Of Hoarding and Housekeeping: Material Kinship and Domestic Space in Anthropological Perspective 9781805390930

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Figures
Introduction. House/Keeping
Part I Food Storage and Family Values
1. Food Abundance and the Storage of Tuberous Kin: The Houses of the Potato Park in the Peruvian Andes
2. Making Space for Onions: Material Production and Social Reproduction in Rural India
Part II Domestic Accumulation and Disorder
3. The “Stuffing” of Kinship: Containing Clutter and Expanding Relatedness in US Homes
4. Topoanalysis: Hoarding, Memory, and the Materialization of Kinship
5. Locating Hoarding: How Spatial Concepts Shape Disorders in Japan and the Anglophone World
Part III Decluttering and Minimalist Aesthetics
6. Decluttering the House, Purifying the Self: Women Discarding Objects and Spiritualizing Everyday Life in Buenos Aires (Argentina)
7. The American Garage Sale: Liberating Space and Creating Kin
8. Minimalist Mortality: Decluttering as a Practice of Death Acceptance
Part IV Holding on to Rubbish: Trash and Transmutation
9. “It’s Not Waste, It’s Diamonds!”: Recovery Practices and Public Waste Management in Garoua and Maroua (Cameroon)
10. Where Would We Be Without Rubbish?
Afterword. The Shape of Things to Come
Index

Citation preview

Of Hoarding and Housekeeping

Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement Edited by  Birgit Meyer, Department of Religious Studies and Theology, Utrecht University, and  Maruška Svašek, School of History and Anthropology, Queens University, Belfast. During the last few years, a lively, interdisciplinary debate has taken place between anthropologists, art historians, and scholars of material culture, religion, visual culture, and media studies about the dynamics of material production and cultural mediation in an era of intensifying globalization and transnational connectivity. Understanding “mediation” as a fundamentally material process, this series provides a stimulating platform for ethnographically grounded theoretical debates about the many aspects that constitute relationships between people and things, including political, economic, technological, aesthetic, sensorial, and emotional processes. Recent titles: Volume 13 Of Hoarding and Housekeeping Material Kinship and Domestic Space in Anthropological Perspective Edited by Sasha Newell Volume 12 The Cracked Art World Conflict, Austerity, and Community Arts in Northern Ireland Kayla Rush

Volume 8 Ethnographies of Movement, Sociality and Space Placemaking in the New Northern Ireland Edited by Milena Komarova and Maruška Svašek Volume 7 Death, Materiality and Mediation An Ethnography of Remembrance in Ireland Barbara Graham

Volume 11 Crafting Chinese Memories The Art and Materiality of Storytelling Edited by Katherine Swancutt

Volume 6 Creativity in Transition Politics and Aesthetics of Cultural Production Across the Globe Edited by Maruška Svašek and Birgit Meyer

Volume 10 From Storeroom to Stage Romanian Attire and the Politics of Folklore Alexandra Urdea

Volume 5 Having and Belonging Homes and Museums in Israel Judy Jaffe-Schagen

Volume 9 Sense and Essence Heritage and the Cultural Production of the Real Edited by Birgit Meyer and Mattijs van de Port

Volume 4 The Great Reimagining Public Art, Urban Space, and the Symbolic Landscapes of a ‘New’ Northern Ireland Bree T. Hocking

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/material-mediations

Of Hoarding and Housekeeping Material Kinship and Domestic Space in Anthropological Perspective

Edited by

Sasha Newell

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2024 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2024 Sasha Newell All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Newell, Sasha, editor. Title: Of hoarding and housekeeping : material kinship and domestic space in anthropological perspective / edited by Sasha Newell. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2024. | Series: Material mediations : people and things in a world of movement ; Volume 13 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023021762 (print) | LCCN 2023021763 (ebook) | ISBN 9781805390923 (hardback) | ISBN 9781805390930 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Storage in the home--Social aspects--Case studies. | Compulsive hoarding--Social aspects--Case studies. | Material culture--Case studies. | Kinship--Case studies. Classification: LCC TX309 .O4 2024 (print) | LCC TX309 (ebook) | DDC 648/.8--dc23/eng/20230819 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023021762 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023021763 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80539-092-3 hardback ISBN 978-1-80539-385-6 epub ISBN 978-1-80539-093-0 web pdf https://doi.org/10.3167/9781805390923

• Contents

List of Figures

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Introduction. House/Keeping1 Sasha Newell Part I  Food Storage and Family Values   1. Food Abundance and the Storage of Tuberous Kin: The Houses of the Potato Park in the Peruvian Andes 35 Olivia Angé In collaboration with: Aniceto Ccoyo, Ciprian Ccoyo, Bacilides Jancco, Lino Mamani, Daniel Pacco, Ricardina Pacco, Daniel Peres, Eliseo Puma, Brisayda Sicus, Mariano Sutta   2. Making Space for Onions: Material Production and Social Reproduction in Rural India Tanya Matthan Part II  Domestic Accumulation and Disorder   3. The “Stuffing” of Kinship: Containing Clutter and Expanding Relatedness in US Homes Sasha Newell

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  4. Topoanalysis: Hoarding, Memory, and the Materialization of Kinship99 Katie Kilroy-Marac   5. Locating Hoarding: How Spatial Concepts Shape Disorders in Japan and the Anglophone World Fabio Gygi

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Part III  Decluttering and Minimalist Aesthetics   6. Decluttering the House, Purifying the Self: Women Discarding Objects and Spiritualizing Everyday Life in Buenos Aires (Argentina)145 María Florencia Blanco Esmoris   7. The American Garage Sale: Liberating Space and Creating Kin Gretchen M. Herrmann

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  8. Minimalist Mortality: Decluttering as a Practice of Death Acceptance183 Hannah Gould Part IV  Holding on to Rubbish: Trash and Transmutation   9. “It’s Not Waste, It’s Diamonds!”: Recovery Practices and Public Waste Management in Garoua and Maroua (Cameroon) 203 Émilie Guitard 10. Where Would We Be Without Rubbish? Michael Thompson

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Afterword. The Shape of Things to Come Daniel Miller

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Index264

• Figures

  0.1. An elderly man’s bedroom in Abidjan Côte d’Ivoire. © Sasha Newell, 2022

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  0.2. A wall of one woman’s apartment in Abidjan was comprised of things she no longer used, but would not part with unless someone else promised to use them. She felt “pity” for these things with which she had shared her life. © Sasha Newell, 202215   0.3. A former bedroom converted to storage, Vermont. © Sasha Newell, 2019

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  3.1. Unopened boxes sent from a research participant’s mother and stored in her closet. © Sasha Newell, 2007

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  3.2. A pile of baby dolls from Nicole’s childhood, all of whom she chose to return to storage. © Sasha Newell, 2011

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  3.3. Lucy’s dance hall, serving as both living room and external storage unit. © Sasha Newell, 2019

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  3.4. Lucy’s museum, once the living room of her family home. © Sasha Newell, 2019

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  4.1. My mother’s bedroom. © Katie Kilroy-Marac, 2021

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  4.2. The basement. © Katie Kilroy-Marac, 2021

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  7.1. Garage Sale in Ithaca, New York. © Gretchen M. Herrmann, 2022164   7.2. Garage Sale in Ithaca, New York. © Gretchen M. Herrmann, 2022175   9.1. Blacksmiths’ workshop in Kollere. © Émilie Guitard, Garoua, 2006205

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Figures

  9.2. Christian Kingue Epanya: Le Petit Camion de Garoua [The Little Truck of Garoua]. Coll. “The Green Chameleon,” EDICEF, 2001 (with kind permission of the author).

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  9.3. Christian Kingue Epanya: Le Petit Camion de Garoua [The Little Truck of Garoua]. Coll. “The Green Chameleon,” EDICEF, 2001 (with kind permission of the author).

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  9.4. Hyascam door-to-door collection. © Émilie Guitard, Garoua, 2006219 10.1. Cultural categories of objects and the possible transfers (the solid arrows) between them (from Thompson, 1979, p. 10). 234

Introduction

•

House/Keeping

Sasha Newell

Le grand chef doit être comme le grand tas d’ordures. (The big chief should be like the big rubbish heap). —Cameroonian proverb (Guitard 2012: 155)

Across the globe in this late capitalist moment, increasing numbers of households are being overrun by the accumulation of domestic clutter. Anthropologists might be prone to belittle this as a “first world problem,” but in a world increasingly connected by circulations of wealth and waste, the Global South has already been absorbing the overflow of household excess from the First World for at least a couple of decades, and the quantity of surplus stored in private homes has dramatically increased since that time. The accumulation of material goods has reached critical levels in the last decade in the Global North, indexed by the widespread appeal of television programing and self-help books on hoarding, decluttering, and professional organizers, and the moral and ecological value of minimalism. Others (especially in the United States) have sought to control their excess stuff by cutting down on the size of the home with movements such as tiny homes (Whitford 2018) and the #vanlife (Monroe 2017), drawing upon the minimalist values of increased mobility and freedom by diminishing expenditure on the containment of their possessions. Another indication of this growing social problem comes from the discipline of psychology. Since the publication in 2013 of the DSM-V (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), the most important

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manual for psychiatric diagnosis has included Hoarding Disorder as a form of mental illness (DSM-5 Task Force 2013). According to the DSM-V, hoarding disorder is estimated to affect two and a half to five percent of the human population. As a genetic trace, neurologists suggest the disorder is probably evenly dispersed throughout the globe, and one 2018 study claims this to be true for the United Kingdom, Spain, Japan, and Brazil (Nordsletten 2018). Despite historical and anthropological indications that problematic levels of domestic accumulation are strongly correlated with capitalist economies (Hodder 2014; Smail 2014), the biomedical model continues to dominate intellectual discussion in reductionist ways (as described by Orr, Preston-Shoot, and Braye 2017). Without denying the significance of this disorder, it is important to take into account the widespread circulation and casual use of the term in popular culture and the framing of clutter and excess possessions in general around this mental disorder. As Herring argues (2014), there is a component of “moral panic” to the way in which everyday people self-diagnose or label others in relationship to this term. Translated into English one year after the DSM-V was published, Marie Kondo’s Japanese approach to decluttering has sold eleven million books (in forty languages) and spawned television series and classes on home organization organized by self-professed “Konverts” of the Konmari method (see Blanco-Esmoris and Gould, this volume). The need to keep things in the house conflicts quite directly with the imperatives of housekeeping, even though the principal housekeeper is also responsible for the storage and organization of family belongings. The stigmatization of those with a compulsion to keep and the moral injunction to purge households of excess stuff are parallel social forces driven by the interconnected chains of causality. The widespread anxieties surrounding the imbalance between the influx and egress of domestic belongings is testament to a generalized social phenomenon with footings in middle-class sensibilities that would seem to have worldwide dissemination. While these tendencies have, thus far, primarily been approached through the genres of psychology and self-help, this collection takes a cross-cultural anthropological stance in order to highlight the socioeconomic and cultural forces shaping domestic overaccumulation, thus building a comparative spectrum of the processes surrounding the selection, retention, and expulsion of possessions. In so doing, we make the home a focal point for thinking about the intersections of materiality and social relations (Miller 2005, 2009). In particular, these chapters open up a lens on kinship that includes not only people but things as the content of kin relationality. As Carsten writes, “The mixing of elements of old and new furnishings, heirlooms, and objects may thus express how houses capture the creative and regenerative aspects of memory work, rearranging the past, and also setting out a vista for the future” (Carsten 2007: 17). By placing housecleaning and storage as key processes of kin-making, our collection focuses on material kinship; that is,

Introduction 3

we examine the materialization of kinship in homes, possessions, and waste, the practices of storage and decluttering activities as the labor of kin, as well as the way in which materials can be kin in themselves. One insightful precursor to this perspective can be found in Goldfarb and Schuster’s special issue (De)materializing Kinship, in which they “draw attention to the ways in which material signs are a productive focus for scholars attending to relatedness in day-to-day interactions between humans, non-humans, and other material things (2016: 6). They make the important point that highlighting processes of materializing and dematerializing kinship allows a clearer view of the “non-mutuality” of kin relations, something that often emerges in the conflicts around household accumulation in this volume. Like Goldfarb and Schuster, our work builds upon the insights of what has often been called New Kinship, the wave of kinship studies that followed Schneider’s (1984) symbolic turn away from mapping social relations and taxonomies towards ideologies of substance and transference (Carsten 2004), as well as the redrawn relationalities of kinship surrounding new reproductive technologies (Franklin 2001), gender (Yanagisako and Delaney 1995) and LGTBI studies (Weston 1991). One of the contributions of this movement has been a complete rethinking of kinship around questions of substance, especially in relationship to the cultural conceptualization of blood and biology (Franklin and McKinnon 2001). While anthropology has long understood the importance of material objects in the mediation of kinship relations, as Mauss’ essay on the gift ([1925] 2016) or in Evans-Pritchard’s famous “bovine idiom” (1940), scholars such as Strathern (1990), Carsten (1995), McKinnon (1991), Fajans (1997), and Weiner (2002) turned their attention towards how often substance was at the center of cultural conceptions of relatedness. The house emerged from this work as a key site in the making of kinship in cross-cultural perspective (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995; Joyce and Gillespie 2000). However, in this collection, we bring materiality to the forefront of the analysis of kinship, sewing it together with insights from a literature on materiality that has often left kinship in the background. The phrase material kinship thus signals a volition to think of these theoretical dimensions in unison, as integral parts of the same social processes. Similarly, while kinship studies have often favored more classically exotic locales and the anthropology of materiality has been especially attentive to the North Atlantic, this volume aims to bring these domains together under a symmetrical gaze that draws out the “strangeness” of North Atlantic kinship and the familiarity of material culture in the Global South.1 Finally, the concept of material kinship conceptualizes kinship not only as relation passed through substance but also as a relation with material things, entities that not only absorb the personhood of their co-residents but also exert obligations and sentiments of their own accord. In these stories, the household becomes a crucible of value transformation that takes place along the lines of Thompson’s famous “rubbish theory” ([1979] 2017), from fortune to rot, from junk to heirloom, from

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alienation to kin. Clean shiny commodities develop the patina of intimacy (Dawdy 2016) and become affectively integrated in the dwelling, but the reverse happens too, such as when emotionally searing objects associated with deceased family members, a divorce, or other family traumas are given time to “cool off” enough to allow for “dispossession” (Hirschman, Ruvio, and Belk 2012), transforming into mere clutter to be discarded or passed on at a yard sale. Our case studies—ranging from the United States, Japan, Cameroon, England, Peru, Argentina, India, and Australia—shake up conventional understandings of both sentimental and market value while demonstrating the interconnections of global accumulation that make their first appearances on the countertops and other surfaces of the home. The twin problems of storage and clutter seem present in most societies, and yet they are rarely given a space of prominence in ethnography (Makovicky 2007), and such intermingling between relatedness, possessions, and the spatial organization of the home can serve as inspiration for new, interpretative approaches to the continued globalization of capitalist socioeconomic forces. The essays in this collection together describe the tension between keeping and housekeeping in the context of the global spread of commodities for household consumption and the accumulative consequences both within and outside the home. If the home is a container for kin relations, what happens to kinship when the house must absorb greater and greater quantities of objects? What happens to the very concept of value around which domestic consumption is oriented? What is the significance of the storage spaces of the home in which large portions of possessions are kept out of sight? What social practices and spatial processes surround waste, excess, and the riddance of objects from the home? How are these relationships being changed by the expanding availability of cheap consumer goods throughout the Global South? Presenting what may be the first book to consider domestic accumulation from a cross-cultural perspective, this collection binds together the micro-level of keeping as a form of kin intimacy with the macro-scale of global accumulation. The arc of collection traces a spectrum from the value of accumulation to the productivity of purging. While such a small sample cannot possibly make conclusive claims about what aspects of hoarding and clutter are universal and which are culturally specific, the purpose of this collection is to ask the kinds of framing questions that can direct future research in these directions. We begin by exploring variations on keeping and the links between material accumulation and kinship-making. We not only highlight how value production forges the relations of kinship itself, but also how kin relations become materialized and how those materializations emerge in turn as members of the kin group, becoming increasingly entangled in familial interrelatedness. Such an affective intensity of relations with objects is not in itself deviant or even unusual in most parts of world (BirdDavid 1999; Santos-Granero 2009), but something changes when these relationships turn from a cherished assemblage of persons and things to a

Introduction 5

material multitude that threatens the home and family. The ethnographic focus turns towards strategies of removal, minimalist aesthetics, and the moral injunction to declutter as an ideology with global and commodifiable clout. The processes of the negotiation of the remaining material possessions of the deceased often become key sites in which kinship relations are reconfigured. Finally, the volume turns towards the ways in which the waste matter being ejected from the home—itself a threat for global accumulation of waste—can be transfigured into resources for new forms of sociality. In the following sections, we trace out several thematic interventions that weave in and out through the volume, intersecting and overlapping in new ways across the various contexts discussed. The collection employs a variety of ethnographic contexts and thematic concerns in order to stretch North Atlantic emic concepts of hoards, heirlooms, clutter, and kinship, taking into account the differentiated geographic faces of the global commodity-scape, as well as their interconnections.

Accumulation and the Time of Capitalism Homes tend be depicted as sites of consumption and display, but they are also the locus of a perpetual struggle against unwanted accumulation. The imagination for growth and cumulative wealth within societies organized around capitalist economies has traditionally been boundless, and the household itself is often perceived as an expansive site for abundant accumulation, where quantity is itself an index of wealth. Indeed, by the twentieth century in Europe and the United States, this aspiration had become democratized to include nearly everyone, and was particularly crystallized in the United States in the form of the “American Dream” so often thrown back in faces of those marginalized populations who were not able to “pull themselves up by the bootstraps” (Bourgois 2003: 326). Within the logic of neoliberal ideology, acquisition of the latest commodities was both a civic duty and a neighborly conquest. As Robert Reich wrote after George Bush exhorted the nation to “go shopping” in response to September 11, 2001, “The theory is that we demonstrate our resolve to the rest of the world by investing and consuming at least as much as we did before, preferably more . . . The terrorists tried to strike at the heart of American capitalism. We show that American capitalism is alive and well by giving it as much of our credit card as possible” (Reich 2001). However, over the last decade, the emergence of new discourses in popular culture around hoarding disorder on the one hand and minimalist aesthetics on the other indicate a sea-change in domestic aesthetics. In prosperous regions of the world, the accumulation of clutter has become a seemingly autonomous force that threatens the very sovereignty of humans over their domestic space by literally occupying it (Bennet 2012; Newell 2014). In response, droves of organizer gurus teach residents how to control their impulse to keep, how to reorder their possessions, and above all, how

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to remove things, while magazines and television documentaries proclaim the virtues of clean surfaces, bare walls, and tiny homes. The New York Times discussed popularity of Marie Kondo in the following terms: By the time her book arrived, America had entered a time of peak stuff, when we had accumulated a mountain of disposable goods—from Costco toilet paper to Isaac Mizrahi swimwear by Target—but hadn’t (and still haven’t) learned how to dispose of them. We were caught between an older generation that bought a princess phone in 1970 for $25 that was still working and a generation that bought $600 iPhones, knowing they would have to replace them within two years. We had the princess phone and the iPhone, and we couldn’t dispose of either. We were burdened by our stuff; we were drowning in it. (BrodesserAkner 2016)

This same generational shift is exposed in the Washington Post: As baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, start cleaning out attics and basements, many are discovering that millennials, born between 1980 and 2000, are not so interested in the lifestyle trappings or nostalgic memorabilia they were so lovingly raised with. Thanks, Mom, but I really can’t use that eight-foot dining table or your king-size headboard. Whether becoming empty nesters, downsizing or just finally embracing the decluttering movement, boomers are taking a good close look at the things they have spent their life collecting. Auction houses, consignment stores and thrift shops are flooded with merchandise, much of it made of brown wood. Downsizing experts and professional organizers are comforting parents whose children appear to have lost any sentimental attachment to their adorable baby shoes and family heirloom quilts. To make matters worse, young adults don’t seem to want their own college textbooks, sports trophies or T-shirt collections, still entombed in plastic containers at their parents’ homes. (Koncius 2015)

As one of my participants in Vermont put it in 2019, “the kids won’t take the brown furniture anymore.” In a generational shift, the cultural elites of latter-day capitalist societies are thus recognizing that “less is more,” as the collection and display of valuables is being replaced by the ostentatious display a clutter-free lifestyle, and as Kilroy-Marac has argued, minimalism has become a new scale of Bourdieusian distinction (2016). 2 Meanwhile, much of the Global South is still understandably clambering to achieve the basic Fifties consumer fantasy of a house, a car, and a matching set of labor-saving household appliances, and anthropologists are often skeptical that the framework around domestic accumulation developed here has any bearing on the problems experienced by households where getting food on the table is a more immediate preoccupation. But the position developed in this collection is that only through a frame that brings into focus the interconnected global economy, as well as a comparative perspective on issues of what enters, exits, and is stored within the household, can we come to terms with a future where the collective surfeit of unwanted domestic possessions will become a problem shared by all. We can see the precursors of this dilemma in the ongoing worldwide problems

Introduction 7

with plastic refuse and recycling, epitomized by the islands of floating plastic in the ocean, the biggest of which is reported to already be twice the size of Texas (the ocean cleanup). Already twenty years ago in Côte d’Ivoire and Morocco, I was stuck by the tendency for discarded plastic bags to accumulate in public space, clogging up drainage systems and collecting on the dead stalks of past harvests, giving the appearance that farmers were cultivating plastic bags in their fields. Single-use plastic bags are no longer legal in Côte d’Ivoire, and many other nations (including the European Union) have followed suit, but in the meantime, a global capitalist economy based on plastic packaging has outrun our technological capacity to recycle it into something of value, despite decades of being told at least some of it was recyclable. Adam Minter’s Junkyard Planet (2013) discusses the town of Shijiao, which, at the time, imported 2.2 million pounds of Christmas lights each year to melt down the plastic and harvest the copper wires, only to turn it into more plastic commodities to send back on the same shipping containers (Hodder 2016: 19). When China stopped accepting containers full of used plastic because it could no longer absorb it, Mikaela Le Meur (2019) documented the catastrophe in Vietnam, where newspapers claimed as many as 9000 containers full of waste were waiting to be emptied (many for as long as three months). Her research into Mink Khai, a Vietnamese town devoted to recycling, not only revealed mountains of plastic waste lining the roads and polluted rivers no longer suitable for fishing or bathing, but also that the recycled plastic produced there was so impure it was suitable for making little else besides the very plastic bags already being banned across the world for their negative environmental impact. According to a study published in Nature, “the global mass of produced plastics is greater than the overall mass of all terrestrial and marine animals combined” (Elhacham et al. 2020: 443). Indeed, anthropogenic mass (human-made mass) has now surpassed biomass on the earth as a whole, a somewhat terrifying prospect (Elhacham et al. 2020). Of course, the accumulation of plastic waste is not the same as the accumulation of possessions in the home, but we might think of plastic as the vanguard of excess-to-come. It is the film of alienation that wraps almost every commodity to guarantee direct contact only with its future owner, and its arrival is the hallmark of disposable consumer culture. The Global North is not only exporting its waste, but also its used possessions (secondhand clothing, cars, and cellphones, for example, feature prominently in the markets of the Global South). But just as commodities have needed to become cheaper in order for profit accumulations to continue to grow by expanding the consumer market to the working classes, the same phenomenon continues as household commodities and electronics become available in the Global South. This is especially marked by the arrival of an array of Chinese products, which Kernen and Mohammad characterize as nothing less than a revolution in their ethnography of new West African consumer practices (2014).

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Figure 0.1.  An elderly man’s bedroom in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. © Sasha Newell, 2022

Describing this as the emergence of a new material culture, they describe how Chinese goods should not be framed solely under the rubric of cheap and low-quality goods, but rather as prestige objects, such as motorcycles and cellphones, rendered accessible to a much wider portion of the population. Above all, the emergence of this new mass consumer society across the African continent also entails the accessibility of having new goods, rather

Introduction 9

than relying on “France-au-revoir” second-hand goods to achieve signs of modernity. Presumably, these kinds of new consumer dynamics are developing in societies all over the world, allowing houses to fill with an array of new and highly replaceable products on a global scale never seen before. From Thompson’s (this volume) expanded view, the houses of London themselves become so many heirlooms and piles of clutter, fought over collectively by those who would romantically preserve and repair the residences of the past, and those who would rebuild entire neighborhoods from a “rationalist” perspective, tearing down the old to make way for the new and producing vast quantities of rubble to be trucked out of town and out of sight. Whereas in most of our articles the house is a container for kin and kin-things, here the city is the container, and the houses and citizens are the contents. This bird’s eye view draws our attention to the ways in which the problems of clutter, waste, and storage scale up to regional and even global arenas, where political and economic decisions by those with hierarchical leverage affect the lives of all within the container in question. In most cultures, houses are modeled upon cosmological models of the body and reproduce issues of containment and divestment, and the polis is another extension of the same set of metaphors into the “body politic” (Lock and Scheper-Hughes 1987). This is perhaps most concisely expressed by Warnier’s concept of roi-pot drawn from Cameroon, in which the king’s body, his palace, and his city are mirrored layers of the same kingas-container concept (2007). The importance of these containers within containers is that they are interconnected—thus when we expel waste from one container, it does not disappear but becomes material in the larger container that holds it. A minimalist who truly rids a house of its contents in an effort to attain an anti-consumer aesthetic only ends up adding to the waste problems of his or her community, and the planet as a whole. Thompson here draws upon his dynamic theory of rubbish (2017), through which objects shift from the sphere of decreasing value (most commodities) to the sphere of increasing value (antiquities) by passing through a kind of liminal invisible zone of “rubbish,” during which they are removed from social space and social norms. Applied to the architecture of the home, one sees that storage is this transformative space where such “rubbish” is kept (when it is not, it is clutter). But here, Thompson extends his concepts to consider the tensions between hoarders and minimalists as part of a dynamic system in which the negotiations between these moral and aesthetic perspectives keep the overall system in order. Indeed, it is rather interesting that even as the interiors of homes are driven by a puritan aesthetic that espouses the expulsion of all extraneous matter, urban aesthetics and market value are increasingly driven by the preservation and renewal of what once was. Thompson’s argument is that these different cultural/moral/aesthetic positions are not mutually exclusive but exist within the same social system and are even interdependent on one another. This internal heterogeneity is precisely what allows one person’s waste to

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be transformed into another’s bounty and keep material cycling through spheres of value, instead of piling up in undead landfills (Reno 2014), where they are neither gone nor repurposed, neither vital matter nor truly dead and buried. Landfills are zombie accumulations, always threatening to rise again. In fact, Reno’s point is that if humans could code discarded material as communicative signs of life (as most animals do with scat), instead of hiding it as though it did not exist, it would allow for a more posthumanly humane ecosystem in which one entity’s refuse is understood to be another species “diamond” (see Guitard, this volume).

Cross-Cultural Variations in Domestic Accumulation Despite the global dimensions of domestic accumulation, it is important to attend to the varying ways in which problems of clutter, storage, and riddance emerge in different cultural and socioeconomic contexts in order to challenge the dominant paradigms around minimalism and hoarding in the Global North. Hoarding as a mental disorder draws a line between healthy and unhealthy practices, marking not only the afflicted as unsound but also their kin, given the current scientific paradigm suggesting that there is a genetic component to hoarding. Not only are the definitions of what constitutes hoarding behavior suspiciously cultural and valueladen in the DSM-V, but there is no clear explanation in the biomedical model for why this tendency to accumulate worthless things would only emerge in the nineteenth century and not at any earlier point in human history (Smail 2014).3 To understand the presence or absence of hoarding, anthropologists must begin to think about the cultural values associated with accumulating, ridding, clutter, waste, and storage. Such data must also be put in dialogue with the differential access to the proliferation of material possessions both within and between societies. This volume does not pretend to be able to produce answers to this dilemma; rather, we seek to open up the questions, pushing at the assumed meanings of these terms and examining their appearance or non-appearance in a variety of sociocultural settings. Differential levels of wealth cannot be clearly correlated to the amount of objects found in a home, especially if we open up the categories of things accumulated beyond the standard commodities considered as “­consumption,” a step that is necessary given that hoarders of old cellphones, magazines, or their grandmother’s tax receipts are often lumped together with those who rescue objects from other people’s garbage, collect cats, or even their own hair and fingernails. Thus, we begin this volume by stretching our understanding of the objects stored in homes and how these relate to our other analytic categories of kinship, social space, and capitalism. The stockpiled potatoes in Andean homes are read as a form of kin, whose collaboration is necessary for the well-being of the household and

Introduction 11

who must be “kept happy” and treated with respect. The potatoes emerge within Angé’s ethnography as rather fragile beings with tender emotions, sensitive to both physical and symbolic shock. A dark, enclosed room of the house is devoted mostly to potatoes, and it is a space only women can enter, barefoot and hat in hand. Potatoes must not be touched unless they are to be consumed, for their very nature can transform under such duress and their edibility can be compromised. Potatoes (whose genealogies are also traced) are understood to be part of the family and community in a dialectically constructed kin group, where potatoes are mothers to humans, who in turn nurture future potatoes. In contrast, the house can also be a site that brings together the abstraction of speculative global markets with the material qualities of accumulating and caring for the bounty of agricultural storage. Matthan (this volume) describes how onion farmers in India store thousands of onions within their home in hopes of hitting the highs of the wildly fluctuating onion trade. The act of onion storage is risky, of questionable morality, and successfully hitting the peak of an onion market bubble accrues the farmer a reputation for courage and acumen. Even while women do the primary labor of sorting and caring for the onions, removing any that might encourage the rot of the assemblage, men garner reputation for the speculative prowess. Of course, only those with the means to build extra space for storing their onions can profit from these market fluctuations, since there is no public warehousing of the onion harvest. These two articles make for fascinating comparisons around themes of domestic space, kinship, and capitalism. In the Andes, the potatoes that are closest to kin are never even brought to the market, for insensitive urban consumers might disrespect them or handle them improperly, risking the vitality of the entire potato lineage. Indian onion farmers, by contrast, sacrifice their own domestic space to the temptations of onion futures, filling up their living space with onions that must be cared for and watched just as much as the potatoes, lest rot infect the hoard before the market reaches its potential and the entire crop is lost. Here kin is mediated by the capricious gestures of the market’s invisible hand, the social space of family swallowed by a crowd of onions, but also produced by their return as greater wealth and prestige in years to come, to be converted into more domestic space. Although the onion hoarder’s consumption habits remain opaque, presumably some of their wealth will be converted into domestic commodities that signal their increased income, thereby filling up the limited space of sociality still further. I would like to contextualize this comparison further with consideration of Mosko’s “Fractal Yam,” where he describes the ways in which tubers form a cultural model in Melanesia based on the biological structure of yam plant itself, consisting of base, body, tip, and the resulting fruit. This biological metaphor structures how Melanesians across the Massim region understand kinship, exchange, cooking, storage and display.

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As Malinowski (1935: 171–74) noted, a gardener initially displays his harvested yams in temporary shelters (kalimomia) for passersby to admire, with the exchange yams gathered into a conical heap (gugula) at the shelter’s center and the seeds sorted into smaller piles at the base of the shelter’s peripheral walls. Like newborn human children, harvested yams are white and weak, vulnerable to the darkening and ageing light of the sun. Shelters thus protect young yams similarly to human mothers’ birth cloaks (saikeula). A heap of exchange yams consists of an u’ula, base, typically circumscribed by a short ring fence (lolewa) containing the largest, oftentimes non-symmetrical tubers, a tapwala (body), composed of consistently proportioned tubers which culminate in the pile’s doginala (peak). Villagers regard the outermost layer of perfectly shaped tubers, however, as also a part of the heap’s tip, especially when, as in the case of chiefs, exposed yams are decorated with paint and pandanus streamers, similar to the adornment of the skins of human children, adolescents, kula traders, and the recently deceased (e.g., Weiner 1976: 36, 69, 127, 237–38). The heaping and garden display of exchange yams thus recapitulates the spatial and temporal coordinates of the now-dead plants and gardens that grew them and the clusters in which they were formed. (Mosko 2009: 686–87)

One of the fascinating aspects of Melanesian storage is that it tends to collapse the visible/invisible distinction around which much of the analysis in this book is built—yams are stored as public display, at once the fruit of their gardening effort and the base of kin and exchange relationships that will be built and maintained upon these accumulations. Here, the storage container is wide open to public viewing, the best yams selected and adorned like children or kula exchange partners as the outside tip or skin of the yam assemblage. Indeed, the exchange yam houses built to receive these garden displays are highly decorated, with thatched rooves and painted patterns, even resembling a human house but stretched vertically to form a small tower. In all three of these comestible storage examples, storage is an act that is highly valued, even if precarious and open to moral judgement. They bear consideration because storage technology was probably first developed for the purposes of preserving food, and traces of this may carry into contemporary issues with storing inanimate and unvalued things. Hoarders are often described as ceding the space of the home to their irrational attachments to objects of little value, but once we apply a crosscultural lens to the situation, the fact that outside the Global North most people have fewer “possessions”4 to their name does not mean they are free of the same “sentimental” attachments to objects, or to the seemingly irrational desire to keep broken electronic appliances that I have found to be so common in the United States. Indeed, Katrien Pype has discovered that in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, electronic appliances remain in homes long after their functioning ceases, both as a memory of its social role in the home and its previous symbolic claims of access to modernity, as well as a reservoir of spare parts for future reparations (2016). She begins with an intriguing question: “. . . in many living rooms of elderly Kinois (inhabitants of Kinshasa), old and defunctive radio and television sets are put on display. When their primary function, to inform, has been rendered

Introduction 13

obsolete, we are faced with the question why people continue to display these objects, often next to newer models, in their living rooms” (1). Pype argues that the role such media objects play in enhancing social communication and the temporality of futurity they embody (even if a past rendition of such futurity) makes them very hard to let go of. Many elderly people held on to old radios from their youth long after they stopped working, often referencing the now dead member of a former generation who had given it to them, even carrying the defunct device from house to house in their moves. Indeed, I witnessed the same phenomenon in Abidjan; my landlord had a beautiful old wooden Grundig shortwave, much like the one Pype describes. She writes: “In local parlance, Kinois talk about les paves as bodies of ‘dead radios’ or ‘dead television sets.’ Radio ekufi, the radio has died, it is said. My research will show that ‘dead material’ continues to retain social value, even when stored in a closet or partly dismantled” (2016: 5). The last sentence resonates in my head, because of how commonly I have encountered broken electronic media in US homes whose owners felt some kind of value even when its function ceased. In Kinshasa, such undead media are the sites of generational struggle over different forms of material value, as children and grandchildren harvest spare parts and materials from the defunct machines for resale, often against the will of their elders. Pype writes: “For these children, it is clear that the pasts that outdated objects inhabit, and in particular the social relationships that they represent, have no value to the present anymore . . . When elders do protest against the destruction of a radio or a television set, they are met with the phrase: ‘you are being nostalgic’” (2016: 14). These are the stories of particular devices that match the kinds of attachment to used things I have seen in the United States, but Pype’s work speaks less to the question of clutter or accumulation in regions of the Global South. Preliminary research in Abidjan indicates that similar dynamics of involuntary accumulation that I documented in earlier work in the US (2014, 2018) can be found in Côte d’Ivoire. I first saw this during a visit to Abidjan in 2015, I stayed with my old friend Raoul from my research in 2001. He had moved into his parents’ middle-class home, within which his old boyhood room remained intact, though it had gradually been transformed into a storage space. One day, his wife ordered the maids to empty this wasted room into the courtyard so that he could sort through it. We spent an hour sifting through the stored possessions, which included a broken fan, his high school notebooks, pictures from his first trip to study abroad in Tunisia in the 1970s, old clothing that would no longer fit him, plastic bins full of assorted objects, and other assorted junk. In short, in terms of general categories present, Raoul’s old bedroom contained much the same kinds of things that my research participants in the United States have in their storage spaces. Finally, he put the photos we had been nostalgically reminiscing over back into the pile, and ordered the maids to put it all back in his old bedroom. “I don’t have time for this,” he said, “I need

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to work.” This is precisely the kind of feeling many people expressed in my research in the United States, when, after gearing themselves up for a good purge, they faced the reality of what their boxes of stored things contained. While some persevered and separated out a pile of things to take away, others sent me away in exhaustion before we had really gotten started. Inspired by this experience, I returned in November 2022 to investigate how common this kind of similarity might be and whether it had any relationship to class status. I conducted a series of interviews using essentially the same methodology as those in my US interviews. While I have not yet had a chance to analyze this new ethnographic material in detail, it was immediately very clear that many of the same relationships of attachment to household objects and accumulations of clutter also exist in Côte d’Ivoire, despite a comparative poverty and the recycling practices described by Emilie Guitard (this volume). Even though there might be far fewer possessions in absolute quantitative terms, the size of personal space and lack of storage meant that clutter emerged in quite similar ways. At the same time, many of those interviewed held onto objects for purely sentimental reasons. As one middle-aged woman put it, she felt “pity” for these objects that had served her so well and shared her life, and she kept an entire cupboard of objects that she no longer used but would never part with unless someone else planned to use them. At the same time, important differences emerged. “The village” proved a crucial resource for many urban dwellers to clear their cramped space of no longer used objects (especially clothing), as well as to store their memorabilia, though fears of witchcraft also prevented many from trusting their things with others. This volume attempts to inspire future research into the effects of capitalist possession upon domestic space in global and cross-cultural terms.

Houses as Containers for Kinship We have to ask what kind of “bag” a housse is, or what kind of “house” a bag is. (Strathern 2013: 110)

For the purposes of this volume, we define houses heuristically as containers for kin (Shryock and Smail 2018), noting that this leaves room for extensive variation in the meaning of each of these terms (see Gygi, this volume), but insisting that “the process of kinship and the process of the house are so thoroughly intertwined as to be one process” (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995: 40).5 Drawing upon such works as About the House (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995) and Home Possessions (Miller 2001), this collection focuses on the ways in the material contents of the home and its internal organization delineate kin relations. If the house is a container for social bodies who are imagined in a mutuality of being (Sahlins 2013), then all the contents of the home have the potential to belong as kin (Gamble 2007). Not only do the humans and assorted animals and plants that

Introduction 15

Figure 0.2.  A wall of one woman’s apartment in Abidjan was comprised of things she no longer used, but would not part with unless someone else promised to use them. She felt “pity” for these things with which she had shared her life. © Sasha Newell, 2022

make up the multispecies unity of the home often count as kin, but also their things, at least those which absorb the partible personhood of their human co-dwellers. Kinship relations are materialized in the structure of the home itself but also in the flow of things from one internal space to

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another (Cwerner and Metcalfe 2003), the storage of inalienable objects (Weiner 1992; Godelier 1999), and the entrances and exits at the threshold of the home, as “the continuous movement of goods and people between the inside and the outside, a movement sometimes represented as one through the orifices of the body, again attest to the processual and animate qualities of the house” (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995: 40). It is not enough to say that material possessions mediate relations; they also take on the aspect of social beings, as with Kwakiutl coppers, kula valuables, heirlooms passed through generations, or cars who are named and spoken to. We contribute to the emergence of an anthropology of materiality and kinship together (Makovicky 2007; Holmes 2019) by examining the ways in which the management of material belongings produces the belonging of kinship, even as such possessions also accrue animacy and take on the role of members of the kin group in their own right. While anthropologists have often described objects such as gifts and heirlooms as part of the fabric of kinship, here we incorporate storage and clutter as key aspects of kin relationality, where objects project their own sets of social obligations (Empson 2012). As Miller pointed out in his pioneering work on homes, the materiality of the home is crucial to the social work that it does: Once one acknowledges the degree to which the home itself is both a site of agency and a site of mobility, rather than simply a kind of symbolic system that acts as the backdrop or blueprint for practice and agency, then the rewards of this focus upon material culture in trying to understand the social relations that pertain to the home become apparent. (Miller 2001: 12)

Without neglecting the house’s objectivizing capacity to both act as a “model of and model for,” Miller encourages us to examine how the house and its contents not only inform human social relationships but also constrain and activate them. As he suggests in his essay, “Possessions,” in the same volume (2001: 107–22), houses even participate in them as social entities in the form of ghosts. It is this concept of material things as possessed not only as belongings but also by spirits that informs our relationship to homes and their contents. Gygi (this volume) demonstrates how the very concept of home in Japan works quite differently (and less materially), built upon cultural distinct concepts of privacy and interiority, such that the idea of a hoarder in the sense delineated in Anglophone media cannot exist. Gygi uses this challenge to the universal qualities of the home container to interrogate a key principle of the contemporary psychological hoarding model—the idea that mind and house mirror one another such that the disorder of the home is a symptom of a mental disorder—as a misapplication of cartesian categories beyond their cultural distribution. Since privacy is not produced by built material spatial boundaries so much as internally focused attention, the internal and external boundaries of the home are fluid and malleable—sometimes the

Introduction 17

convenience store or the public bathhouse count as homes, and everyone will politely ignore someone in their pajamas in the street under the assumption that they are not actually in public. Perhaps more fundamentally, there is no “public space” of the home itself, as one does not typically invite people from the outside in to visit. Japan’s “women who cannot tidy up” only recognize themselves this way on the rare occasion that someone else sees their domestic space. They were unable to see their mess on their own and their “disorder” could only be determined through social interaction. However, a subtext runs through Gygi’s argument that bears consideration—that the meaning of home and family in Japan has undergone considerable transformation over the last century, and not only are nuclear families more prevalent, but fixed material walls are more common both outside and inside the home, producing more sequestered spaces of privacy with unintentional affordances, an argument that resonates with Blanco-Esmoris’ portrait of aspirational middle-class home-ownership in Argentina (this volume). In my chapter, I focus on the relationship between clutter and kinship, arguing that clutter is typically held onto for its expansive relationality, often at the behest of other absent or dead family members, gradually filling up social spaces and being progressively stuffed into hidden storage spaces of the home, typically in a disorganized fashion that reproduces the disorder of clutter but masks it from public view. I argue that storing things for people is a “labor of love” that in fact makes kinship, especially in a world where neoliberal capitalist pressures tend to pull families apart spatially. But more than this, while the stuff stored not only represents kin relationships, I argue that it is itself also a form of kin. Like the woman in Abidjan who pities her former possessions, many people I interviewed in the US felt bonded and even obligated to the things that they preserve and protect. In this sense, the contents of the home become defined as kinthings that belong, and to discard them feels more and more as though their social history together is being denied. While my chapter focuses on non-hoarders with tendencies to accumulate, Kilroy-Marac’s (this volume) research examines the role of hoards within families from the perspective of the adult children of hoarders (ACoH). In hoarding houses, family members often feel they must compete for attention and space with the hoard itself. Kilroy-Marac highlights the often overlooked “dark side of kinship” in which the competition for space and affection are as much a part of the relational nexus as love and belonging, epitomized by the way in which family members are “subjected” to the hoard, whose sensual presence is undeniably obtrusive. Kilroy-Marac discusses how the hoard and house merge into a single entity, an entity that inscribes itself upon the memories and imaginaries of the entire family in ways that affect their understanding of relationality going forward. Drawing upon her own personal experience, she also confronts the problematic inheritance of the hoard, when the adult must face their

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Figure 0.3.  A former bedroom converted to storage, Vermont. © Sasha Newell, 2019

childhood memories in their current state of decay. In the end, the desire to preserve these things and the relationships they embody is overcome by the agency of the hoard itself. It is the hoard that consumes, in the end, and not just the materials that dissolve in its midst, but also memories and even  relationships. As such, the presence of kin-things and kin-assemblages are not only composed of the cozy sentimental value of cherished and inalienable heirlooms, but they also take on parasitic qualities, attaching to their human family members with affective hooks that bind and blind their prey as they drain vitality and sociality from their co-dwellers.

Hoarding, Minimalism, and the Magic of Decluttering Like all social products, kinship is made through human labor, and the labor of storage and decluttering is rife with tensions over whose rights in particular that objects and spaces prevail. De Beauvoir captures this dynamic, and especially its gendering role, in her description of housework, where tidying is a war against life itself: Washing, ironing, sweeping, ferreting out fluff from under wardrobes—all this halting of decay is also the denial of life; for time simultaneously creates and destroys, and only its negative aspect concerns the housekeeper . . . The maniac housekeeper wages her furious war against dirt, blaming life itself for the rubbish all living growth entails. When any living being enters her house, her eye gleams with a wicked light: “Wipe your feet, don’t tear the place apart,

Introduction 19

leave that alone!” She wishes those of her household would hardly breathe; everything means more thankless work for her. (1953 [2011]: 438)

The tragic irony is that the more that the housekeeper seeks to preserve the purity of this perfect domestic order, the more her husband and children will seek to transcend it. Of course, not all housekeepers are women, and De Beauvoir’s mid-century depictions of housewives sometimes read as outdated reifications of women’s relationship to domestic labor. Even if men are often expected to take on more responsibility for the household and most women work outside the home at least some of the time, the current vogue for spotless minimalist interiors nevertheless raises the stakes for this battle against the movement of life and its material traces in the home, and I think it goes without saying that in many homes, especially those with children, women continue to bear the brunt of this labor, no matter how much men congratulate themselves for their participation. Indeed, while men in the United States do twice as much housework in 2005 than in 1976, married women in 2005 did seven hours more housework a week than single women, whereas married men did one hour less. In households with three children, women did an average of twenty-eight hours of housework a week while men only did ten, three hours more than married men with no children (Stafford 2008). The primary act of decluttering is “to put things away.” But the presence of clutter contradicts this thesis because it is made up primarily of things that “have no elsewhere,” as design theorist Baker put it in his fantastic essay about clutter (1995). That is, if some clutter accumulates through inertia and procrastination, the clutter that really sticks is that which does not belong anywhere. It is not decorative enough to hang on the wall, not useful enough to make up part of the array of tools ready-at-hand, and yet too important, for one reason or another, to be discarded. Most people deal with this category by putting it in storage, and it is for this reason, as an unmarried Spanish woman with four brothers pointed out to me, that women tend to have a more intimate relationship with storage. When her mother died, it was she who did the primary work of sorting through the kin-things that remained and deciding what should be discarded and what should be distributed amongst the siblings. The relationship of the feminine role to managing material excess is echoed in both Blanco-Esmoris’ and Gould’s analyses (this volume) of women’s central role in care and ridding practices surrounding material possessions. In much of the world, the carework of kinship around the maintenance of domestic space and the preservation of material kinship in non-social space tends to fall on women’s shoulders, as also demonstrated by the fact that significantly more women than men were willing to talk to me about this subject. Undoubtedly, there is as much cultural variation around the ideals of housekeeping as in practices of keeping things in the house, but it does also

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seem likely that a specific idealized aesthetics of housekeeping is spreading through an increasingly globalized middle class, given the international success of minimalist self-help literature and Marie Kondo’s appearance in several of the chapters in this volume. That is to say, the pressure to declutter has taken on the veneer of fashion. As Kilroy-Marac has written: It’s not just the meticulous arrangement of these interiors, then, but the obvious absence of clutter that signals a new form of affluence . . . [A] close look at the not-there renders visible the practices of organizing and divestment that often contain within themselves their own practices of consumption. (2016: 446)

This is clearest in the case of Blanco-Esmoris’ chapter, where she reveals how deeply decluttering enters into an aspirational aesthetic of middleclass achievement. The women in her stories are motivated to improve their lives (and their souls) by acting upon the material contents and structure of their homes. Already to own a home in Argentina is the attainment of a specific class mobility in which the attainment of a nuclear family, car, and independent property were indicators of joining a modern and partially globalized identity. What is fascinating, therefore, is that it would seem that a social identity based on consumer acquisition, even newly attained, comes with the corresponding pressure to declutter. Blanco-Esmoris also articulates how acts of decluttering and renovation engage the family in rethinking the home and revitalizing kin relations in the process, revealing the interlacing of practices of discarding with the tissue of kinship. When Louisa’s children come over to help declutter, they reminisce about their past together while reimagining the future of their family home as they free up space for the new by removing their own material past. Likewise, Herrmann’s garage sale ethnography (this volume) serves to highlight how kinship is produced both by ridding and “liberating space” for family, while at the same time virtually expanding the kin network through the material transfers of sentimental objects to those outside the home. In fact, Herrmann finds that garage sale transfers do not necessarily produce full alienation as with typical commodities. Sometimes the new owners think of the house and the previous owner of the object they purchased, in one case even treating it as a “memorial to motherly love,” while sellers carefully choose “a good home” for objects they continue to care about, even going so far as to request a buyer wear a necklace she purchased to a music event they were both attending. The yard sale itself is a curious moment of eversion of inside of the house (often dominated by things long relegated to innermost storage space) into the public space surrounding the home—a topsy-turvy moment of category-blurring that encourages the hybrid gift-commodity transfers that Herrmann has taught us to appreciate throughout her research. And Gould extends these insights about minimalist consumption and ridding to death itself. Here again we see the strong impact of the consumption of literature and other media surrounding minimalism and

Introduction 21

“death-cleaning,” and Gould emphasizes the growing consciousness in Australia of the burden of one’s possessions after death. A major strain of this movement is the idea that “acquisition = death denial,” a critique of the idea that the person can live on through their material remains. Indeed, to bequeath one’s abundant collection upon one’s kin is increasingly considered to be a kind of cursed inheritance, requiring not only great efforts and resources but representing a complicated emotional labor of sorting and choosing which objects are valuable enough to be kept and by whom. The literature often directly implicates the reader in the guilt of leaving such work to their kin rather than taking it on themselves, focusing material care practices on what happens after death and the negative legacies that material inheritance can produce. Throughout the book, we find such moments of cleaning as a kind of magic in which the renewal of the home through decluttering is believed to be a cleansing process that is morally good, purifying the mind and social relationships that tend to become muddled in the midst of the material clutter. Etymologically, clutter is related to “clotting” (Cwerner and Metcalfe 2003: 232) and as excess things fill the home the entirety of the domestic social body can be thought of as “clotting,” losing its vitality as its internal flow becomes caught in the obstacles filling its channels of movement. This is the parasitic, clingy, life-sucking aspect of material vitality, which shows up in many of our chapters. Even when it comes to edibles like potatoes and onions, the care, time, and space sacrificed to these life nourishing crops recalls the maxim of Ian Hodder (2014) on material entanglement: the more things one has, the more things and care they will require to maintain them. Onions and potatoes are good things to have on hand, but they produce chains of entanglement, for the solutions we produce for our material needs inevitably involve more things which will require their own maintenance and material/human dependence. One form of decluttering magic many people rely on is the transformation of the material into the digital, with the illusion that as such it continues to exist in immaterial form (though in fact the material and energetic cost of digital storage makes up a bigger and bigger environmental and human impact, both in the mining regions where minerals essential to digital lives are procured, and in the air-cooled buildings devoted to servers scattered around the globe. But perhaps more importantly, as Miller reminds us in his afterword, many of the same themes or hoarding and purging reappear in the realm of the digital. The smartphone is yet another container, like the house, in which aspects of our selves and all of our relations are stored. It is a dividual object par excellence, at one containing representations and links to everyone we care about, severable from our bodies but rarely in fact outside of the room we are in. But as cloud storage platforms never tire of reminding their clients, smartphones and even clouds fill up with data. Digital hoarding is now a popular hashtag and a search on Google will bring you dozens, even hundreds of sites. As Miller mentions, increasing

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efforts are given to software that helps us to make the triage, to automatically suggest what can be deleted, but even so few are able to keep up with our email, let alone the archive of messages already read. Digital platforms are thus yet another space in which to store things, only deferring the inevitable arrival of digital clutter to compound the material clutter already surrounding most readers. Some of us in this volume are also critical of this tendency to equate materiality with its negative implications. Hoarders, as Bennet so insightfully argues (2012), often keep things out of a keener sensibility for the vitality of things. Often storage is filled with things in order to avoid further engagement with consumerism, respecting the potential of each thing for future reuse or repurposing. While there can be no doubt that the consumer culture fostered by capitalist economies has had disastrous environmental and social consequences over the last two and half centuries, this is not the same as to diagnose the accumulation of material goods in a household as a sign of moral and/or moral disorder. There is good anthropological reason to believe that social relations take place largely through things, and even with things (Goldfarb and Schuster 2016), and that these dividual relationships deserve some respect, even when they go against local cultural aesthetic or environmental norms. Clearly, as things pile up and take over social space, domestic accumulation risks interfering with sociality and even the things themselves suffer neglect and damage as they disappear under the weight of the assemblage.

Conclusion: Increase, Rot, and Renewal Whether the potential usefulness of kept things that most people throw away, stored for a thousand forking paths of futurity in Newell’s work, the urban renewal and recycling of urban waste in Thompson’s essay, or the “pathways to reuse” produced by Herrmann’s yard sales, the composite being of the pile of clutter also breeds new vitalisms and even potential future connectivities. Haraway (2016) has asked us to think of kin-­making through the agricultural logic of compost, in which the jumbled pile of organic detritus allows for so many new forms of relatedness and these biological connections become the source of new life. Such a metaphor serves surprisingly well for understanding the power of clutter to cling, as well as the posthuman economies influencing housekeeping, storage, and collective waste management. Here, we also consider more semiotic forms of rebirth through which “dead media” (Pype, 2016) and other objects become undead, serving to unlock the affective doors to the past while providing the material resources through which to refashion relationality itself. Thompson’s essay makes for an excellent finale, taking our focus beyond the intimate walls of the domestic and reminding us of the ways in which the wasted remains of the past (in wastewater and construction rubble alike) can be used to rekindle the return to the next cycle of value

Introduction 23

production. Ingold’s (2013) long durée perspective that calls for us to think more about materials and less within the strictures of things is useful here as well, allowing for a recognition of seemingly permanent objects to transform fluidly from rock to sand, from mud to brick, from scrap to art. There is a temporal tension within the dynamics of keeping: will things increase in value, become once again useful or desired, and finally fulfill their functional destiny? Or will they only increase in number, seemingly reproducing like fruit flies over gradually blackening bananas? Many things are held onto with the idea that they will one day be properly appreciated either by future family members, unspecified strangers, or even by oneself, in an imagined moment of where there will be more time. Of course, kept things can also lose value, often becoming damaged over time, losing color, developing mildew, or even literally rotting away. All kinds of life can take hold in these situations, hosting insects, mice, squirrels, mold, and so on. The case of food is particularly poignant, for when consumed, it is transformed into the literal flesh of kinship, into the burned energy of family production, or into the economic success of the household at the market, but when unconsumed, it slips quickly into noxious putrefaction, a stinking index of moral decay. To leave something as socially valuable as food to rot is not only a sign of excess and a lack of socially responsible distribution, but the waste of life itself, as demonstrated vividly in both Angé and Matthan’s texts. And yet those who keep food to the point of rotting do so precisely because they see it as too valuable to throw away. The connection between hoarding and rot even shows up in the dry texts of economic policy in the nineteenth century, where hoarders are criticized as “barbarians” who allow their money to “molder” away in their mattresses, “stagnating” rather than circulating and benefiting the national economy (Peebles 2008: 235, 238). A civilizing discourse par excellence, banks and economists worked to educate the public that value only attained its proper form outside the home, in constant and vital motion. In a later text, Peebles explores the opposition between hoarding and saving in terms of centripetal and centrifugal forces (2020). Hoarders pull the outside inwards, while the act of saving (in banking terms) projects the self outwards into social circulation. Strangely, at this moment, bank capitalism starts to sound like Melanesian gift exchange, and despite Peebles intentions to rescue hoarding from its negative representations, his categorization of hoards as dead and savings as living does not appear to help his cause—at least at first glance. For running through these essays, we also find glimpses of the circular value hidden within waste—the fertile rebirth of life lurking inside the dead remains of past things. This theme is most explicitly crystalized in the work of Guitard, whose investigations of the everchanging economic and cultural relationships with domestic refuse offer an important contrast to the emphasis on possessions in the volume. She demonstrates that in Garoua and Maroua, very little of value actually leaves the household,

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and when it does, it tends to go directly to private waste collectors who go door to door seeking profit.6 Everything that can find a future use, even as raw materials, has recognized value. That which does not is mostly organic (though the plastic content is rapidly growing) and is also collected as compost. Formerly, the quantities of compost deposited in front of the house indicated the wealth and power of the owner (their potency), but over time it became more and more stigmatized, such that refuse had to be snuck out of the house by children or others of low prestige. Perhaps most interesting of all are the dangerous spirits that lurk in the garbage that does leave the house. Those who spend too much time searching for value in the refuse of others are likely to become possessed by these spirits and lose their minds, becoming overpowered by the agency of these things whose value and sociality has been denied. Perhaps such spirits can be understood as the collective recognition of the social force and power of entanglement that discarded items have over those who come in contact with them. Finally, despite the negative associations and low prestige of discarded things, throughout Guitard’s chapter, we sense continuously the potential future value of that which is no longer useful to the household. Indeed, Peebles suggests that hoarding resembles the cadaver in just this sense, the fertile value of rot appearing here again in the opposition between life and death carried by saving and hoarding, respectively: Many people acknowledge that death can be terrifying and horrible, but that the dead body nevertheless will continue to support life, both via the “sticky” kinship relations that it will forever haunt and via simply “pushing up the daisies” as part of nature’s inevitable flow. The oscillation between life and death captured in the representation of a cadaver mirrors the oscillation between hoarding and saving. Sustaining social worlds can sometimes be achieved by the hauntings of the hoard, while sometimes it is done via the seeding performed by saving. (2020: 3)

By emphasizing the fertility of rot, or more prosaically, the future potentiality of discarded heaps of rubbish, we may be able to generate a consumer aesthetic more attuned to the future lives of those things we bring into our lives, claiming them less as possessions which we reject when they no longer please than as fellow travelers whose trajectories only temporarily coincide with our own. Lepselter’s analysis of the first episode of Hoarders is relevant here (2011). She discussed Jill, whose home, crowded with objects that brimmed with potential in her eyes, also contained a rotting pumpkin. The psychologist who was there to help steer her back into social normatively argued that the pumpkin was a health hazard.7 Jill agreed after negotiation to part with the pumpkin: She reluctantly agrees to part with it—doing her part in the negotiation—and then, at the last moment, plunges her hand into the orange mess, grabbing around inside it. “Wait. Let me get the seeds.” Even rot is to be seen for its

Introduction 25

“seeds”—its endless potential. She says she may plant some of these seeds, and then she can, in effect, still be able to have this very pumpkin, or have it magically back again the way it was before. For it was a wonderful pumpkin. There was never a pumpkin like that one. It is singular, unexchangeable, and sacred. For her, it is intolerable to let go of this singularity in the world of things, to let its specificity go to waste. At this moment, she believes she will redeem it. (2011: 941)

This “singularity” is precisely what makes these things feel just as undiscardable as people. Herring also comments on this story, asking us to consider whether or not we should consider respecting Jill’s pumpkin as an intimate whose company she enjoyed, for “what if she liked hanging out with pumpkins more than with her sister?” (Herring 2014: 12). This is just the problem that Kilroy-Marac’s ethnography highlights so poignantly. Children of hoarders sometimes feel that their parents choose the hoard over their human family, and the rot takes down the relationships with it. However, while this should not be ignored nor downplayed (I also believe accumulations have dangerous capacities to swallow all that surrounds them), I want to think here in the conclusion towards the relationship between rot and potentiality. For in many societies, rot is associated with fertility—thus, for example, the Trobriand islanders take pride in storehouses so full that the yams begin to rot, an index of the fertility of the gardens a brother plants for his sister and her husband, as well as the strength of their relationship. In the words of Malinowski: They will boast that . . . half the yams will rot away in the storehouses, and be thrown on the wawa, the rubbish heap at the back of the houses, to make room for the new harvest. Here again we meet the typical idea that the main aim of accumulating food is to keep it exhibited in the yam houses till it rots, and then can be replaced by a new étalage. (1922: 169)

Malinowski, like the Trobrianders themselves, it would seem, place the emphasis on the display, but what happens afterwards behind the houses is just as relevant. After all, it is the moldering layers of compost turning into dark soil that brings the most vibrant growth, something all gardeners know well. Indeed, the Hua associate rotting leaves and darkness with the womb and see these as potent sources of life and growth that men try to capture in their most secret initiations in which they try to become more like women (Meigs 1995). In this book, we consider how on an increasingly global scale, commodities circulating on the market are transformed into the inalienable and enchanted, personally infused “stuff of kinship” that fills up the household containers throughout late capitalist societies. Perhaps those of us living in such societies should take a cue from Weiner’s reanalysis of Trobriand society in terms of the differences between women’s wealth (ephemeral and labor-intensive banana leaf bundles) and the circulation of men’s durable and alienable wealth. Indeed, Trobriand women’s wealth is distinct from the men’s in its capacity to rot, and their banana leaf

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bundle currency must continuously be renewed through productive human labor or disappear—but Weiner demonstrates that the durable wealth of men’s valuables ultimately depends upon exchanges built on women’s banana-leaf labor, made visible in the mortuary ceremonies where women compensate each other for the work of care that went into the personhood of the deceased. In this moment of late capitalist crisis, I suggest that we must recalibrate our sensibilities to the vital potentiality of stored clutter, the matter of kinship, making room for it within the visible center of our value scheme. Not that homes should be cluttered nor be organized around enormous storage spaces, but that instead of denying the compelling qualities of clutter and seeking to project a minimalist exterior to the world, societies should work towards collective solutions to socioeconomic structures that produce “surplus value” at toxic levels of intensity. As the currency of exchange becomes ever more alienated from material relations, we must communicate where and how we are keeping, indeed hoarding our sense of relatedness, to one another as well as to the built material things (anthropogenic mass) that make up who we are. Perhaps the ultimate figure for the fertility of rot is the Cameroonian proverb with which I began the volume, “le grand chef doit être comme le grand tas d’ordures” (the great chief must be like the big rubbish heap) (Guitard 2012: 155). Guitard’s fascinating research (2017) indicates that under the previous royal regime, not only were large rubbish heaps indexical of the spiritual and political power a sacred king wielded, but that the collection and centralization of rubbish in the Garoua and Maroua regions of Cameroon was a kind of Foucauldian dispositif (mechanism) for the subjectivation of citizens into the body politic. On a daily basis, the household waste was collected from pile to pile until it reached the village chiefs door, from which every year a portion was ritually removed and added to the king’s mound, placed just in front of his palace. The waste is collected every morning by the women when they sweep the house and courtyard floors. In a series of routine bodily techniques, the refuse is collected at the levels of the rooms, buildings, households, residential quarters and villages. Then, once a year, a fair quantity of it is dug out, loaded into baskets and carried all the way to the king’s waste heap . . . Waste is identified with the bodies of the subjects who have expelled it. Collecting the waste amounts to collecting something of the subjects’ bodies—a kind of left over, a part, a substance imbued with their subjectivity. Piling together the waste achieves a totalizing of the subjects of the kingdom and fuses them with the refuse of the king himself and of his household within the royal heap.

In this way, the very bodily detritus of each citizen was amalgamated with that of the rest in order to produce a powerful composite being, a spiritual entity (setene) with its own agency, and the source of the king’s own political and spiritual potency. I believe this perfectly encapsulates what I mean by the phrase “the fertility of rot.” Here, the chemical decomposition of the contents expelled from the bodies, houses, and villages of the kingdom

Introduction 27

become a metaphor for the unity, productivity, and wealth of the society as a whole, containing the power for both positive rule and dangerous sorcery. At another level, I suggest that the king’s rubbish heap might serve our increasingly global society as a symbolic inspiration for the need to consider the material endurance of our productions as at once an entity beyond our control and a resource for the future. As Haraway frames her call to multispecies kin: “We are humus, not Homo, not anthropos; we are compost, not posthuman” (2016: 55). If our multispecies community must also include the dividual meshwork of possessions, perhaps we had best begin making compostable currencies for our kin relations as well.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Le Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique–FNRS for their support of this project, allowing for the lively exchanges between coauthors that preceded this volume as well as research in Vermont and Côte d’Ivoire. Earlier research that contributes to the project was funded by a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship and by College of the Holy Cross. Thanks to Edgar Tasia for his participation in the early phases of organization. My appreciation to all the authors in this volume for their enthusiasm for the project, especially Katie and Fabio who provided encouragement and guidance when it was needed. Above all I thank my partner-in-all-things Diana Arbaiza for her direct contributions in editing, formatting, and critique, as well as her indirect assistance in providing the time to work on this volume. Sasha Newell is associate professor and director of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporain at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He is author of The Modernity Bluff: Crime, Consumption, and Citizenship in Côte d’Ivoire (University of Chicago 2012), which won the Amaury Talbot prize, and is based upon field research carried out for his doctorate at Cornell University (2003). While he continues to write about Côte d’Ivoire, most recently on cybercrime and digital sorcery (African Studies Review, Africa), since 2007 he has also worked on questions of domestic accumulation in US homes, developing publications on storage, hoarding, clutter, and possession. More recently, he has been investigating the material traces of Belgian colonialism, including monuments, museums, as well as domestic objects.

Notes 1. However, the human kinship that emerges in these chapters is quite heteronormative in structure, and in this sense, the kin relationships described may fall too easily into North Atlantic projections of an idealized nuclear family. We hope that our attention to objects as important members of kin groups nonetheless serves to challenge normative boundaries of kinship from another angle, one that could also work towards the “queering” of what constitutes family.

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2. Minimalism and its anti-materialist predecessors have waxed and waned over decades, even centuries (not incidentally encouraged by the Protestant aesthetics but pre-existing that) in Euro-American cultures, and there is no doubt that the social dynamics of fashion are at play here. However, the correlation with the emergence of hoarding disorder is unprecedented, since the contemporary pandemic of hoarding disorder has no historical antecedents (Smail 2014). 3. Smail suggests that it may be an epigenetic phenomenon triggered by the late-capitalist condition. 4. Note that the word possession has been marked by Strathern (1990), as well as more recently by Johnson (2014) as partaking of a particularly capitalist, property-oriented, bounded individualist approach to “things,” and as such it should be looked at with suspicion. My own approach (2014) is to invert this relationship by drawing upon the metaphor of spirit possession to understanding the act of possession as a relationship of mutual and dialectical encompassment. 5. There is a risk here of projecting North Atlantic understandings onto both houses and kinship. Houses have no material definition here and could refer to anything from a Nuer windscreen to a Malaysian longhouse to a royal palace. Likewise, we should not imagine that kinship units are clearly defined by the container, as in some societies there is a great deal of circulation between house structures on a daily basis, reflecting overlapping kin roles and exchanges. 6. Many of my interviewees in Abidjan mentioned this same service as their go-to solution. 7. Herring’s account informs us that he is David Tolin, who is an advocate of DSM-V diagnoses of HD and a co-author of various important scientific papers on hoarding disorder (Herring 2014: 11).

References Baker, Steven. 1995. “To Go About Noisily: Clutter, Writing, and Design.” Emigre 35: unpaginated. Beauvoir, Simone de. [1953] 2011. The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, 1st edn. New York: Vintage. Bird-David, Nurit. 1999. “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology.” Current Anthropology 40(S1): S67–91. Bourgois, Philippe I. 2003. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. Brodesser-Akner, Taffy. 2016. “Marie Kondo, Tidying Up and the Ruthless War on Stuff.” The New York Times, 6 July. Retrieved from https://www​ .nytimes.com/2016/07/10/magazine/marie-kondo-and-the-ruthless-war​ -on-stuff.html. Carsten, Janet. 1995. “The Substance of Kinship and the Heat of the Hearth: Feeding, Personhood and Relatedness among Malays in Pulau Langkawi.” American Ethnologist 22(2): 223–41. ———. 2004. After Kinship. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. Carsten, Janet, ed. 2007. Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Carsten, Janet, and Stephen Hugh-Jones, eds. 1995. About the House: LéviStrauss and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Cwerner, Saulo B., and Alan Metcalfe. 2003. “Storage and Clutter: Discourses and Practices of Order in the Domestic World.” Journal of Design History 16(3): 229–39. Dawdy, Shannon Lee. 2016. Patina: A Profane Archeology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DSM-5 Task Force. 2013. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-5. Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association. Elhacham, Emily, Liad Ben-Uri, Jonathan Grozovski, Yinon M. Bar-On, and Ron Milo. 2020. “Global Human-Made Mass Exceeds All Living Biomass.” Nature 588: 442–44. Empson, Rebecca. 2012. “The Dangers of Excess: Accumulating and Dispersing Fortune in Mongolia.” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 56(1): 117–32. Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan. 1940. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fajans, Jane. 1997. They Make Themselves: Work and Play among the Baining of Papua New Guinea. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Franklin, Sarah. 2001. “Biologization Revisited: Kinship Theory in the Context of New Biologies.” In Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, eds. Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, 302–22. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Franklin, Sarah, and Susan McKinnon. 2001. Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gamble, Clive. 2007. Origins and Revolutions. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. Godelier, Maurice. 1999. The Enigma of the Gift, trans. Nora Scott, 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goldfarb, Kathryn E., and Caroline E. Schuster. 2016. “(De)Materializing Kinship: Holding Together Materiality and Difference.” Social Analysis 60(2): 1–12. Guitard, Émilie. 2012. “Le chef et le tas d’ordures: la gestion des déchets comme arène politique et attribut du pouvoir au Cameroun.” Politique africaine 127(3): 155. ———. 2017. “The Sacred King as a Waste Heap in Northern Cameroon.” Journal of Material Culture 22(4): 406–18. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, illustrated edn. Durham: Duke University Press. Herring, Scott. 2014. The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture, 1st edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hirschman, Elizabeth C., Ayalla Ruvio, and Russell W. Belk. 2012. “Exploring Space and Place in Marketing Research: Excavating the Garage.” Marketing Theory 12(4): 369–89. Hodder, Ian. 2014. “The Entanglements of Humans and Things: A LongTerm View.” New Literary History 45(1): 19–36.

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Holmes, Helen. 2019. “Material Affinities: ‘Doing’ Family through the Practices of Passing On.” Sociology 53(1): 174–91. Ingold, Tim. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge. Johnson, Paul Christopher, ed. 2014. Spirited Things: The Work of “Posses­ sion” in Afro-Atlantic Religions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Joyce, Rosemary A., and Susan D. Gillespie, eds. 2000. Beyond Kinship: Social and Material Reproduction in House Societies. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. Kernen, Antoine, and Khan Mohammad. 2014. “La Révolution des Produits Chinois en Afrique Consommation de Masse et Nouvelle Culture Matérielle.” Politique Africaine 134: 111–32. Kilroy-Marac, Katie. 2016. “A Magical Reorientation of the Modern: Professional Organizers and Thingly Care in Contemporary North America.” Cultural Anthropology 31(3): 438–57. Koncius, Jura. 2015. “As Boomers Shed Their Stuff, Their Offspring Reject It.” Washington Post, 27 March. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local​ /boomers-unwanted-inheritance/2015/03/27/0e75ff6e-45c4-11e4-b437​ -1a7368204804_story.html. Le Meur, Mikaëla. 2019. “Plasti-cités: Enquêtes sur les déchets et les transformations écologiques au Viêt Nam.” Bruxelles: Université Libre de Bruxelles. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:20​ 13/282071. Lepselter, Susan. 2011. “The Disorder of Things: Hoarding Narratives in Popular Media.” Anthropological Quarterly 84(4): 919–47. Lock, Margaret M., and Nancy Scheper-Hughes. 1987. “The Mindful Body: A Prolegemon to Work in Medical Anthropology.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1(1): 6–41. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. 1935. Coral Gardens and their Magic, Vol I. New York: American Book Company. Mauss, Marcel. 2016 [1925]. The Gift, trans. Jane Guyer. Chicago, IL: HAU. Makovicky, Nicolette. 2007. “Closet and Cabinet: Clutter as Cosmology.” Home Cultures 4(3): 287–310. McKinnon, Susan. 1991. From a Shattered Sun: Hierarchy, Gender, and Alliance in the Tanimbar Islands. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 2016. “Doing and Being: Process, Essence, and Hierarchy in Making Kin.” In The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology, eds. Simon Coleman, Susan Hyatt, and Ann Kinsolver, 161–82. London: Routledge. Meigs, Anna S. 1995. Food, Sex, and Pollution: A New Guinea Religion. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

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Miller, Daniel, ed. 2001. Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors, 1st edn. London: Routledge. ———. 2005. Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2009. The Comfort of Things, 1st edn. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity. Minter, Adam. 2015. Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade. New York: Bloomsbury. Monroe, Rachel. 2017. “Vanlife, the Bohemian Social-Media Movement.” The New Yorker, April 17. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017​ /04/24/vanlife-the-bohemian-social-media-movement. Mosko, Mark S. 2009. “The Fractal Yam: Botanical Imagery and Human Agency in the Trobriands.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15(4): 679–700. Newell, Alexander [Sasha]. 2019. “L’hospitalité des hoarders. Accumulations et relations dans l’espace domestique aux États-Unis.” L’Homme. Revue française d’anthropologie 231–232 (November): 111–34. Newell, Sasha. 2014. “The Matter of the Unfetish: Hoarding and the Spirit  of Possessions.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4(3): 185–213. ———. 2018. “Uncontained Accumulation: Hidden Heterotopias of Storage and Spillage.” History and Anthropology 29(1): 37–41. Nordsletten, Ashley E., Lorena Fernández de la Cruz, Elena Aluco, Pino Alonso, Clara López-Solà, José M. Menchón, Tomohiro Nakao et al. 2018. “A Transcultural Study of Hoarding Disorder: Insights from the United Kingdom, Spain, Japan, and Brazil.” Transcultural Psychiatry 55(2): 261–85. Orr, David M. R., Michael Preston-Shoot, and Suzy Braye. 2019. “Meaning in Hoarding: Perspectives of People Who Hoard on Clutter, Culture and Agency.” Anthropology & Medicine 26(3): 263–79. Peebles, Gustav. 2008. “Inverting the Panopticon: Money and the Nationalization of the Future.” Public Culture 20(2): 233–65. ———. 2020. “Hoarding and Saving.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed. Mark Aldenderfer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pype, Katrien. 2016. “Dead Media Objects and the Experience of the (Once) Modern: Ethnographic Perspectives from the Living Rooms of Kinshasa’s Old Aged.” Ethnos 83(2): 218–36. Reich, Robert B. 2001. “How Did Spending Become Our Patriotic Duty?” Washington Post, 23 September. https://www.washingtonpost.com/arch​ ive/opinions/2001/09/23/how-did-spending-become-our-patriotic-duty​/ bc893ad4-c8a9-4a65-8ed6-aefd9f392691/. Reno, Joshua. 2014. “Toward a New Theory of Waste: From ‘Matter Out of Place’ to Signs of Life.” Theory, Culture & Society 31(6): 3–27. Sahlins, Marshall. 2013. What Kinship Is—and Is Not. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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Santos-Granero, Fernando. 2009. The Occult Life of Things: Native Amazonian Theories of Materiality and Personhood. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Margaret M. Lock. 1987. “The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1(1): 6–41. Schneider, David M. 1984. Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Shryock, Andrew, and Daniel Lord Smail. 2018. “On Containers: A Forum. Introduction.” History and Anthropology 29(1): 1–6. Smail, Daniel Lord. 2014. “Neurohistory in Action: Hoarding and the Human Past.” Isis 105(1): 110–22. Stafford, Frank. 2008. “Chore Wars: Men, Women and Housework.” https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=111458. Strathern, Marilyn. 1990. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia, 1st edn. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2013. Learning to See in Melanesia: Four Lectures given in the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University, 1993–2008. Master Class Series 2. HAU Books. https://haubooks.org/learning-to-see​ -in-melanesia/. Thompson, Michael. 2017 [1979]. Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, new edn. London: Pluto Press.

Part I Food Storage and Family Values

1 Food Abundance and the Storage of Tuberous Kin

•

The Houses of the Potato Park in the Peruvian Andes

Olivia Angé

In collaboration with: Aniceto Ccoyo, Ciprian Ccoyo, Bacilides Jancco, Lino Mamani, Daniel Pacco, Ricardina Pacco, Daniel Peres, Eliseo Puma, Brisayda Sicus, Mariano Sutta.

Introduction Potato is a vital food to the cultivators in the Peruvian highlands, where no other crop flourishes. It is a voluminous crop. At harvest time, they are all over the place: assembled as heaps in the house gardens, laid down as carpets of tubers to be sorted in the patio and common rooms, gathered in buckets of wormy pieces to be eaten by animals, arranged in bowls of the very best fresh specimens to fulfill human fancy in the kitchen, piled on shelves for seed conservation, packed for a market venture, or lined up in the larder as selected native varieties. Once sorted, food tubers are stored in a specific space within the family house identified as a potato room. I could only trust the refrain: “Here, we never lack potato.” Indeed, potato is a key ingredient of any proper meal, in the usual and festive menu. Even if they eat potato as a staple, the cultivators I met in the Pisac district of Cuzco appreciate their potatoes as living beings imbued with a subjectivity of their own. They insist that their potato has a spirit (also noted by Allen 1982: 182; Hall 2012: 1122). In Spanish, they speak about the potato espiritu, as a translation for the word ánimu1 used in Quechua to refer to the “spiritual essence” of a being (Allen 2002: 43). While all crops are appreciated as

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animated beings, human encounters with potatoes entail particular forms of interspecies relatedness that I explore in this paper. In the vein of Janet Carsten’s study of rice consumption in Malaysia (1995), eating the same food has been widely documented as a core practice of kin making. In the fishing village where she carried out her research, Carsten described “a continuity between the relatedness of a mother and child or full siblings who are thought to share bodily substance, which in turn is partly derived from procreation, and those who are considered to share substance because they live in one house and eat rice meals together” (1995: 229). In the Andes, too, eating together has been reported as a core instance of human relatedness (Angé 2022; Van Vleet 2008; Weismantel 1995). My ethnographic research in Cuzco reports that eating in highland agricultural communities not only creates intimacy between human commensals, but it also fosters a mutuality of being (Sahlins 2013) with the ingested potato. These interspecies relations are verbalized with the idiom of kinship, whereby tubers are appreciated as both mother and child to their human growers. Inspired by Sasha Newell’s proposition to look at “houses as containers for kinship” (this volume), this chapter explores tuber storage as another modality of food practices convening domestic relationality. Tuberous accumulation in houses famously participates in the creation of human relatedness in Melanesian societies, where separated yam gardens are cultivated for the enactment of kinship exchanges. Before being offered to their final consumer, the harvest of these gardens is stored in yam houses displayed in the village to enhance the renown of their cultivator. In her classic study of Trobriand exchange, Annette Weiner highlights yams’ preservation capacity as a material condition for their contribution to the creation of men of renown (1994: 139). While yam can be ostensibly stocked in houses for up to six months before being distributed to kin, taro, in contrast, expires a few days after it is harvested. Like yam, Andean potatoes can be preserved for several months, if stored in convenient conditions. While they are not hoarded as objects of display in the fashion of Melanesian slow decay tubers, their accumulation in houses nonetheless participates in the extension of their growers’ webs of relatedness. In this paper, I describe the spatio-temporalities of potato storage, according to the cycles of gestation, sprouting, rot, freezing, and cooking, through which potatoes are enacted as both mother and child to their cultivators. This focus on the peculiarities of tuber storing highlights the ethical commitments and mutual regards weaving a heterogenous relatedness composing Andean houses. It thereby offers an eloquent support to Newell’s proposition that the “stuff” stored in houses does “not only represent kin relationship . . . it is itself kin” (this volume). In the last section of the chapter, I explore potato housekeeping in another kind of building where potato is accumulated: the seed bank constructed as part of the Parque de la Papa (Potato Park), established

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in the Pisac district, where I have carried out fieldwork since 2015. 2 An ethnographic description of seed-tuber storage on the bank shelves posits agrobiodiversity conservation in the Park not as a way to accumulate genetic material available for breeders in laboratories across the world, but as an initiative reclaiming human respect for crop kin to the public at large, including in capitalist societies where the intensive cultivation of potato calibrated for fast-food processing is a core sector of a contaminating agro-industry.

Potato Livelihood The potato has been vital in Andean economies since archaeological times. In his voluminous History and Social Influence of the Potato, Redcliffe Salaman advances the idea that potato consumption was a requisite for Amazonian dwellers to be able to move from the rainforest and establish settlements in the Andean highlands: “it was the potato which made residence on these plateaux possible” (1985: 11). Apparently, hunter-gatherers started domesticating tubers between 8,000 and 5,000 bc around the Titicaca Lake, at some 4,000 metres above sea level. The Solanum andigenum has become the most common subspecies cultivated throughout the Andes, comprising a huge gamut of varieties that differ in their morphological and physiological features. Such an intimate relationship, whereby humans tend to Solanum plants, making them grow in challenging habitats while the tuber fosters human physical and social reproduction, is still tangible today in the Pisac district. Indeed, potato cultivation remains a core activity in the highland ayllus, as agricultural communities are called in Quechua. In her book about earth beings in Cuzco, Marisol de la Cadena famously accounted for the ayllu as a relational entanglement from where heterogenous entities emerge, including Apus, the most powerful mountainous ancestor. De la Cadena insists that ayllu members do not pre-exist their interactions as they mutually constitute one another through relations of nurturing constitutive of the collective (2015: 103). In this chapter, I focus on the accommodation of vegetal crop in houses to highlight the prominence of another kind of earth being in the highland ayllus of Cuzco: the potato. A key ingredient of any proper meal, potato production remains a mainstay of household economies. Stephen Brush reports a study which estimated that, in the past century, up to 70 percent of the ingested calories of these cultivators came from the potato (2004: 102). Since the daily diet is based on locally produced food, self-sufficiency in potatoes is a priority that involves the continual cultivation of a number of varieties appreciated for their specific qualities. As indicated in the introduction, potatoes are ubiquitous in the highland ayllus. In times of prolific harvest, they give a sense of plenty that contrasts with the precarity of the growers’ participation in the capitalist economy.

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Earning money usually requires traveling out of the community to sell the labor force for meagre and unstable wages. In a context of monetary scarcity, commodity consumption in highland houses is limited. Mobile phones, televisions, and gas stoves are the core basic domestic appliances to which growers aspire. And yet, the tidying up of the domestic space is appreciated as a significant human virtue. I became aware of that when urged not to take pictures featuring out of place objects such as clothes, cooking pots, or agricultural tools. In a context of parsimonious commodity consumption, the storage of agricultural produce—among which potato is prominent—is crucial to the maintenance of an ordered domestic space. The native potatoes are distributed into four familias (families, in Spanish), which their growers classify according to their preferred culinary treatment. The mundas are round tubers, peeled with a knife before they are boiled, usually in soup and stew. The wayk’us are elongated ones that can only be hand-peeled once boiled, although they are usually eaten with peel and flavored with chili sauce. Those that are tasty enough to be swallowed alone are appreciated as delicacies, while those with bright colors like red, purple, or pink are appreciated for their aesthetic, as well as their curative properties. In addition, a set of potato varieties, admired for having outstanding shapes or colors identified to non-tuberous beings, are flagged out as resaltantes (outstanding, in Spanish), although most of them are consumed as wayk’us. For instance, Puma Maki or Pacocha Sinka, meaning “puma’s hand” and “alpaca’s nose,” respectively, are appreciated as related to these animals. The other two families comprise bitter varieties suited for the desiccation process, which transforms them into chuño or moralla. These two kinds of potatoes are dehydrated under the extreme climatic conditions of the Andean winter.3 In this form, they can be stored for decades and easily transported. Whilst their culinary use overlaps with the mundas, the papas mejoradas (improved varieties, in Spanish), produced through laboratory crossbreeding since the middle of the past century (de Haan 2009: 63), do not fit within the four families of native potato. According to oral accounts by cultivators, improved varieties were introduced in the Pisac department in the 1980s as part of an agricultural intensification campaign led by an NGO and state policies, provoking a drastic decrease in potato agro-biodiversity in many plots (Brush 2004, Zimmerer 1996). Resistant to the pesticides required to eliminate the plagues thriving in milder climatic conditions, improved varieties can grow in lower plots closer to the road. Harvested tubers are big and evenly formed, fit for urban market demands, contrary to the smaller native ones despised by urbanites for their unusual shapes, multiple eyes, and small size. Conversely, highland growers are reluctant to eat improved varieties. They are very critical about their much higher water content, as well as their chemical requirements, making them less tasty and less able to nourish the body efficiently.

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In contrast, native ones are appreciated as enhancing human vitality or fuerza (strength, in Spanish). A mature lady from the community of Chahuaytire was definitive as she described the native potato as a medicine that protects human health. She noted that when one eats them, one never needs to go to the hospital. Since they can be stocked for months without decaying (even decades for desiccated ones), native varieties comprise the basis for a rich menu until the next harvest. As it sustains physical reproduction, the native potato also participates in the crafting of subjectivities. An increased potato harvest was, until recently, a condition to advance on the hierarchy of cargos, the political charges a man must accomplish to gain respect in the ayllu that entail the capacity to convene communal feasts of tuberous dishes. Incidentally, the orchestration of collective labor in the communal plots has been a key duty within the system of cargo itself (Pérez 2004: 191). Even though younger generations yearn for urban life, within the ayllu, potato growing remains a value-loaded activity where the quantity and quality of the harvest reflect on the cultivators’ virtues. Working in the fields indexes moral qualities in Andean communities (Gose 1994: 236; Hall 2012: 110). These qualities expand with the surface of the chacras (agricultural plots, in Quechua) and the number of grown varieties. This capacity to enhance earthly diversity endows humans with core moral qualities as loving and generous persons (see also Valladolid 1998: 66). As expert potato grower Nazario Quispe put it, cultivating a large diversity of varieties with diverging necessities requires “a great mind, and patience.” Cultivating quantities of potato obviously requires intense agricultural work in the fields. It also demands considerable efforts of household organization for the management of voluminous stock or maintaining the many different varieties separately. While males are in charge of strenuous agricultural tasks, women’s ability to properly transform potatoes into food that will be ingested is of the essence for them being acknowledged as a warmi; that is, an accomplished woman in Quechua. The Jatun Huacachi variety illustrates this relationship between potato skills and feminine achievement beautifully. Meaning “the one who makes the daughter-in-law cry” in Quechua, this name refers to its potential use as a test by mothers to estimate whether a young woman is going to be a suited housewife for their son. Jathun Huacachi’s body is composed of a succession of humps, which makes it particularly challenging to peel. To be successful, the candidate has to be able to peel it quickly, without damaging its form, nor wasting edible matter. Even though narrated as an old custom that is unusually accomplished, stories featuring the Jatun Huacachi indicate the importance of potato skills to the maiden’s acknowledgement as an accomplished person apt for the creation of a new household. In the Andes, like in the Malay village studied by Carsten (1995), eating the same food is considered to produce the same bodies, and daily ingestion of the same ingredients is further conceived as the point at which kinship is

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created. Rather than resulting from sexual reproduction only, parenthood is seen as a processual construction in which blood filiation is important but not necessary, or sufficient. As Mary Weismantel noted in her study of foster children in Ecuador: “Especially critical in this process is the sharing of meals. Flesh is made from food, and especially from different grains and tubers, each of which has its own characteristic effect on the human body” (1995: 695, see also Angé 2022; Van Vleet 2008). In highland households where pots are filled with potatoes, their consumption is crucial to the weaving of family ties. The next section focuses on practices of tuber storage to show that tuber accommodation in the family house also creates relatedness between human and tuberous beings.

Sorting and Storing Potatoes in Houses Stocking potatoes in the family house requires many days of work that necessitates sorting out the tubers to determine where and how each will be accommodated. Examining a potato heap starts with the selection of seeds, which are put aside according to their size and shape: they must be small, evenly shaped, and free of pests. The more “eyes” (ñawi in Quechua, stem growing points) they have, the better. Bigger tubers are kept for human food, as well as those lightly bitten by worms, which are first transformed into chuño. Finally, damaged potatoes engaged in a rotting process are put aside for fodder (sometimes after being freeze-dried as well). Bitter potatoes in the chacras of the communal rotating plots situated in the highest sectors of the community are the last to be harvested. They are usually sorted out near the fields, where they can stay until night temperatures fall below zero in June, allowing for chuño and moralla processing. They are brought to the house once dehydrated, and are thus lighter for transport. In the remote agricultural sectors, tubers separated as seeds can remain at the edge of fields until the next sowing campaign. Every variety, or mix of varieties from a given family, are piled as heaps of about a meter high, covered with a weatherproof coat of straw (and, sometimes, a blanket) protecting from frost and potential late rain, unless stored in a temporary house built by the owners to overnight near their fields in peak labor season. Tubers harvested in plots close to the village can be sorted out in the main house. The varieties best adapted to these lower plots are usually from the munda and wayk’u families. Around the house, chuño production is minor, usually only to produce fodder out of wormy tubers. Seeds were traditionally hoarded in a corner of the patio, protected from rain and frost by a cover of straw. Incentivized by training offered by conservation programs, some cultivators have constructed outdoor seeds storing shelves in their patios. Seeds of each variety are accommodated on a specific shelf covered with a bed of straw. They are protected with repellent plants and wrapped with more straw so that they can stay safe until the next sowing when they are brought to the fields.

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Seed tubers are appreciated as gestating bodies. Sorting out is thus pivotal in the tracing of a potato genealogy, securing the continuation of the varietal line. Gestation processes on household shelves take a new turn during the sowing campaign (between September and November), when seeds are brought to the chacras to sprout into a new plant. When baby tubers start to grow underground a few months later, their mother tuber is said to become an awila (grandmother, in Quechua), who perishes in the fields while the new tuber generation flourishes. Similar tuberous lines of descent expressed in the idiom of motherhood are reported in other settings across the Andes. In the Argentinean cordillera, Francisco Pazzarelli and Verónica Lerma observe that cultivated, as well as, wild potatoes “have kinship relations” because seed tubers are recognized as mother giving birth to babies, who compose the forthcoming harvest (2018: 278; see also Arnold and Yapita 1996 about potato filiation in Bolivian fields). While ethnographies in Melanesia have highlighted the importance of yam display and exchange in the knitting of human alliances (Mosko 2009; Munn 1992; Weiner 1992), accounts of relations in gardens and plots indicate the existence of genealogies involving tubers. Not only are yams for replanting as daughters who will bear progeny; gardeners are themselves introduced as the “mother” and “father” of their crops (Strathern 2017: 30, following Mosko and Malinowski). Vegetal reproduction in Amazonia is also reported to outline tuber genealogies whereby cassava plants are the children of Cassava Mama, the tutelary spirit of this cultivated crops (Daly 2021). And, likewise, the interspecies web of kinship weaved through cultivation entails human growers. In his classic ethnography of Achuar agriculture, Descola points out the maternal relation female gardeners knit with their cassava through plant tending and incantations (2005: 348, see also Daly 2021; Miller 2019: 100). My purpose in this paper is to consider the importance of household storage in the making of interspecies genealogies in which humans and tubers are entangled. Before they are sorted out, potato agglomerates are prone to premature rot. In the promiscuity of a heap, worms quickly transit from one potato to the next, spreading mold and other fungi as they eat. If the potatoes are not sorted out soon enough, they risk becoming the kind of clutter outlined by Newell as “a seemingly autonomous force that threatens the very sovereignty of humans over their domestic space” (this volume). This is how I apprehended the multiple heaps waiting for growers’ selection in chacras and patios after the 2022 harvest, when the selection and storage of tubers were delayed by an unusually wet and warm weather. Due to multiple ecological upheavals, the harvest had been particularly infested that year, and my hosts were becoming nervous about not being able to start separating intact tubers from the damaged ones, which they wanted to urgently freeze into chuño—and thereby kill the worms before they would take over the “clutter.”

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Once sorted out, mundas and wayk’us intended for family consumption are gathered in a first-floor room devoted to potato storage. Potatoes are either stocked in rag bags or on the floor dispersed on straw. In both cases, they are gathered according to their variety, although different strains from the same family are sometimes mixed together in ready-to-cook assortments. The room also hosts other cereals and tubers used for feeding the household over the year, such as oca, quinoa, wheat, or dried fava beans; but these are minor as compared to the bulk of the potato reserve. Chuño and moralla are stored in rag bags lined up against the wall. These can date back to previous harvests several years earlier. They are kept as food insurance in case of a devastating harvest. In contrast, fresh food (like meat, fruits or onions), and other ingredients brought from the market (like rice, oil, salt, and sugar) are kept in the kitchen shelves. Sometimes, harvest is so prolific that the storage room is full, and potatoes are put away in other rooms or wherever they fit, much like the onions in Matthan’s chapter (this volume). Part of the harvest can also remain in secondary houses used by cultivators to overnight closer to their fields. In 2018, my host Lino Mamani decided to occupy a full house he inherited from his mother in the center of the village of Pampallacta to store his plentiful harvest; planning to reclaim it as his own space when he would move in with his wife.

Hosting Potato Kin While tubers delineate female varietal lines by clonal gestation, another kind of genealogy unfolds in entanglement with human growers of both sexes. Making room for food tubers in the family home is enacted as elementary hospitality to vegetal kin. A mature potato grower from a highland community in another Cuzco district explained the importance of never abandoning potatoes in the chacras and bringing even the smallest ones to the larder. “Otherwise they curse us. As if, for instance, you leave a baby naked wherever, he could curse you, right? Likewise, the small potato would curse you.”4 This appreciation posits the potato as response-able in the sense of Donna Haraway (2008: 164) as they are offered a chance to respond back in their interactions with humans. A crux of this appreciation of potato as response-able subject is the ceremony performed to welcome the new harvest at the family home. Meaning “potato tying” in Quechua, the Papa Huatay is a domestic gathering intended to fasten tubers’ spirits to their bodies. If its ánimu were to remain in the fields, the tuberous bodies of that variety would perish prematurely in the house stock, thus jeopardizing the reproduction of that line if no seeds were left for the next sowing. Fastening tubers’ ánimu concretely consists of coating piles of tubers with straw and coiling lama wool rope around the heap. Wearing their ceremonial ponchos, the owners convene their Apus and the Pachamama (Mother Earth, in Quechua) by addressing kintus, which are bundles of coca leaves fundamental to interspecies

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communication and nurturing in the ayllu (Allen 2002; de la Cadena 2015). They ask protection for their potatoes’ well-being until consumed or sown in the next season. The potato’s spirit is then attracted with sahumeo (fumigation of incense or animal grease smokes) to bring it back from the fields where it might have stayed. Afterwards, the harvest is sprinkled with wine or maize beer and covered with flowers or confetti. Patiently explaining the purpose of throwing flowers at a pile of newly harvested potatoes, Lino astutely compared it to a potato birthday celebration, knowing that this is the typical festivity that urban parents like myself organize for their young children. Once all the different kinds of tubers are positioned in their corresponding places, the couple owner of the house can further please them with a t’inkay (splashing maize beer or wine around as a form of libation in Quechua), accompanied with kintus and the burning of sahumeo. Even though their cultivators agree that a potato does not have a nose, they appreciate the fragrance of the smokes of burning incense and animal grease. A rejoicing that can be repeated for the new year, carnival, Pachamama’s day and other highlights in the yearly calendar of fiestas. On all occasions, it is expected to enliven the crops’ ánimu. The pleasure of incense and alcoholic beverages is offered to seed and food tubers, as well as to chuño and moralla. Deprived of growing capacities, freezedried tubers are considered as dead bodies. Intriguingly, my hosts in Pisac insisted that dehydrated potatoes also needed to be welcome in the house with the kindness of olfactive fragrances and the appreciation of coca leaves. In the neighbouring ayllu of Sonqo, Catherine Allen documented the ch’uño ch’alla (2002: 143), whereby sacks of chuño are fed with coca leaves and alcohol, as well as being rejoiced with music. This ch’alla is performed when these “potato mummies” (idem: 147) are moved into the larder to make sure the stock does not give out too soon. Such gestures of hospitality to newly hosted food are common across the Andes. I had observed it during former fieldwork in the Argentinean cordillera, where libations, coca leaves, and incense offered to food when introduced in a house also compose a “challa.” Agricultural produce are the primary beneficiaries of such rejoicing, 5 particularly those produced in domestic fields or acquired during barter fairs. I did not hear Argentinean cultivators qualify their relation to their potatoes with the idiom of kinship. Yet, like other crops, tubers were treated as sentient beings animated with emotions and intentionality. Like t’inkay, challa is a practice of nurturing crops after they are harvested to make sure they do not perish once stored in the larder. As observed by Pazzarelli and Lema in the Argentinean Cordillera, “storage rooms are active workspaces where food stuffs are expected to continue reproducing” (2018: 278, see also Bugallo and Vilca 2011). As part of the storage work, t’inkay is not intended for the growth of the potato body—as it is when performed in the chacra—but for slowing down their resorption through consumption. As I was repeatedly told:

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“It’s for them to not finish up quickly” (para que no se terminen rapido, in Spanish). This refrain means that the owner hopes that his stock will not empty too quickly despite the steady feeding of the family and potential undesired dwellers in the larder, like pests, rodents, or mold. Once conveniently distributed and accommodated in the house, potatoes continue to be handled with careful consideration. While not systematically applied, household etiquette states that their room should only be visited by women, who are expected to enter quietly with barefoot and hat in hand as a sign of respect. Their room is kept closed and obscure, as subterranean tubers are known to degrade quickly if exposed to the sunlight, their skin color turning green before becoming toxic for human consumption. Likewise, potatoes need to be handled with care. Brusque movements or shocks would also accelerate the physical degradation of the potato. Their peel would darken, transforming them into another kind of being. “They would not be potatoes any longer,” insisted Lino to make sure I would not move them around unnecessarily while taking pictures. If properly treated, native potatoes keep for several months, feeding the whole family until new ones start sprouting in the fields.

Potato Depletion Once accommodated, potatoes will be used daily to cook an array of usual and festive meals. Through steady consumption, heaps shrink, bags are emptied, and the room clears out. Being fed by her, growers appreciate that they owe their lives to the potato. This vital role in human nourishing fosters potato appraisal as a mother. A young potato cultivator and handicraft producer in Amaru explained this with words that are common to highland cultivators: “The potato is primordial. For the soup, for the main plate, every meal is with potato. Without her, we would not be living beings. Potato is our mother, Mother Potato, we say.” Hence, being nurtured by the potato creates a relationship that growers qualify with the idiom of kinship. Potato motherhood is manifested through a series of normative prescriptions, through which humans manifest their respeto (respect, in Spanish) to their dear tuber. Avoiding disturbing noises in the plots, asking permission before entering the chacra, stepping the ground with barren feet while working in the field or gently grasping the potato are common enactments of this interspecies regard. Amongst the many expressions of respect that enact this maternal ascendency, food practices are of the essence, particularly those related to waste avoidance. If most wayk’u potatoes cannot be peeled, it is because their many and bumpy eyes make it impossible not to damage their flesh. Those round and even potatoes who can be peeled require careful manipulation. When learning how to peel a potato, I was taught that I should cut out as thin a layer as possible to remove the peel while maintaining all edible matter intact. As they sit down on their tiny seat in the kitchen, back

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bent to peel the tuber between their knees, cookers lay a plastic container on the ground to gather the peeling. These cannot be left on the ground to be eaten by wandering chickens, as is the typical practice with organic garbage. Instead, they are later boiled and served as fodder for the pigs. If nurturing another being is considered an appropriate destiny for those not selected as seed, peeling etiquette outlines a regime of suitable use according to whom the potato will feed. Damaged potatoes should not be left for the worms. They are dried out as second-class chuño used to feed cows or pigs. Pigs are also fed with boiled peels and spoiled food. Dogs in turn receive meals of leftovers, sometime in considerable quantities. Yet, the first to be fed are humans, who will use the potato strength to grow more potatoes in their chacras. These practices for treating potatoes with respect are crucial for the maintenance of the potato’s livelihood by growers, who appreciate that an upset plant will stop producing nourishing tubers for them. This fact recurrently justified cultivators’ reluctance to bring native varieties to the market, where unfamiliar urban clients risk not to treat the tuber appropriately. Urbanites do not know the diversity of native potatoes, nor the specific treatment they expect. Due to this lack of knowledge, they could peel the wrong potato, or let them perish as garbage without feeding another being. Described as inherited from elders, the etiquette for respecting potatoes is nevertheless not systematically applied. For instance, a most respectful potato cultivator who hosted me in Pampallaqta did not always boil her potato peel, for she did not have pigs to feed them with. More than being a set of norms to be mechanically applied, potato respect is enacted through pondered nurturing and avoiding offence. In addition to daily cooking and eating, respectful consumption unfolds through the extended temporality of agricultural cycles. Securing appropriate use requires eating up the household stock before a new one is harvested. By the end of May, the potato room must be cleared out to host the next generation. At this time, the former is becoming old and delicate to handle. As time passes, potato flesh softens and the peel wrinkles. Germs grow vertically from the potato eyes, throwing impressive sprouts toward the roof. They should not be approached, if not for being immediately cooked, for they would turn brown and perish under minimal shock. The taste of these old tubers is very much appreciated for its increased sweetness. Yet, the new potato arrival is expected with much excitement, and everyone likes to be served the fresh tubers when the harvest starts. At this stage, the old potatoes could neither be brought to the market since they would not stand such a journey. They would not sell out anyway, for their wrinkled bodies are despised by urbanites who ignore their particular taste and intense sweetness. Hence, any stock unconsumed by June risks receiving a lesser destiny than the expected human consumption. In the “potato livelihood,” rot is not viewed as a fertile process of regeneration (see Newell, introduction to this volume). The only accepted potato rotting

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I witnessed was the awila perishing in the fields, composting into the soil, as human bodies do when they die. Significantly, at this point, the old body is severed from the growers’ family to incorporate the non-domesticated realm of underground life flows. Convenient accumulation in the household thus requires mastering a delicate potato accountability unfolding over the agricultural calendar. This starts when separating seeds for the next campaign and mapping the plots to be sown with a specific extension in the multiple ecological niches of the community, according to household composition, kin necessities, and ceremonial duties. When the harvest is brought to the house, another estimation is pondered according to that year yield. Adjustments are made by reducing or increasing the amount of potato to be brought to the market if the variety allows, transformed into chuño, or exchanged for lowland produce with valley partners. Managing stocks in the potato room then fall under the scope of women’s administration as they master the tuberous supply in the kitchen. The balanced cycle of accumulation and purging ensures the most appropriate potato use; that is, for producing strong bodies of highland growers who will, in turn, maintain a flourishing potato population in the chacras. These abundant potato flows are now perceived as declining as a result of cultivators’ participation in the labour market and related changes in food consumption. Potatoes are increasingly substituted by rice and pasta, although these are known to be less nutritive than the native tubers. Another reason put forth to justify the decline of the potato reproduction in the highland ayllus concerns a failure to relate with them appropriately. When I enquired about the urgency of demonstrating daily and festive respect to their tubers, my interlocutors explained that an offended potato would disappear from their chacras and larder. A mature potato grower from the community of Amaru, warned me: “You must respect (respetar) potato really really well. If you give her bad treatment, she will necessarily disappear progressively. Year after year, smaller and smaller harvests, then it’s gone.” With this grower’s insight, we see a potato able to respond to ungrateful growers by inflicting starvation. And yet, cultivators agree that younger generations tend to omit their Papa Huatay, as well as other practices enacting potato response-ability. In the following section, I describe a conservation initiative intended to recover potato abundance.

Potato Conservation in the Seed Bank At the end of the twentieth century, a growing number of scientists began to criticize the state and non-governmental institutions’ distribution of improved varieties for provoking the erosion of local agrobiodiversity. This concern is now assumed to be overstated, in the sense that many growers continued to sow small plots of native varieties for domestic consumption

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(Zimmerer 1996; Brush 2004). Yet, even if genetic biodiversity has been conserved at the regional level, the number of varieties grown in every household has nonetheless decreased. At the end of the past century, the region has attracted multiple agricultural programs intended for the conservation of the potato diversity in its center of domestication. The world-famous Parque de la Papa, or Potato Park, stands out as a particularly successful initiative that curates an impressive amount of 1362 varieties of native potatoes. It was initiated on 30th May 2002 through an agreement between five hamlets (Amaru, Paru Paru, Sacaca, Pampallaqta, Chahuaytire) in the district of Pisac and the Cuzco-based NGO ANDES (Association for Nature and Sustainable Development). In 2004, the Park signed a launching agreement with the Lima-based CIP (International Potato Center) to repatriate some 400 virus-free seed tubers, which had been collected in the region by scientists in the 1970s. To achieve the agrobiodiversity conservation goals, an investigation center, a greenhouse, a museum, a potato-focused restaurant, and a local seed bank were built in the Park’s different communities. Communal land was allotted to the experimental culture of a range of varieties (mostly from the Andigenum species), which are planted at different altitudes with different kinds of organic fertilizers and insect repellents. The cultivation, experimentation, and conservation tasks are carried out by eight “local investigators”6 who receive monthly wages to curate the Park’s agrobiodiversity. Every year, they bring samples of the varieties grown in their community to be stored in the facilities constructed for seed conservation. While usually referred to as a banco de semillas (seed bank, in Spanish), an entrance sign identifies the building as Papa Mamaq Mujun Taqena Wasi, meaning the House of Mother Potato Seeds Storage in Quechua. This house is composed of two small offices occupied with a desk, a computer, and an array of agricultural tools, a toilet, and a main room filed with shelves labeled with the name of the communities composing the Park. This is where 1367 seed potatoes are deposited yearly after harvesting the experimental plots and greenhouses from across the conservation area. Potato storage in the Taqena Wasi requires careful treatments, albeit different from those applied in family houses. As in the domestic larder, visitors are, in principle, not allowed to enter the seed bank. I felt privilege to be invited to step in and receive extended explanations of the curating work by Mariano Sutta, a local investigator in charge of the bank’s maintenance. I noticed that, in the potato room, humans of both sexes are allowed to enter with their shoes on, provided they step on the disinfecting lime powder available at the door. Sanitary precautions are of the essence to maintain the quality of the seeds curated in the bank. When accounting for the subtle and steady precautions protecting seeds from external threats, Mariano asserted that “handling a potato is like taking care of a baby”.

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The facility itself is designed to ensure optimal storage conditions for the vitality of the little tubers. The adobe brick building helps to maintain a stable temperature between 12 and 13 degrees, even when the outside temperature falls below zero. This stability is also facilitated by the vapor produced through a system of water canalization traversing the ground along the shelves. The favorable grade of air humidity so achieved enhances seed tuber reproductive capacity as moisture prevents them from wrinkling and premature withering. In the propitious conservation condition of the bank, seeds could, in principle, maintain fertility until the two subsequent sowing campaigns; even though they are, in fact, sown yearly to enjoy their early fuerza. In addition to the building protection, seed tubers are wrapped in mesh or paper bags, handwritten with the code of the variety. Bags are folded to prevent entry by light and insects before being piled in the plastic baskets aligned on the shelves. By the end of July, the Taqena Wasi is indeed filled with hundreds of mother potato seed varieties growing on the array of soils composing the park’s territory.7 The curation of this huge potato collective requires a complex management of varietal diversity. Historian Helen Curry (2022) has highlighted the threat of overaccumulation perceived by gene banks in their operation of “safety duplication” strategies; that is, the copy of genetic material as a backup in case of ecological or political destruction. Under the pressure of the limited funding in the neoliberal age, Curry describes how the “rationalization of collection” by distinguishing wanted from unwanted duplication has become an urgent target. When expenditures must be limited, unintended and unnoticed repetitions hamper inventory management, as well as the cyclical sowing necessary to regenerate seed vitality. In this context, redundant seed samples instantiate another modality of clutter, where hoarders’ sovereignty over their stuff is jeopardized by being lost in the mass of accumulated matter. In the Papa Mamaq Munjun Wasi, cyclical purging also conditions the conservation of agrodiversity, albeit not to avoid over accumulation or unwanted duplication. In September, when the temperatures start to rise and the first rains approach, tuber seeds are distributed back to their original experimental plots and greenhouses where they are sown for continuing their varietal line. Even if the bank moisture extends seed tuber vitality, insects risk damaging their flesh during the warmer rainy season. Moths are particularly feared. Any remaining paper bag after the sowing campaign has ended is eaten by the bank caretakers, if still edible. Otherwise, they are burned in front of the bank, or handed out for pig fodder to ensure optimal sanitary conditions for the storage of the next generation of seeds on the shelves. Mother Potato seeds stored in the park storage house do not receive sahumeo and libation as those hosted in domestic houses usually do. Yet, like those stored in family houses, it is imbued with ánimu that tubers successfully inhabit the bank. This is made tangible during the park’s

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anniversary on May 30th, when inhabitants of the communities of the Park gather to play music and dance in their traditional costumes, carrying samples of their recently harvested potatoes. They transport them in handwoven fabrics and baskets displaying the most respectful ways of containing tubers, even those that are no longer in use, like the taqe, ceramic jars of former times. After their performance, the participants gather around piles of potatoes covered with straw. They call the spirit of the many different potato varieties to remain in the communities of the Park, attracting them with the pleasant aroma of incense. They also offer maize beer, coca leaves, flower petals, and other ingredients shared with Pachamama and local Apus. As attested by the public performance of the Papa Huatay ceremony, the Park is not chiefly concerned with the quantitative amount of varieties and genetic material curated in the bank, as usual conservation programs are (Angé et al. 2018). In addition to agro-biodiversity conservation, local investigators also work to increase human regard towards the potato. While not all visitors attending the Papa Huatay perceive potato ánimu, or relate to tubers as kin, those I asked agreed that the experience had led them to appreciate the tuber in new ways. As an expatriate from the United States acknowledged during an interview at the 2017 celebration of the Park’s anniversary: “I think we took (the potato) for granted, yes. But here (in Peru) it’s sort of, well, living with the queen potato.” Increasing awareness of the potato as an animated being deserving of respectful relations was the motivation of the Park’s investigators when they lobbied the national authorities to declare May 30th national day of the potato. As a result, the precious tuber is celebrated yearly throughout the country since then. This intention to foster new kinds of potato–human relatedness was also manifest when a Potato Park delegation deposited 750 native potato seeds in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in 2015. Brizaida Sicus, from the Sacaca community, wrote the following verses, which she recited in the vault to manifest her enduring relatedness to the seeds: Mother Earth, I offer you respect Sacred mountains, I ask for your blessing To walk this journey bringing you endangered children Far away where the ice reigns To stay in a safe place.

When chatting in her patio in 2022, Brizaida told me that the verses came to her on a long journey to Svalbard, during which she was concerned about depositing her seed kin in such a remote storage location in the dark and cold Arctic Circle. By comforting her endangered seeds with her verses, Brizaida enacted her entanglement with her response-able potato kin. In this historical moment captured by international media, her poetry triggered new tuberous engagements with the public at large, raising concerns for interspecies relations ignored by objectifying storage practices in gene

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banks.8 Like other cultivators in the Park, Brizaida is worried about the breeding practices operated in laboratories that involve potatoes originally extracted from Andean chacras. The traveling of potatoes around the globe traces a history of colonial plunder. Andean varieties are stored in the gene banks of leading potatoproducing countries, where they are used to engineering ever more resistant varieties for the agro-industry (Pollan 2002). China has now become the world’s major potato industry, where 25 percent of the potato varieties are acknowledged to be “improved” with Peruvian varieties.9 And yet, the model of agriculture promoted by the Chinese state as a sustainable alternative to rice does not entail the respect of potato kin advocated by its growers in the center of domestication. Be it as a staple for the poorest or as fast food for the well-off, the potato lauded by national and international industries, is severed from the relatedness that highland cultivators in Pisac care to knit in their houses and fields. Indeed, the hundreds millions of tons produced annually under capitalism give a sense of a world saturated with potato starch, where the intensive production of tubers calibrated for the agroindustry of chips and congealed fries accumulate chemicals in soils and fat in human bodies.

Conclusion Andean ethnographic accounts describe domestic spaces as inhabited by an array of differently animated dwellers: talented musical instruments (Allen 2002: 34), eventful archives (de la Cadena 2015), protecting saint effigies (Angé 2022: 41), living little stones and other reproductive miniatures (Allen 2016; Angé 2018), or indeed, fertile foodstuffs. Among the many different kinds of industrial and locally produced food stored in the larders of Pisac, the focus on tubers reveals the contribution of housekeeping practices to the processual weaving of heterogenous relatedness that composes Andean families. Indeed, the daily and festive storage of voluminous amounts of potato shows that Andean houses are not containers for human kin only. Respectful sorting and storage enact different kinds of potato bodies as offspring, mother, and grandmother. It is through their accommodation in houses by cultivators that potatoes unfold their own genealogies, continued in the fields underground. And yet, the lively potential of tubers accumulated in the houses of the Potato Park can only be realized in cyclical articulation with depletion. When the sowing season arrives, gestating seed tubers are transported from the house to the chacra; when harvest season starts, the storage room must be cleared out to host the new generation of food tubers. This involves steady consumption before the tuberous bodies decay. While food waste is avoided in a general sense, and every leftover is used to sustain the life of another being, the potato is a vital staple entailing a unique urgency in both accumulation and clear out. This sharply contrasts with

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the management of the harvest described in Melanesian ethnographies, where yam participation in the making of human families entails massive accumulation exceeding their growers’ capacity of ingestion. While yam excess creates prestige and political influence in their perishing as compost, in the households of Pisac, rot is not looked for as a creative process. In contrast to the flows of increase and rot out outlined by Newell (this volume), the renewal of the potato life force is conditioned by the work of sorting and storing that ensure appropriate nurturing before the tuberous body becomes inedible to other dwellers in the domus. While Melanesian yam houses are famous spaces of accumulatory glory, it is in the pondered alternation between pile-up and depletion that human–tuber relatedness is created in the Andean highlands. In this balanced cycle of stocking and purging, the potato emerges as an ethical subject whose life is entangled to its growers in the common destiny of flourishing, as a household. Being gently accommodated in the darkness of a closed container, slowing down sprouting and degradation is thus conditional to the potato’s extension of varietal lines through time. If not piled under a cover of straw, they are stocked in the most intimate space of the household closed off to visitors. In the light of David Graeber’s value theory (2001), these tuberous stocks appear as a kind of valuable discreetly hoarded by their grower as a token of capacities to act upon others in the future. Examining ethnographies from disparate historical and social contexts, Graeber indicates that hidden valuables endow their owner with an agentive power typically associated with money—a generic value that tends to be concealed and which potential is realized through future exchanges. In the case of highland potatoes, this capacity emerges by later practices of nurturing the family, and other ayllu members. The power to act directly on others conveyed by potato storage is illustrated by the necessity to increase one’s harvest for endorsing the highest functions of the political cargos. That the life force encapsulated in the fresh and mummified potato bodies of the larder potentially conveys political power is also historically demonstrated by the huge potato barns used by the Incas to support their imperial extension (Zimmerer 1996: 39). Graeber contrasts these hidden generic values enabling their owner to directly act upon others against valuables displayed for public appreciation. The latter, he explains, are past-oriented. They endow their bearer with a more diffuse form of “power to define oneself in such a way as to convince others how they should act toward you” (2001: 104), in virtue of the amount of work previously engaged for their production. Even if their preservation requires obscurity, potatoes are occasionally displayed in celebrating feasts and labors within the ayllu. They have recently even started to be displayed during public events, such as the celebration of the Park’s anniversary. Like the heirloom jewelry examined by Graeber, ostensible tuberous paraphernalia can be appreciated as “visible forms of display” (ibidem) expected to bring forth new power relations. The displacement

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of native potato kin under the spotlights of the international conservation and breeding assemblage appears as a claim by cultivators to see the potato not only as generic potential for future action, as Graeber describes hidden tokens, but to also regard them as valuables encapsulating past acts of production (Graeber 2001: 105). The life of a native potato is indeed the outcome of uninterrupted tending by generations of ayllu growers. They demand this historical relation to be acknowledged by today’s breeders and eaters around the world. Likewise, Brizaida’s verses chanted before her seeds were engulfed in the Arctic seed bank was a public claim to the past nurturing relations from whence she and her potato first came to existence in the ayllu. This is an act of resistance against the possibility of the transformation of seed potato kin into hidden generic valuables bolstering the power of global gene bank managers, after being hidden in their vault. While food storage is usually appreciated as an essentially private matter, in the houses of the Potato Park it constitutes a crucial locus to reconsider how to grant tubers a decent room on our shared planet.

Acknowledgements This chapter is the fruit of an ethnographic collaboration with potato growers in different communities of the Potato Park, with a focus on Pampallacta. I am thankful to my hosts who generously shared their expertise with me. I cannot name them all, but I particularly wish to thank Lino Mamani and the late Nazario Quispe for their enduring care and affection. I am also thankful to the ANDES staff, and particularly its director Alejandro Argumedo, for their admirable political engagement and for making my research possible in the first place. I am most grateful to Sasha Newell for inviting me to look at human–tuber relatedness in new ways and for the generative insights he offered on this paper. Of course, I claim responsibility for any remaining shortage in my appreciation of potato storage. This research is graciously funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant (950220), as well as a Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique research project (35282336). Olivia Angé is a professor of anthropology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. She specializes in the study of agriculture, value creation, and relatedness in the Andes. Since 2014, she has been doing research on potato cultivation in Peru. She has also performed extensive fieldwork on barter fairs in the Argentinean cordillera. She is the author of Barter and Social Regeneration in the Argentinean Andes (Berghahn 2022, 2nd edn.), and co-author of Ecological Nostalgias (Berghahn 2021, 1st edn.).

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Notes 1. The existence of the potato spirit is more complex than intimated by this straightforward translation but the examination of this question exceeds the purpose of this chapter. 2. This article draws on ethnographic data produced during fieldwork in the department of Pisac—Province of Calca, Cuzco, Peru—since 2015. Using classic ethnographic methodologies, I engaged in an array of potato practices such as cultivation, breeding, cooking, eating, selling, hoarding, and celebrations. Beside daily duties in the domestic economy, I participated in a number of activities engaged by the Park, such as investigations, ceremonies, institutional meetings in the country and at the NGO’s headquarters, visitor tours, or exhibitions at biodiversity fairs. I furthered these experiences with recorded open interviews, with people involved in the Park across different levels, as well as with people who were not officially employed by this institution. During my fieldwork, I spent time in the cities of Cuzco and Lima, enquiring about potato appreciation by Peruvians from different social backgrounds. Internet websites and YouTube spots related to the Potato Park, partner institutions, and potato activities in general, have also been useful to gather data on potato appraisal in diverse social fields. 3. Both kinds are frozen during the cold nights of the Andean dry season. Their water content is extracted by squeezing them under feet pressure at dawn, before being dried out under the burning sun during daytime. Morallas are soaked into a river bed for about two weeks before being freeze-dried. 4. This is an extract of an interview realized by Céline Morancay, who carried out a year of ethnographic fieldwork in an agricultural community of the Ollantaytambo District in Cuzco. Her research is part of the AgriValues project (FNRS 35282336) aimed at comparing agricultural relations within and outside of the conservation area of the Park. In Pisac, some cultivators leave tiny tubers in the fields as a gesture of sharing with birds, rodents, and other wild animals who nourish themselves with the leftovers of human harvest. 5. Some did also offer incense and beverage to welcome industrial ingredients like cooking oil, rice, or pasta bought in large quantities from the city market. 6. The team of local investigators, along with ANDES agronomists, have also nominated papa arariwas (potato guardians, in Quechua), distinguished for their existing expertise in conserving potato diversity and sharing their knowledge. 7. If potatoes in the seed bank are related through varietal genealogies, and their curator related to their seeds as vegetal kin, it is noteworthy that the relation seed tubers create between humans when hoarded in the bank is a relation of compañeros (colleagues in Spanish), not the kinship relation weaved by food tubers stocked in domestic larders, to be cooked in the family pot. 8. For further examination of Brizaida Sicus poetry, see Nazarea (2021); or the Tuberous Respect entry in the After Progess Virtual Exhibition (https://www.afterprogress.com​ /tuberous-respect-after-progress-praising-verses-and-potato-flourishing-in-the-andean​ -highlands). 9. https://www.potatopro.com/news/2019/25-chinese-potatoes-were-improved-varieties​ -peru; consulted on 19 January 2023.

References Angé, Olivia et al. 2018. “Interspecies Respect and Potato Conservation in the Peruvian Cradle of Domestication.” Conservation and Society 16(1): 30–40.

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Angé, Olivia. 2018. “Reproductive Commodities: Work, Joy, and Creativity in Argentinean Miniature Fairs.” Ethnos 84(2): 241–62. ———. 2022. Barter and Social Regeneration, 2nd edn. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books. Allen, Catherine. 1982. “Body and Soul in Quechua Thought.” Journal of Latin American Lore 8(2): 179–96. ———. 2002. The Hold Life Has: Coca and Cultural Identity in an Andean Community, 2nd edn. Washington: Smithsonian Books. First published in 1988. ———. 2016. “The Living Ones: Miniatures and Animation in the Andes.” Journal of Anthropological Research 72(4): 416–41. Arnold, Denise, and Juan de Dios Yapita, eds. 1996. Madre Melliza y Sus Crias Ispall Mama Wawampi. Antologia de la Papa. La Paz: Hisbol Ediciones. Brush, Stephen. 2004. Farmers’ Bounty. Locating Crop Diversity in the Contemporary World. Ann Arbor: Sheridan Books. Bugallo, Lucila, and Mario Vilca. 2011. “Cuidando el ánimu: salud y enfermedad en el mundo andino (puna y quebrada de Jujuy, Argentina).” Nuevos Mundos—Mundos Nuevos (online). https://doi.org/10.4000/nu​ evomundo.61781. Carsten, Janet. 1995. “The Substance of Kinship and the Heat of the Hearth: Feeding, Personhood, and Relatedness among Malays in Pulau Langkawi.” American Ethnologist 22(2): 223–41. Curry, Helen. 2022. “The History of Seed Banking and the Hazard of Backup.” Social Studies of Science 52(5): 664–88. Daly, Lewis. 2021. “Cassava Spirit and the Seed of History: On Garden Cos­ mology in Northern Amazonia.” Anthropological Forum 31(4): 377–95. De Haan, Stef. 2009. Potato Diversity at Height: Multiple Dimensions of Farmer-Driven In-Situ Conservation in the Andes. Wageningen: Wageningen University Press. De la Cadena, Marisol. 2015. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press. Descola, Philippe. 2005. Par-delà Nature et Culture. Paris: Gallimard. Gose, Peter. 1994. Deathly Waters and Hungry Mountains: Agrarian Ritual and Class Formation in an Andean Town. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an Anthropology of Value. The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hall, Ingrid. 2012. “Labourer la terre, tisser la vie. Éclat d’analogies dans les Andes sud-péruviennes.” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 98(1): 101–31. Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Miller, Theresa. 2019. Plant Kin: A Multispecies Ethnography in Indigenous Brazil. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Mosko, Mark S. 2009. “The Fractal Yam: Botanical Imagery and Human Agency in the Trobriands.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15(4): 679–700. Munn, Nancy. 1992 (1986). The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Nazarea, Virginia. 2021. “Ontologies of Return: Terms of Endearment and Entanglements.” In Moveable Gardens. Itineraries and Sanctuaries of Memory, eds. Terese Gagnon and Virginia Nazarea, 253–72. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Pazzarelli, Francisco, and Lerma Verónica. 2018. “A Pot Where Many Worlds Fit: Culinary Relations in the Andes of Northern Argentina.” Indiana 35(2): 271–96. Pérez Galàn, Beatriz. 2004 “Somos como Incas.” Autoridades Tradicionales en los Andes Peruanos, Cuzco. Madrid: Iberoamericana. Pollan, Michael. 2002. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World. New York: Random House Trade. Sahlins, Marshall. 2013. What Kinship Is-And Is Not. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Salaman, Redcliffe. 1985. The History and Social Influence of the Potato, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. First published 1997. Strathern, Marilyn. 2017. “Gathered Fields. A Tale about Rizhomes.” Anuac 2: 23–44. Valladolid, Rivera Julio. 1998. “Andean Peasant Agriculture: Nurturing a Diversity of Life in the Chacra.” In The Spirit of Regeneration. Andean Culture. Confronting Western Notions of Development, ed. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, 51–88. London: Zed Books. Van Vleet, Krista E. 2008. Performing Kinship: Narrative, Gender, and the Intimacies of Power in the Andes. Austin: University of Texas Press. Weiner, Annette. 1992. Women of Values, Men of Renown: New Perspectives in Trobriand Exchange. University of Texas Press. Weismantel, Mary. 1995. “Making Kin: Kinship Theory and Zumbagua Adoptions.” American Ethnologist 22(4): 685–704. Zimmerer, Karl. 1996. Changing Fortunes: Biodiversity and Peasant Livelihood in the Peruvian Andes. Berkeley: University of California Press.

2 Making Space for Onions

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Material Production and Social Reproduction in Rural India

Tanya Matthan

Kantilal’s house abuts the paved road running through the village of Pipliya. Facing a dilapidated primary health center, the panchayat (village council) office, and the government middle school, the house is a relatively new construction—an accomplishment of the last few years. But it is resolutely incomplete, as evidenced by the exposed red brick and gray cement walls. It is nonetheless a significant achievement for Kantilal, a slim, tall, and quiet man in his early forties from a dominant peasant caste (Khati) in the Malwa region of central India. His extended family—his uncles and cousins—collectively purchased this plot of land, building their homes separately but adjacent to each other. The six houses are connected by shared walls and the kinship ties of their respective residents but have little else in common. With its two floors and grand metal gate, Kantilal’s home stands tall above the others. Onions, as the residents of the village agreed, played no small part in raising this structure. This chapter investigates the relationship between houses, kinship, labor, and value through the lens of a single commodity crop, the onion. During fieldwork on agrarian life in central India, I heard a common refrain that made direct connections between onions and houses: “onions have turned houses from kaccha to pucca,” from mud to concrete. Others remarked that it is through onions that some people had managed to construct mansions: “bade bade bangle khade kar diye” (it has propped up large bungalows). This is not entirely novel nor unique to onions. Elsewhere in rural India, scholars have documented local discourse tying specific

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crops to newly accumulated wealth and their material instantiations in double storey, painted, and cement homes (see Sinha 2020). Yet, the onion is somewhat different: houses are not only built from onions but for them. That is, while houses are built from the wealth of high-value onions, they are also constructed for their proper storage. The latter is, in turn, pivotal to profiting off sales. In this chapter, I examine the dynamics and tensions of storage and accumulation, as well as its implications for intimate ties and market relations in agrarian India. Onions offer an interesting lens into the intersecting themes of this volume: materiality, kinship, houses, and storage. My own introduction to village houses occurred when I was myself looking for a home to live in for the duration of my fieldwork. When I first arrived in the state of Madhya Pradesh in which Malwa is located, I traveled through cities and towns, staying at hotels, NGO guest houses, and the homes of activists working in the region. Through these contacts, I hoped to locate a village in which I could base myself and begin research. This proved more difficult than I had imagined. I was a complete outsider with no kinship ties in the area, and my caste, regional, and familial provenance were unknown and difficult to place. Even if families were willing to have me as their long-term guest, where was the space for me? In smaller homes, I would have to share a room with the women of the household, which would leave me with little privacy. Some wealthier households, who had moved to nearby cities for work but retained their village homes, suggested that I live in one of those empty houses—but this raised the question of my safety as a young woman. For most rural families, space can be a huge constraint. Between multiple generations of a family, livestock such as cows, buffaloes, and goats, and harvests of soybean, wheat, onion, and garlic, there is little space for an uninvited anthropologist. Ultimately, I lived in a mud hut nestled between three other houses belonging to one family—the hut was earlier occupied by one son and his wife, but they had recently moved to a two-room concrete house built with subsidies from a government housing scheme. This arrangement allowed me some privacy while also remaining connected to a local family and sharing in their everyday activities. What emerged from this search for housing, as well as the following months of fieldwork with farmers in homes and fields, was a keen interest in how the space of the house is both a site of capital accumulation and social reproduction. Following Janet Carsten, my focus here is not on the house itself as much as “the multiple entanglements that houses illuminate between the lives and relations that are enacted within them and the historically inflected social and political contexts in which they are situated” (2018: 103). In particular, I found that storage is both the source, means, and product of material wealth, the activity and space through which economic value and moral values are generated and constructed. As I show, the specific physical and biological qualities of onions make it especially cumbersome to grow and store—but storage is key to the accumulation

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of wealth. This is because prices are quite low during the harvest period of April and May. Thus, wealthier farmers prefer to store their onions for several months (usually until August–September), when prices often rise as supplies dwindle. However, as I will describe, storing onions through the summer and monsoon seasons is a precarious and cumbersome endeavor, necessitating not just ample and appropriate space but also significant labor. Unlike many other chapters in this volume, this piece takes up questions of storage and housekeeping in relation to production rather than consumption. As Sasha Newell’s introductory essay highlights, the household in Global North contexts is generally considered a space of leisure, intimacy, and consumption, far removed from the production of commodities. While this appears to stand in stark contrast with the agrarian households of the Global South discussed here, I show that these divisions do not quite hold up to the complex realities of householding. This chapter highlights houses as productive arenas, but this does not negate their importance as sites of aspirational consumption and status-building. This is true of the structure of the house itself, as well as the objects with which it is filled—not only commodity crops but also sought-after consumer goods such as smartphones, flat-screen televisions, refrigerators, motorcycles, and plush sofa sets that are crucial symbols of class status in rural India. These consumer goods might compete with agri-commodities for space within the house, although eventually the former achieves victory. As families achieve upward class mobility, there is certainly a tendency to insulate domestic spaces—building separate sheds for cattle and warehouses for the storage of crops, thus distancing the spheres of consumption and production. This physical separation is also a social one. For instance, higher class and caste status often pushes women away from the field and into the home, which is now deemed the site of household chores (cooking, cleaning, raising children) rather than agricultural work. Although these are important (dis) connections, the focus of this chapter remains on storage as a productionoriented endeavor that shapes and is shaped by familial relations, intimate spaces, and more-than-human processes. I explore these themes by drawing on research conducted in the region of Malwa in West-Central India, a fertile area known for its moistureretentive, deep black cotton soil. As a predominantly agricultural region, Malwa has long been entwined in regional and global markets through the cultivation of crops such as opium, cotton, and sugarcane. Since the 1970s, cropping patterns have changed dramatically—soybean now dominates in the kharif (monsoon) season, followed by a second crop of irrigated wheat and gram in the rabi (winter) season, made possible by the spread of irrigation through private tube wells. In the past decade in particular, wealthy farmers have taken to the large-scale cultivation of high-value, high-risk horticultural crops such as onions, potatoes, and garlic. This has been fueled in part through the National Horticulture Mission, which promoted

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the cultivation of vegetables as a way to boost farmer incomes. As a result, the state of Madhya Pradesh has become an important horticultural production hub and the second largest producer of onions in the country. I draw on fourteen months of ethnographic research conducted between 2018 and 2019. During this time, I was primarily based in a single village that I call Pipliya, but my research involved interviews with a range of people in neighboring villages, market towns and government offices across three districts of Ujjain, Dewas and Shajapur. My research methods included a household socio-economic survey in Pipliya; close observation of the agricultural decisions and practices of rural households (stratified by class, caste, and gender) across three agricultural seasons; interviews with a range of key actors in the rural economy (farmers, traders, agricultural extension agents, policy-makers) in Malwa, as well as the cities of Indore, Bhopal, Mumbai, and New Delhi; and an analysis of national and statelevel policy documents on agriculture. Drawing on data gathered through fieldwork, this chapter is structured as follows. The first section delves into the specific bio-physical qualities of the onion to explain why storage is both key to profiteering and a risk-laden enterprise. The following section offers a detailed description of the peasant house in Malwa, showing how these multi-species homes are spaces of labor and production, serving as extensions of the agricultural field and critical infrastructures of capital accumulation in the countryside. Then, I explore the relationship between the work of storage and kinship ties, showing how houses and housekeeping are important sites through which kin relations are negotiated and marital alliances are secured. Finally, I outline how storage practices are tied to ethical and moral evaluations of persons, households, and the state through notions of greed, courage, and hard work. The conclusion outlines the social and political-economic stakes of commodity storage and the broader significance of this case study for the anthropology of houses, materiality, kinship, and accumulation.

The Pink Bulb Soon after I had settled into conducting fieldwork, I encountered what some referred to as an “onion craze” among farmers. While many cultivators had been growing onions for household consumption and for global markets for several decades, nearly everyone I spoke with noted that the area under cultivation had risen considerably in the past few years, launching Madhya Pradesh as a key producer state in the country. Now, even small and marginal farmers with tiny plots of land were trying their hand at onion cultivation. Much of this was driven by the observation of price escalations in recent years that had brought windfall profits to some farmers. Nearly everyone I spoke with claimed to know somebody who had made a large profit from onion sales in previous seasons. Unsurprisingly, in light of depressed commodity prices and rising costs of living, a large

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number of farmers hoped that the pink bulb could open up a path toward petty accumulation. However, these aspirational impulses often elided the significant capital and labor investments required to produce a good harvest, as well as the significant role of storage in transforming a good harvest into substantial wealth. In this section, I elaborate on the specific ecological qualities of the onion that shape both its profit potential and the high risks involved. First, it is crucial to emphasize that onion cultivation requires considerable monetary investment in seeds, fertilizer, pesticide, labor and water—far more than most other staple crops, including wheat, which is also planted in the early winter. Since the average expenditure on a single hectare of onion cultivation is nearly one lakh rupees (roughly $1220), it is generally only wealthy landowners who can make these big investments while poorer farmers plant on smaller portions of land (often less than half a hectare). Moreover, cultivation and storage are highly labor intensive. This painstaking work of transplanting seedlings, weeding, harvesting, sorting and grading the bulb is done primarily by women (both household and hired labor). Yet, the onion is a bountiful crop in that yields can be very high depending on soil type, irrigation, and fertilizer use. Thus, even for small farmers, high yields mean (potentially) high returns even from small and fragmented landholdings. Yet, the accumulation of wealth from onions is highly dependent on the ability to store for anywhere between two to six months following harvest. This is due to the seasonality of onion cultivation in India. While onions are grown throughout the year, the rabi (winter) crop accounts for about 70 percent of production. Harvested in April-May, this seasonal variety is the most profitable since it can be stored for several months, even until November. Stocks tend to dwindle by August (since most farmers have sold by this time) while the new monsoon crop is yet to be harvested. During this time, prices can (but do not always) skyrocket, especially if the new crop is damaged or delayed. Farmers and traders who possess onions in storage can earn a fortune if this occurs. Moreover, they push prices further upward by hoarding produce in homes and warehouses, only releasing them into the market when rates peak. Here, too, in the absence of public storage infrastructures, it is primarily wealthy farmers who have access to storage facilities for two reasons. First, most farmers require quick cash to pay off debts and meet daily expenses. They cannot always afford to hold off sales for long periods of time. Second, onions require storage space with proper air circulation and ventilation to prevent rotting. Small farmers do not have access to the required space either in their homes or in private warehouses. At the same time, onions are a kacchi fasal (raw crop), requiring constant attention and care to prevent spoilage. Even with constant sorting, onions tend to rot and sprout over time, especially during the hot summer and humid monsoon months. This means that storage is itself risky since the

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quality of the bulbs deteriorates over time, shrinking and spoiling, potentially declining in economic value, especially when stored in less-than-ideal conditions. Perishability comes from two of the crop’s defining features. First, the onion comprises almost ninety percent water, which means that it gets dehydrated and shrinks in storage. This reduces the weight of the bulb and its value in the market. Second, this high water composition means that excess moisture and light can cause onions to sprout and rot. Storage is crucial to the production of surplus value but it has important material and ecological limits. To farmers in Malwa, the onion is not quite an alienated commodity, and nor is it kin; rather, it moves between these poles at various junctures in its plant life. That is, farmers exhibit tremendous care and concern for their crops both in the field and in storage, developing interspecies affective relations. However, this does not materialize in perceptions of onions as individual subjects imbued with intentionality and emotion (Angé 2018). Yet, in the rural economy, the onion also exhibits a certain “nonhuman charisma” (Lorimer 2007) in that people marvel at its bright pink color and voluminous bulb, which are, in turn, associated with the hard work, expertise, and diligence of the grower. In the words of Sophie Chao, writing about oil palm seeds in Sumatra, “affect and care sit awkwardly alongside value and profit” in the practices of onion farmers and traders in rural India (2018: 423). It is common, for example, to hear farmers describe the intricacies of caring for their onion crop in terms similar to caring for a child: bacchon ki tarah paalna hai (you have to raise them like a child). Constant vigilance is necessary; otherwise, just like a child, if you look away, they too might get spoiled. Storing onions is both a temporal and a spatial project. It is future-oriented in that it entails holding off on sales until the price is right. Here, the temporality of the crop itself (its gradual shrinkage, rotting, and sprouting over time) stands in tension with the temporal logics of capitalist markets in which prices are (in part) tied to the logistics of supply. Waiting several months to sell one’s produce can lead to both spectacular profits and crushing losses. Over the course of one calendar year (January–December 2019), I witnessed wholesale prices ranging from Rs. 1 to Rs. 50 per kilogram. The value of onions fluctuates so dramatically that the same bulb can transform from garbage into gold (and vice versa) within the span of a few months. It is storage, and often storage within the space of the home, that lies at the heart of these value transformations. It is to the peasant house that I now turn.

The Farm/House For most farmers, it is often the home that is transformed into a storehouse, for both subsistence grain and cash crops for sale. While rich farmers might build warehouses specifically for the purpose of storage, the majority store

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produce within the house. Each time I entered a new home, I could not help but notice the ubiquitous presence of crops—sacks of garlic tucked underneath jute cots, steel drums holding the year’s wheat to protect against rats, heaps of soybean drying on tarpaulin sheets in the center of the living room. Drawing from these observations, in this section, I describe the spatial organization of peasant homes, showing how the house is intimately connected to and an extension of the field. In rural India, it is a key infrastructure of agricultural production and consumption, an index of rural aspirations, and a symbol of the privatization of agrarian infrastructures. Kantilal’s home—briefly described in the introductory section—­ materializes these processes. While it is not a large or grand house, it is sizable, especially in a village as poor as Pipliya. As noted earlier, it was through the successful cultivation of onions that this two-floor dwelling was built—and, it is hoped, that future sales will contribute to its expansion and improvement. The two floors of the house are quite starkly divided—the ground floor houses the tractor in the front room, a small bathroom for bathing and washing clothes, and a back room in which the buffaloes are housed at night. The middle room has multiple purposes—in the monsoon season, there are two cots on which the women as well as guests sleep, gather, and gossip, but by April, all the furniture is cleared in order to store the onion harvest. The upstairs houses a kitchen, a spacious room with two beds and a television, and a large balcony. At present, there is much less open space around the home. While houses have become larger and taller in part with the proliferation of cheap construction and the expansion of economic prosperity, the space for courtyards and kitchen gardens has dramatically shrunk. Houses such as this are not merely sites of consumption. Rather, they are crucial spaces of production, and in many ways serve as extensions of the farm and the field. This is not exclusive to peasant households—as feminist scholars have long noted, the home is the site of multiple forms of labor. For the majority of cultivators, the home is an agrarian space that encompasses a multitude of productive activities, tools, and products. When visiting Kantilal’s house, I would often find his wife busy stitching blouses at her sewing machine near the entryway, his aunt seated on the floor cleaning sticks and stones from the soybean crop, and his mother milking the buffaloes in the back room. The peasant house is equally a space in which produce is stored, grain is threshed, seeds are cleaned, harvests are dried, buffaloes are milked. Only the wealthy households had refrigerators, flat-screen televisions, and sofa sets. For most, the house was not exactly a site of mass consumption—clothes stored in a single cupboard or trunk, a small television, cosmetics lined up around a square mirror only barely large enough to reflect one’s face. The walls are bare, apart from brightly colored macrame ornaments, small mirrors and pouches to hold combs and mobile phone chargers, and posters of Hindu gods and goddesses. In many ways, these

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homes oddly manifest the minimalist aesthetics now promoted in the North Atlantic world—bare walls, uncluttered rooms, empty surfaces. Like other peasant homes, this is a multispecies dwelling, one in which humans share space with other species, both plant and animal. In this house, one room is occupied by the family’s cattle—two buffaloes and their calves. However, there are hierarchies of value evident in the space allocated to different farm animals—goats (considered less valuable) may be tied outside the house, while buffaloes, with their enormous milkproducing potential and high price, are generally kept inside, often in a separate room. Livestock are important productive members of the household—their milk is consumed and sold every day, and they serve as a form of insurance in that they can be sold in the event of crop failure, or even when additional capital is required for the farm, a debt must be repaid, or a daughter married off. While not necessarily considered kin, their lives and deaths are intimately intertwined with the biographies of the families of which they are part. This multispecies and multipurpose nature of dwelling spaces is experienced sensorially (to this urban outsider)—the whir and clank of the sewing machine, the strong stench of urine and dung hanging in the air, and the pungent odor of onions and garlic emanating from sacks and heaps in the storeroom. Housekeeping, in this context, not only entails the standard domestic chores of cooking, cleaning, and washing, but also the care of livestock, grain, and other produce. These activities are vital to both household subsistence and capital accumulation. However, not all households have access to ample space. A large number of poor and low-caste families live in one-room mud tenements and are unable to create the desired space for storing produce such as onions, which must be kept under very specific conditions. For instance, a young Dalit (low-caste, formerly ‘untouchable’) man named Lalit, maintained that he could not make adequate profits from his onions because “bandaran nahi hai” (there is no storage). He too lived in a mud house with his paternal grandparents, parents, wife, and two children. Being a poor village, Pipliya has a number of houses built with a combination of mud, grass and dung covered with tiled roofs. These are more malleable, permeable and fallible structures—mud walls collapse with heavy rain, tiles are broken by mischievous monkeys, and mold builds up on the damp floor. These types of houses are especially unsuited to storing onions since they get extremely damp during the rainy season and such excess humidity causes bulbs to quickly rot. As a result, Lalit has to sell his onions far sooner and at a much lower price than he could have if he had the ability to store them. He is now hoping to build a larger concrete dwelling space on another plot of land owned by his family. But this remains a difficult task—he first needs to pay off loans and generate enough surplus from his fields to invest in its construction. This investment will, he hopes, not only provide ample living space for the three generations of his household but also sufficient space for their crops. These dreams

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and plans for construction are central to his aspirations for a livable future within farming. Lalit recognizes that the private home and warehouse are now at the heart of the agrarian infrastructure of accumulation. This reality is in stark contrast to the immediate postcolonial period when the construction of storage infrastructure was pivotal to nation-building projects. Historian of  architecture Ateya Khorakiwala (2016) argues that grain silos, first gifted by the United States to India, were crucial to the storage of buffer stocks of wheat, thus serving as a corrective to potential market price instabilities. Khorakiwala writes that the silo formed a “quantitative architecture” defined as a “a calculable infrastructure deployed against the incalculability of weather and hoarding, absorbing surpluses and augmenting shortages to manipulate the market in wheat.” This was a crucial imperative of the newly created postcolonial state, particularly in the wake of devastating famines that ravaged the region during the British colonial period. Storage facilities expanded further as Green Revolution technologies dramatically increased productivity, creating a surplus stock of grain. This formed what Khorakiwala calls a “biopolitical apparatus” that mediated exchanges and flows of grain across both space and time. Unlike public storage facilities and procurement systems for grain such as wheat and rice, horticultural crops such as onions are largely stored in private warehouses and individual homes. Indeed, one of the biggest reasons for the supply crunch that occurs every few years is precisely this absence of public storage infrastructure. While farmers can apply to receive state subsidies to build their own storage units, storage is largely individualized and privatized. As a result, it is primarily wealthy and upper caste farmers who have the capacity to store. In this sense, space begets space—wealth g­ enerated from the sales of stored harvests are often reinvested into agriculture including tractors and trolleys, land purchases, the drilling of new wells, and certainly, the building or purchase of new storehouses. Therefore, in a circular fashion, a house (or a space to store) is essential to speculative accumulation, even though building a large house (with additional rooms) requires capital investment in the first place. Houses are clearly immensely valuable investments and assets (cf. Guyer 2015). Attention to houses, and in this case, farm houses, demonstrates the “centrality of domestic maintenance to the accumulation of capital” (Besky 2017: 619). This is also true for Kantilal’s house; that is, it is through the profits of onion sales that the house was built, and it is also through the house that onions can be stored and further profits generated. In Sarah Besky’s evocative words, “In the layers of paint and wood, one could detect a sedimentation of kin and labor relations over time” (2017: 617). Yet, this is still a house in the making. The unpainted walls of red brick and gray cement add to the dreariness of the interior, giving it an unfinished appearance, a material manifestation of a project that remains partial and incomplete. Indeed, as “material and symbolic structures” that reflect

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and shape “quotidian affective realities,” these houses “not only materialize past efforts of specific families but also create the possibility of multiple futures in uncertain times” (Sandoval-Cervantes 2017: 210). Perhaps the next season would bring a good harvest, a better price and even a fresh coat of paint.

Kinship, Accumulation, and Social Reproduction In this section, I examine how intimate social relations—between mothersand daughters-in-law, brides and grooms, as well as caste fellows—shape and are shaped by material formations and practices. Specifically, I show that the physical spaces and forms of labor associated with storage become sites through which kinship ties are constructed, constrained, and negotiated. It is not just the physical dwelling of the house, nor simply the material production of onions, but also the cultural meanings attached to these places and practices that (re)make existing and emergent relations of kinship. Onions provide a path toward expanding both the house and the household. By this, I mean that onions are considered an important cash crop through which it is possible to accumulate wealth, and thereby materially enlarge and beautify one’s home. But it is also a means through which the family is itself physically expanded and socially reproduced through marital alliances. In this way, onions—and the prospective wealth they represent—are central to the social expansion of the home. If indeed, the house is the “ground on which social relations are enacted and sustained” (Leinaweaver 2009: 778), then these socio-material relations are heavily mediated by the work of storage and the possibilities of accumulation. This section examines how the production of onions is tied to the re/production of the house and the household. For instance, key life cycle events that expand the home and reproduce the household are often measured in what can be stored and valued—both wheat to feed guests at engagements and weddings, and onions to provide the cash for other key expenses. Crops are the measure through which families calculate their daughter’s dowry or their children’s education. As Gustav Peebles (2014) argues, saving money in a bank is not the only way to plan for the future. Deciding when to sell, or remove from storage, is also predictably tied to household needs. Kantilal, whose home we entered earlier, sold all his family’s onions in a single trade only a few months following harvest. Like many others, he too wanted to sell before the rains arrived and the chances of rotting increased. But there was another pressing concern too, one that connected the seasonal cycles of onion production, storage and sale directly to life cycles more broadly. As his wife, Babita, explained, “We have to sell now because we need the money for our son’s engagement. It will cost us at least 20,000 rupees.” The boy was still in his mid-teens, and the actual wedding would only take place some years

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hence. But Babita was already planning ahead: “The wedding will cost us two to three years’ worth of onion harvests.” As anthropologists have long shown, houses are never simply shelter, but always tied to the building and maintenance of conjugal and kin relations (Cattelino 2006). The material structure also shapes the quality—and even possibility—of social ties. A brick and mortar house offers multiple possibilities to its inhabitants. A house (by this, I mean a cemented structure) is now vital to finding a bride. As many elders—and young men—­complained, “girls these days” have high expectations from potential suitors: a cement house, a latrine and bathroom, a motorbike, gas stoves, and more. Never mind that they looked for these very amenities for their own daughters. It is now difficult to find a bride without these possessions, but especially a house. For young men whose families are yet to build such a structure, the prospects are often grim, leading many parents to take on debt to build a house and secure spouses for their children. For particular caste groups, cultivating and storing onions is a critical imperative, central to caste identity and community pride. This is especially true of the Patidar community, another dominant peasant caste, wellknown in Western and Central India as leading agrarian capitalists and entrepreneurs. Members of the community pride themselves on introducing key cash crops to the region, including onions and potatoes. Historical and sociological studies of Patidars as a caste formation have demonstrated the centrality of capital accumulation, social mobility, and a competitive ethic among members of this community (Pocock 1972). They are among the most prosperous farmers in the region and have diversified into allied businesses including agri-commodity trade and agri-input retailing. Significantly, Patidar farmers were renowned for regularly growing and storing crops such as onions, despite the risks involved. Doing so was regarded as a (unwritten) social rule. As Karan, a young Patidar man joked, “Patidaro me aisa hai ki agar jo gehu channa lagathe hai, to ghar ke baccho ki sagai nahi hoti!” (Among Patidars, it is like this: if you plant wheat and gram, then your children do not find spouses!). In other words, no Patidar would marry their daughters into households that only grow wheat and gram as opposed to high-value crops such as soybean, onions, potatoes, and so on. While the former suggested stasis and immobility, the latter is perceived as an index of aspiration, the desire to accumulate wealth. When I asked him to explain why this was so, he went on: “Gehu me ghar chala sakte ho, ghar ko bada nahi sakte ho” (With wheat, you can run a household but you can’t grow your household). In this framing, it is only through the cultivation of cash-crops that one can expand one’s house, both materially and socially. In other words, only by growing and storing crops such as onions (the risky and high-value crop often juxtaposed with the more secure but low-priced wheat) is it possible to expand and enhance a household’s material possessions, as well as its marital alliances. After all, he argued, if you did not cultivate cash crops or had not built a cement

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house, the continued existence and perpetuation of the family lineage was under threat. It was not just cultivating these crops that indexed one’s status and economic aspirations; storing it to get the best possible price was an additional measure. Karan outlined his family’s own trajectory of upward mobility in terms of the material ability to hoard. Recounting his humbler origins, Karan explained that his family once resided in a rented room in the village—such was their economic situation. Now, he boasted, they had a large house in which the family lived, as well as two other houses (one owned and another rented), which were exclusively used to store their harvests and agricultural equipment. The family’s rising fortune was evidenced in and made possible by this spatial and material expansion. At the same time, production and storage is not solely a binding force to cement ties and bridge alliances between families. In some cases, it can be a strain on these very ties, especially since it is undergirded by intense labor usually performed by women. It is women who do a large part of the work—from transplanting seedlings to harvesting fully grown bulbs and then performing the work of sorting and grading. This tedious and time-consuming labor involves gently placing stalks in neat rows, carefully uprooting them while avoiding damage, and closely inspecting the bulbs while sorting and stacking. It is also women who carry out the majority of agricultural work that occurs within the home, such as threshing and cleaning grain, and grading, sorting, and maintaining stored produce. Just as the women of the home are judged on its general cleanliness and upkeep, they are also—albeit somewhat differently—expected to efficiently and diligently conduct the work of properly storing and sorting crops. In one extended family, this proved a problem. This was the household of Kantilal’s first cousin and neighbor, Suman. Their fathers are brothers, and although their land had been evenly divided between the heirs, the two households make agricultural decisions collectively: what to sow, when, and in which field, and when and where to sell. However, when it comes to the question of the labor involved in each of these tasks, there are clear differences. Kantilal and his wife are older, their children are in their late teens and could contribute their labor to the family farm. Suman is younger. He and his wife have two young children, one of whom was still breastfeeding at the time of my research. In the onion season, the tensions between Suman’s mother and his wife, Sunita, often reach a head. While Suman’s mother complained about her “uncaring” daughter-inlaw, who only rarely and reluctantly labored with her in the field, Sunita derided her marital home, contrasting it with her natal village. She told me, “There [in her natal home], they only grow oranges. Huge orchards filled with orange trees. And they make lakhs [of rupees] every year. They do not waste their time with onions like here. They do not have to spend days in the field like us.”1 However, this labor is not limited to the field. When the final sales of onions were made in June that year, the two families (Kantilal

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and Suman) had to quickly sort and pack their produce to be loaded onto a truck. Since the schools were still closed for the summer holidays, Sunita had left for her parents’ home, as is often the case for wives with very young children. Her mother-in-law had to perform this labor alone. But when this proceeded far too slowly, a laborer was hired to assist her, which caused considerable delays in loading the truck stationed right outside their house. Of all these tasks, Sunita was most displeased with having to spend days under the hot sun or in a stuffy room, weeding, transplanting, and sorting. Her mother-in-law was also unhappy, listing her many physical ailments to me as if to further incriminate Sunita for her lack of empathy and callousness toward her marital kin. After all, just in the neighboring field and home, Kantilal’s wife and mother worked together. Maintaining good kinship relations entails care for kin and care for crops—and care for kin through care for crops. It is through shared labor that mothers- and daughters-in-law are expected to bond—performing this labor together and dividing up tasks (to the extent possible) is a sign of good relations. When these relations fray, a mother-in-law might be viewed as being too ‘demanding’ or the daughter-in-law ‘lazy’ and ‘disrespectful’. Most often, the respective husbands—including Suman—did not publicly voice any objections or intervene in these squabbles, which were often taken to be “women’s issues.” While these tensions have multiple roots and manifestations, it was quite clearly visible in everyday contestations around the division of household labor. The painstaking work associated with the onion crop—from field to home—exemplifies and heightens these familial tensions, even though it also serves as the means through which capital accumulation and social reproduction of the household occurs.

The Ethics of Storage Storage is not simply an economic practice geared toward garnering the highest price and accumulating wealth. It is equally associated with social status and moral standing in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. Produce stored within the house may not always be clearly visible to outsiders, but it is not entirely invisible either, becoming the subject of conversation with house guests and the stuff of rumor and gossip among village residents. Even when hidden from view, most villagers are keenly aware of who has what stored away and where. This generates and reflects an “ethic of storage that varies in conjunction with the need to define and validate social status, reflecting how people in different kinds of society interpret social relations and enact social values” (Hendon 2000: 45). While farmers may store a number of crops in their homes, onions take on particular significance both due to the care and attention entailed and the enormous profits portended. In response, those who successfully store and sell when prices skyrocket are evaluated either as exceptionally hard-working or as excessively greedy, depending on the context.

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Anthropologists have astutely pointed out that “acts of acquiring, accumulating, consuming, storing, and discarding not only make up so much of what we do each day but are fundamentally constitutive of self and personhood” (Kilroy-Marac 2018: 22), with social judgments and valuations also hinging on these practices. In this section, I examine how storage practices are tied to the ethical and moral valuations of individuals, communities, and the state. Katie Kilroy-Marac (2018) notes, following Bourdieu, that it is not simply the possession of things but also the ordering and management of things that becomes a matter of distinction. The quality of a farmer’s onions is both a source of pride and shame. Being able to cultivate quality onions—large, perfectly round, bright pink—is one matter but keeping one’s onions in good condition over months is an uphill task and a battle against a range of ecological threats—heat, humidity, pests, fungi, bacteria. Those who are able to so for months are commended for their skill and diligence, while those who cannot are chastised and ridiculed. This can occur even with occasional guests, since onions, I noticed, were almost always stored in the front rooms of the house. Even the work of sorting can be conducted in these common spaces, opening up one’s skills and expertise as a farmer to assessment and critique. One June afternoon, I visited the home of a farming family with a friend who knew the family well. At the time, a group of women were seated in one corner of the main hall to sort and pack the onion harvest. Inspecting the onions closely, the friend—a farmer himself—examined the onions and commented: “isme chamak nahi hai” (there is no spark in this). In his view, the harvest lacked a certain shine—the bulbs had shriveled into a dull pink. The other farmer nodded ruefully, explaining that was why he did not want to store it any longer and had decided to sell, regardless of the price he would receive at the market. Such appraisals were common as were comparisons to the similarly stored produce of neighbors. On a hot June afternoon, I was observing the sale of onions at Kantilal’s home. Kantilal had settled on a good price and the trader had agreed to send his truck and laborers to collect the onions directly from his front door. His neighbor and second cousin, Ramesh, was also selling his onions to the same trader, but at a lower price. Ramesh’s harvest was older and therefore, not as fresh. When I asked him about what price he was selling at, Ramesh immediately began to lament about his lack of storage space. His home comprised two small rooms. Bags of onions were shoved under beds and tables, bulbs spilling out onto the floor. These were less than ideal conditions for storage, and Ramesh was aware that this meant his onions were likely to rot quickly. When the laborers arrived to load the sacks onto the truck, one of them drew attention to the differences between the two men and between their onions. Kantilal was tall and wiry, Ramesh short and stocky. The worker laughed. “This man [Kantilal] is halka (light) but his onion is bhaari (strong). The opposite is true of you [Ramesh].”

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Here, the farmers’ onions were compared to their physical build with an emphasis on the contrasts. Kantilal’s onions were high-quality—round and bulbous, an even shade of light pink, thick-skinned and hardy. Ramesh’s onions, on the other hand, were small and dull, shrinking in the summer heat and blackening with rot. In part, this reflected a problem with cultivation—the crop did not receive the correct inputs at the proper time. But it was equally a problem of storage—unlike Kantilal’s dedicated room for his heaps of onions equipped with lighting and fans, Ramesh’s onions were spilling out of sacks placed underneath cots and tables. The joke interprets Kantilal’s thin and lean figure as indicative of an agrarian ethic of hard work and toil, while suggesting that Ramesh’s heavy frame was a sign of his idleness—reflected in the differences between their harvested produce. Moreover, the ability to store is equally tied to ideals of masculine prowess. Not only are onions difficult to store for long periods of time, but doing so is incredibly risky. As I discussed earlier, prices tend to rise during the mid-monsoon months (between August and October), during which secure storage is especially difficult due to the heavy rain. But prices may not rise at all—sometimes they crash. Or the stored produce might be ruined with the inclement weather. These are enormous risks, and farmers must be prepared to lose everything. That is, if prices crash or if the crop rots, a farmer could face huge economic losses. The longer the wait to sell— even as produce shrinks and spoils and prices fluctuate—the higher the chances of suffering an ever-greater material loss. Storing in anticipation of potential profit is therefore regarded as indicative of both courage and foolhardiness. It is largely wealthy, dominant-caste farmers who can afford to do so, flaunting their daring and tenacity as ‘big men’ who are prepared to lose everything in their quest for ever greater wealth and higher status— not unlike traders and stock brokers in financial markets (Zaloom 2006). This stance is performed publicly with kin, neighbors, and caste fellows appraised of their audacious acts of storage and accumulation. Everyone in the village knew who still had onions and who had foolishly sold them too early. Indeed, it was meant to be known—the hoard is an index of risktaking capacity, wealth-in-potential, and masculine prowess. This social evaluation of people in relation to the practice of storage is well-known and ubiquitous. Annette Weiner (1976) described how Trobriand men store yams meant for exchange (not subsistence) in their yam house so that they may be seen and appraised as evidence of a man’s wealth, status, skill, and social networks. Yet, in times of shortage, the space of the house transforms into an imagined realm of hidden wealth with distinct moral attributions. In late 2019, when onion prices rose to over Rs. 50 a kilogram (about $0.75) in wholesale markets, the few remaining farmers who still had onions stored away were alternatively viewed as both exceptionally greedy and extraordinarily lucky. Whenever there was mention of onion prices, I heard scornful

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remarks about how people had kept their produce until now—no matter the likely rot and shrinkage. This was, in the opinion of some, only indicative of their lust for money. Those who had already sold prior to this price escalation traded in any ostensible regret for moral righteousness, claiming that they had not lost out since they were simply “not that greedy.” During periods when prices rise and stocks dwindle, the storage of onions is reinterpreted by the Indian state as the hoarding of an essential commodity. With the invocation of the country’s Essential Commodities Act, hoarding onions (defined as storage in excess of a certain arbitrarily set quantity) is made illegal and subject to state confiscation. When this occurred in late 2019, wealthy farmers—who were also often traders themselves—worried that their homes and warehouses would be raided by state officials in search of onions stacked away. This was quite unlikely since raids were more commonly conducted on godowns rented by traders in market towns, while large-scale farmers are more likely to store their produce in their fields or village homes. In the former, it is more difficult to conduct inspections and raids on suspected hoarding. The home thus becomes a crucial infrastructure undergirding speculation. Since these are scattered across the countryside, they also make onions a more surreptitious commodity, under the radar of the state (but usually an open secret within village and trader communities). Nonetheless, in these brief moments when storage is reconfigured as hoarding, the act of holding onions is recast as a criminal act and the peasant home as a space of suspicion. In response, however, farmers deploy this as an opportunity to critique the state for its unjust interventionism. Even farmers who no longer owned any onions lament that their homes were no longer safe from the grasp of the government. After all, they insisted, it is their right to earn well from the crops that they had painstakingly cultivated and carefully stored over several months. They legitimize their stocking not as indicative of greed (though they do not deny their profit motive), but a practice premised on knowledge, skill, and care. Only farmers, it was argued, know how to take care of their onions, having the expertise to store under the right conditions and the will to regularly sort and grade the produce. Who else can care for the onion the way farmers can, ensuring that they stay fresh for months on end? From the perspective of farmers and traders, it was not them but the state that was engaging in unethical behavior in attempting to seize their produce and limit their profits. As one farmer put it, “I will have to get rid of my onions at any price now. They [the government] never want us farmers to earn any money.” Storage spaces and practices are always tied to debates around economic and political morality. As I have shown in this section, the capacity to store—and to store well and for long periods—is socially regarded as an index of hard work, skill, and courage. However, there are also socially defined and politically determined limits to this framing as when storage is

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reconfigured as “hoarding,” and thereby deemed immoral and/or illegal by fellow farmers and the state. The particular ethic of storage that emerges through these valuations of persons, things, and relations is thus one that is complex, dynamic, and even contradictory.

Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated how the practice of storage of a single cash crop, the onion, shapes the material and social relations within and between rural agricultural households in central India. Given that the accumulation of wealth through onions is only possible through careful storage, I have argued that the peasant house is a key infrastructure of agrarian accumulation. However, the spatial and temporal capacity to store is unevenly distributed among farmers. It is largely wealthy and upper-caste households who have additional rooms and warehouses suited to onion storage, and it is, therefore, only these groups who are able to accumulate through storage. At the same time, smaller farmers continue to aspire to construct concrete dwellings not just as living spaces but also as storage spaces. Having additional space in the home is both an index of and a path toward agricultural prosperity. The house itself—and the objects within it—is not only key to the accumulation but also to the social reproduction of the household. Yet, the labor of storage can both strengthen and strain kinship relations. Finally, I have pointed to the myriad ways in which the practice of storage is embroiled within the ethical and moral assessments of farmers and the state. Specifically, this chapter makes three intersecting arguments. First, it maintains that not all houses are the same, materially and socially. Peasant homes in rural India—while highly differentiated and increasingly westernized in their form and layout—possess a distinct aesthetic and variegated purpose. These are spaces of production and labor as much as spaces of consumption and leisure. It is crucial, therefore, to consider the social, political-economic, and ecological milieu within which houses are imagined, assembled, and lived in. Second, this chapter argues for attention to the specific materiality not only of houses but also of the objects accumulated within them. The case of onions—as well as other lively commodities—points to the ways in which materials and environments (built and natural) interact, as well as how these interactions are managed (often unsuccessfully) in the pursuit of material wealth and social status. Third, I argue that the things stored—including their quality and duration— become central to the social and ethical assessments of their keepers. The practice of storage is neither neutral nor static, but rather forms the ground upon which people evaluate each other (and the state) as social and moral beings. A room of onions, I argue, offers insights into the broader agrarian worlds of kinship obligations and tensions, material production and social reproduction, and ethical values and aspirations for the future.

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Tanya Matthan is an assistant professor in environment at the Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science. Her current book project examines experiences of and responses to agrarian uncertainty in central India. Her work has been published in Geoforum and The Journal of Peasant Studies.

Note 1. Rs. 1 lakh (100,000 rupees) is about USD 1230 or GBP 1070 (as of October 2022).

References Angé, Olivia. 2018. “Interspecies Respect and Potato Conservation in the Peruvian Cradle of Domestication.” Conservation and Society 16(1): 30–40. Bennett, Jane. 2012. “Powers of the Hoard: Further Notes on Material Agency.” In Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 237–72. Washington, DC: Oliphant Books. Cattelino, Jessica. 2006. “Florida Seminole Housing and the Social Meanings of Sovereignty.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48(3): 699–726. Chao, Sophie. 2018. “Seed Care in the Oil Palm Sector.” Environmental Humanities 10(2): 421–46. Guyer, Jane I. 2015. “Housing as ‘Capital’.” Hau 5(1): 495–500. Hendon, Julia. 2000. “Having and Holding: Storage, Memory, Knowledge and Social Relations.” American Anthropologist 102(1): 42–53. Khorakiwala, Ateya. 2016. “Silo as System: Infrastructural Interventions into the Political Economy of Wheat.” Engagement. A Blog Published by the Anthropology and Environment Society. Retrieved 12 April 2022 from https://aesengagement.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/silo-as-system​ -infrastructural-interventions-into-the-political-economy-of-wheat/. Kilroy-Marac, Katie. 2018. “An Order of Distinction (or, How to Tell  a  Collection from a Hoard).” Journal of Material Culture 23(1): 20–38. Leinaweaver, Jessica. 2009. “Raising the Roof in the Transnational Andes: Building Houses, Forging Kinship.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15(4): 777–96. Lorimer, Jamie. 2007. “Nonhuman Charisma.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25: 911–32. Peebles, Gustav. 2014. “Rehabilitating the Hoard: The Social Dynamics of Unbanking in Africa and Beyond.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 84(4): 595–613. Pocock, David. 1972. Kanbi and Patidar: A Study of the Patidar Community of Gujarat. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Sandoval-Cervantes, Ivan. 2017. “Uncertain Futures: The Unfinished Houses of Undocumented Migrants in Oaxaca, Mexico.” American Anthropologist 119(2): 209–22. Sinha, Shreya. 2020. “Betting on Potatoes: Accumulation in Times of Agrarian Crisis in Punjab, India.” Development and Change 51(6): 1533–54.

Part II Domestic Accumulation and Disorder

3 The “Stuffing” of Kinship

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Containing Clutter and Expansive Relations in US Homes

Sasha Newell

If the house is a container for kinship, then the stuff inside, its rhythm of ebbs and flows inwards and out, is in some sense kinship, whether that stuff is animate, organic, or otherwise. My title is meant to invoke not only the hoarding-esque practices that are filling up average North American homes, but also the stuffing that fills up a beloved teddy bear (a kin member certainly), as well as the practice of stuffing a turkey, that all-American symbol of family togetherness. Stuffing is both a material and a practice. Or we might say, following McKinnon, it is a practice of materialization: . . . while anthropologists might have reasonably embraced the analytic move toward process, creativity, flexibility, and fluidity in the study of kinship relations, I suggest that we should not lose sight of the diverse ways in which kinship is materialized, naturalized, objectified, and essentialized in culturally particular ways. (McKinnon 2017)

Houses are particularly powerful domains for this materialization of relatedness, not only because they are enduring objects that in many societies symbolize family intimacy, but also because they are a primary context in which kin practices are carried out under the rubric of dwelling. As in Bourdieu’s famous piece on symbolically determined Kabyle domestic space (1970), the material organization of our domestic space almost inevitably naturalizes the resident’s sense of the divisions, coherences, and stratifications of the intimate social sphere. In this chapter, I would like to focus on the material contents of the home, which are often experienced as

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co-dwellers within the kinship domain, making them affectively sticky and difficult to remove, even when they have no further use value or economic value (Newell 2014, 2019). More than this, I suggest these things may well serve as key elements of how kinship operates, and that the removal of things from circulation in the economic sphere and accumulation within the home has everything to do with this social role. My research in the US has taken place as a side project intermittently over the course of fifteen years, especially focused in fieldwork carried out in Illinois, North Carolina, and Vermont, respectively, in 2007, 2011, and 2019. The first location was a large college town of around 70,000 residents, the second in a small city of around 450,000, and the last in a rural zone where most residents lived in towns of several hundred residents. I did not focus on hoarding but rather on the question of storage, and so my participants were largely people interested in and concerned by the management of their own belongings. Most participants were well-educated, middle-class, and white, and encompassing a range of ages from teenage children to elders entering their eighties, with a few outliers either on the brink of poverty or quite wealthy. My methodology consisted of house-based interviews that explored both public areas and storage spaces in the home, sometimes culminating in participant observation through an effort to assist the residents in sorting through and removing excess belongings in the home. I have now accumulated around forty of these interviews, with lengths varying from one hour to weekly recurrent visits over the greater part of the year. As Strathern has argued for a Melanesian cosmology of partible persons producing relations with possessions that are pieces of themselves (1990), I suggest that North Americans tend to allow for an affective overlap between things, selves, and kin that they cannot rationalize and yet find great difficulty in negating at an affective level. In Strathern’s cosmological opposition, North Americans strictly separate persons and things, inalienable bodies, and alienable objects; however, at an affective, inarticulable level, people feel a genuine bond with objects, even if they consciously fight against this feeling in their commitment to “rationality.” When people say that objects feel alive, it is most likely to be the result of what we might call affective habits. As Nuritt Bird-David writes of the Nayaka: . . . the devaru objectify sharing relationships between Nayaka and other beings. A hill devaru, say, objectifies Nayaka relationships with the hill; it makes known the relationship between the Nayaka and that hill. Nayaka maintain social relationships with other beings not because, as Tylor holds, they a priori consider them persons. As and when and because they engage in and maintain relationship with other beings, they constitute them as kinds of person: they make them ‘relatives’ by sharing with them and thus make them persons.” (Bird-David: S73, emphasis original)

In this sense, like the Nayaka, US residents develop affective habits with objects through their daily practices of engagement and interaction, or

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through their long-term storage of things within the spaces of the home, paradoxically defined as innermost yet somehow outside the space of the home in which sociality takes place. This is how I understand the pain people feel when asked to part with something they have not used in years, as seen in the now countless episodes concerning hoarders or home organizers. The public is meant to laugh and squirm in discomfort at these media representations of hoarding, pointing their fingers at the irrationality, and even insanity, of these others who cannot distinguish between people of value and things without value. And yet, in my own fieldwork with people who did not consider themselves hoarders, such feelings of incapacity to “deal with” clutter emotionally were regular and relatively banal, even if the intensity of their anxiety was palpable. Thus, an important corollary to this frame of homes as containment is that not only humans but all entities within the home are potential kin. While ideologically speaking, Schneider’s (1980) cultural logics would exclude objects (whose bloodless state precludes them from true relatedness), my fieldwork indicates that, in practice, a substantial portion of North Americans feel that the material contents of their home are potential kin. That said, a strong majority would deny this to be the case when pressed for comment. Such “spirited things” (Johnson 2014) seem to hover around kin relationships in a social world where the spatial proximity and longitudinal intimacy of a residence passed down over generations has become a luxury only the most elite can afford.1 The displaced are thus haunted by a virtual kinship in which they are possessed by their possessions, the only intergenerational traces of belonging. Indeed, the socio-legal requirement to sort out the objects of the dead and redistribute them to dispersed family members has become a not insignificant means of reactivating overextended kin relations and sealing them through the connective tissue of things that obligate; though it can also operate as wedge driving apart factions formerly held together only by their bond to the now deceased member. Either way, it is the sheer material weight that forces moral interaction with real social repercussions. Although in the United States some kin-things stand as proud heirlooms in public spaces of living and dining rooms, such “durables” (Thompson 2017) tend to have a provenance in the established capital that allows for the maintenance of stable kin relations. In extreme cases, prestigious and valuable “property” enforces kin relations for the sake of holding the wealth intact. 2 Though many people had one or two such things, public objectivations of kinship were relatively rare compared to the proliferation of such objects in storage, and I suggest that there may be a link between concealment and binding such that certain kinds of fragile relations dissolve when exposed to the light of public ideologies. In other words, since objects are “not supposed” to have “objective” capacities of personhood, they cannot do the work of kinship in public, except when they have enough market or

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aesthetic value to justify their presence as “representations” of relatedness. Those who allow the public space of their home be occupied by objects of relatedness without recognizable value find their rationality questioned. Those who keep large quantities of such kin, occupying notable portions of their habitable space, might be accused of hoarding. In order to avoid confusion, let me clarify that in what follows I consider storage and clutter to be two dimensions of the same kind of expansive material vitality (Bennet 2010, 2012), for a good bit of what finds its way into storage is clutter that has to be moved out of the way, and concealed spaces of storage are the only convenient places for such things (Cwerner and Metcalfe 2003). Visible clutter is typically felt to be rubbish, but simply by virtue of passing the threshold into storage, clutter is purged of its polluting presence in the realm of public or visible spaces of the home and simultaneously takes on future potentialities that make it even harder to remove. Stored things are perceived as someday becoming useful, or perhaps valuable, or as necessary to retain memories, but in my research, there was little qualitative difference in kind between things piled up in visible spaces and those piled up in concealment, apart from the subjective attitudes around them. This issue is compounded by the fact that parts of the home can easily be converted into storage spaces if they are out of sight of guests, and thus bedrooms are frequently appropriated when other storage runs out of space. Thus, what is particularly strange about the visible/concealed dimension of the home is the way it affects the kinds of relations we hold with objects, and in turn, how those object relations structure relationships with other people, both in and outside the conceptual container of kinship. I now turn to the ways in which practices surrounding the daily management of the contents of those homes are, in a sense, the labor of kinship, such that practices of storage and decluttering become, in effect, both the expression of relatedness and the action of relating. For many households, there are frequent struggles waged between residents with different styles of relating to things. While decluttering is flaunted as moral and pragmatic action with direct positive consequences for objects and persons alike, I present the act of storage as a hidden function of kinship, both enabling decluttering activity and allowing for deeper temporal and spatial expansions of relatedness. Things that actors feel they should but cannot bear to throw away are often kept precisely because they are connected to the being of kinship; they are materializations of moments of copresence, and indeed, they themselves were present, dwelling right along with the humans. By displacing them to storage, their affective power is only heightened by the pleasure of rediscovery, while their awkward occupation of the space of home is rendered invisible, at least as long as the storage space does not run out. Indeed, the act of storing this worthless yet invaluable matter of past and future relatedness is a practice of kinship in its own right (Culler 1985).

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On the one hand, I consider the way in which material objects not only work to mediate family relations between humans, but also constitute members of the family with their own sets of obligations. These two dynamics are most clear in the case of heirlooms (including houses themselves), but it is perhaps even more significant in the practices of kinship that take place around material goods—this includes keeping, storing, renewing, ordering, and decluttering. These practices are often overlooked modalities through which kinship is enacted and materialized, and some of the most intimate relations are forged through these acts of “housekeeping.” The second aspect of the argument is to consider the way in which both storage and clutter work to expand the subject’s sense of relatedness, stretching backwards into the past, forwards into imagined future potentialities, and outwards across wide distances to make present absent persons or places. The paradox of such semiotic or virtual social expansivity is that, in aggregate, these things constrain real-time sociality by occupying the very space in which social relations take place in the home.

Cathy and Clyde: Reproductive Cycles of Storage (Vermont 2019) Cathy and Clyde in Vermont were a loving couple in their late seventies who had built their own home in the early 1970s and, in many ways, lived a frugal life of DIY homestead culture: carpentry, cabinetry, car mechanics, gardening, knitting, baking, and so on were regular activities they had performed throughout their adult lives, and which their younger daughter was now reproducing with a new sheep farm down the road. Their home was small, simple, and cozy, showing no visible signs of clutter (though they assured me there were areas upstairs and downstairs where things were piling up). However, a key ongoing battleground surrounding clutter was the garage, built by Clyde on a hill so that he could walk underneath his truck and change his own oil. The garage was so full of things that Cathy often felt unable to get her car in and out: He’s been mad at me. Kind of mad in his own way about me trying to get him to get rid of clutter. Every year in the winter, he cleans out my side of the garage enough that I could just park in it very carefully, and it’s hard to get the car doors open. Because he has so much crap up there and I keep saying, I don’t expect you to get rid of your lumber. He’s got a workshop up there. I don’t want him to get rid of anything that he uses, but there’re metal shelves up there that I don’t think anything on the shelf has moved in forty years. So, I think we could get rid of it, you know. But he has the future use.

This kind of struggle between couples is typical of the way quotidian practices of accumulation and housekeeping define family relations. Clyde and Cathy produce a dynamic and productive tension between them in which Cathy works continuously to clear the social space of the home from clutter (it was indeed pristine), while Clyde works just as assiduously to

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store everything of possible future value in the spaces designated as his. Clyde regularly picked up things around town, which he brought back to his garage in case they proved useful. Cathy bemoaned a set of ice-fishing gear he brought back from the dump because, as she put it, “we have never ice-fished, and if we do, it will be with someone who has ice-fishing gear,” but Clyde was thrilled when a visitor mentioned ice-fishing and he was able to procure and transfer his salvaged gear to the guest. While the garage was “his” space, she had to use it too and just wished it could be less cluttered and thought the space would be more useful if it was less full, whereas he saw this as a repository of potential use, potential that exceeded his own capacity but nonetheless stretched forward to his children, his friends, and random passersby—a reserve for future expansions of sociality. However, the garage was also the key site for storage-as-kinship. On the second floor of the garage was a storage room that had once held all of their possessions, including many they had brought with them from their former family homes. When they first moved up to Vermont, they were living in a tiny one-room cabin with a loft-bed (less than 300 square feet), and the garage was the first thing they built. Thus, before they even had a house, they began to move things from their past and some furniture and other things inherited from parents and grandparents into this storage space, much of it in boxes they never got around to opening. The idea was that once the house was finished and they had more space, they would go through these things and use them. But they never did. They had discussed this stuff and what to do with it many times over the ensuing decades, because Cathy felt that at some point these stored things are transformed into mere clutter, but they had never actually found the time to go up there and open any boxes. One day, she received a call from him at work asking whether or not to save any of the things in storage. As it turned out, when his daughter and her partner decided to move back to Vermont and build a house, they needed a place to keep all their stuff until the house was inhabitable. He had a trailer and was cleaning up that upstairs room to make space for their daughter’s things. This is the labor of reproduction at work, as Clyde finally found the motivation to purge their storage in order to allow his child’s new family to store their things while they built a home, just as he and his wife had done forty years earlier. It is a testament to this couple’s mutual pragmatic outlook that neither of them felt tempted to look. Having lived two decades without looking at the contents of their storage, they decided it was better to let it go rather than invite temptation, and he simply hauled it away for donation. Even if Clyde and Cathy’s capacity for ridding was unusual in this instance, forms of this cycle of storage and renewal take place in most homes as part of the larger life cycle of reproduction. When children move out, their space is sometimes preserved as an act of love, a museum of their adolescent selves, frozen as though sealed in amber—a form of storage in its own right. But more often, these spaces are gradually taken over by

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Figure 3.1.  Unopened boxes sent from a research participant’s mother and stored in her closet. © Sasha Newell, 2007

parental surplus, first with old clothes and surplus electronics shoved into closet spaces, then using extra surfaces and floor space, and sometimes even taking over the bed with boxes and bags of excess things that no longer fit in storage. However, the now adult children whose lives tend to be spatially unstable will rely on their parents’ domestic storage space to store their accumulating possessions while they navigate a new life transition.

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Still later, as the children develop more established homes and stop moving, parents trying to declutter their homes (sometimes explicitly thinking of their own eventual demise and wishing to spare their children the task of sorting) send their children boxes of belongings for them to take care of, and many of my informants complained of having to accommodate unopened boxes of such things in their already crowded storage spaces. However, such a picture of a kin meshwork of things flowing back and forth between generations according to life cycle events belies the more difficult negotiations surrounding which obligations count the most, and the inevitable comparative evaluations that take place between human and non-human occupancies of space. A relatively common effect of this is the child returning home to find their room no longer fully inhabitable. However, there are more emotionally disastrous possibilities, as in the case of the Swann’s.

“Fuck Swann Family History”: A Tale of Belongings, but Not Belonging (North Carolina 2011) The Swann’s were a middle-class family living in the research triangle region of North Carolina. Their home was relatively neat but warmly decorated, and when I first entered, Ed was stirring a giant pot of homegrown collard greens in the kitchen. Darlene worked for one of the local universities in an administrative assistant position, while Ed had been a former military man. They had three children, all of whom had moved out of the house already, though their daughter was in a transitional place and had temporarily moved back in while she and her fiancé saved money for their own home. Perhaps due to Ed’s military past and having been forced to move many times, he maintained an emotionally distant relationship to the objects in his life, even though he really loved his musical instruments and felt great responsibility to the family heirlooms he had inherited. The Swann family were early settlers in the region, and even had a state governor in their past, and so history and heirlooms were quite important to all of them. As Darleen said: “Ed’s family goes way back—and my family does too—but his family, things are very important, with the historical value.” Ed would have liked to have inherited the family farm (founded in 1701) and been a farmer, but that was not to be, and he reluctantly cared for the other bits of material heritage. There was furniture that had been handed down and cared for, and they looked after it. And they taught me to look after what we had and care for it, but as far as really being attached to something, I hunted and fished a lot. I liked my gear.” Even those things he really cared about he regarded with suspicion, such that when he grew too attached to one of his banjos, he would get rid of it just to prove that he could. On the other hand, his sister Marge clung to each and every thing attached to their family history, clearly indicating her priorities by producing a rift with Darleen during the cleanup of their mother’s house.

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Darleen and her daughter Cammie went to clean out the pantry and filled a couple of trash bags with half-burnt candles and expired cans of food (“There were cherries in the pantry that were older than Cammie,” Darleen interjected). Knowing how Marge could be, Darleen asked Ed to dispose of the bags right away, but he was busy and put it off. Sure enough, Marge found the bags and dug through them and called Darleen to tell her that she was “throwing away Swann family history,” to which Darleen responded, “fuck Swann family history” and threw the phone across the room, smashing it to bits. This was so uncharacteristic of her that when she related the story, she replaced the swear with “ugly word.” The sisters-in-law were not on speaking terms for two years. After the initial cleanup, it was still necessary to distribute the things of value remaining in the house. On the one hand, the concrete material objects, which require actual physical displacement and actual space in homes that are already lived in and full of a lifetimes’ accumulation, force public decision making, careful negotiation, and judicious resource management. At the same time, the payload of kin sociality contained within them (personal memories, childhood nostalgia, oral histories, shared moments of intimacy) often work against the more pragmatic aspects of the distribution, causing things to be divvied in ways that do not conform to legal inheritance rules, economic value, or the spatial resources of the family members. The objects at once reveal economic and affective inequalities between family members that are normally actively concealed, as well as reaching feelers of affective entanglement into various social actors that render the public articulation of their relationships close to impossible, especially within ideologically acceptable terms of rationality. Marge once again plays the villain, portrayed by Darlene and Cammie as preferring objects to real people and as cutting the two of them out of the sphere of family intimacy. It is also worth noting that Cammie’s brothers do not figure anywhere in the story, reinforcing my impression that the labor of material kinship is highly gendered and linked to the reproductive role of women in the family identity. Darlene: And so, Marge told Ed he needed to come over there, that they were going to divide things out. And you know, she had it made because she was going to be able to get all the good stuff because Ed doesn’t care. Well, I said, “Cammie, you go over there with your father, you’re the granddaughter, you pick out what you want.” So she went over there, and when she got out of the car Marge told Ed, “I just wanted family here.” And Ed goes, “we’ll just go home,” and I can remember her walking up the sidewalk. She said “apparently I’m not a part of the family.”

Marge was drawing a tight line of intimacy around her childhood home, wanting the decisions over belonging to take place only amongst those who had grown up in that household, a circle that included furniture and expired cherries but excluded a newer generation that had not even been born when the cherries were put in the cupboard.

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Cammie: Like I remember they had like everyday stoneware dishes and I was moving into an apartment the next year and so I needed dishes. And she went on replacements.com and emailed my dad how much it would cost to replace like a plate or a bowl or something if it broke. They’re dishes that have been used for probably forty years and you have your own set of dishes that you use every day, you know, and my parents have their own, I need my own. If you have them, they’re going to sit in your garage, so why do you care? But you know, I’m sure she remembered growing up with them and eating off of them and it was hard for her probably to think of a college student just throwing them around.

Cammie’s analysis goes right to the heart of the issue—these plates had shared in Marge’s childhood, in her everyday experience of home and family. As symbols of commensality, they were especially potent containers for a togetherness that she no longer had now that her mother was gone. The pattern was repeated with each thing Cammie asked for—the possible damage that might come to it in her care was invoked. Finally, they gave up and left her to take everything in the house. Of course, Marge was unable to fit most of it in her home, which was already quite full, and so she ended up hosting a yard sale where everything was priced so high that very few things sold. Cammie was able to go to the yard sale and bargain the prices down to a reasonable level and pick up the things she needed for her new college life, as well as a few items her mom was interested in. In effect, Marge demonstrated a preference to sell her goods to strangers rather than allow her niece to inherit them. These things were her family, much more so than her brother’s family members, people she categorized as outside the belongings associated with her childhood. In the yard sale, as Herrmann has demonstrated (1997), sellers pick and choose who they will allow to take home their things, using price as a means to prevent just anyone from walking away with their beloved possessions. Not believing in her niece’s capacity to appreciate these dividual slices of her own past, she attempted to use price as a filter to prevent all but the most dedicated future owners from accessing these goods. The point of relating this sordid tale of Swann family history is twofold. On the one hand, it vividly demonstrates how the management of who will possess and store which objects becomes a direct negotiation of the lines of intimacy and belonging. Upon the death of “Mrs. Swann,” as Darlene continued to refer to her mother-in-law, the contents of the home were considered to belong only with Swann’s immediate children. But my second point is more controversial: for Marge, the contents of her childhood home were more important kin members than her niece, the only female descendant of this branch of the Swann family, and the only person interested in the houses contents besides Marge herself. Perhaps because Cammie was interested in the use value of these objects rather than their status as kin-things, Marge was offended by her interest and rejected her every effort to claim goods from the home, even challenging Cammie’s status as in comparison to these materialized commensalities. For Darlene, such prioritization of

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things over persons constituted a form of “sickness,” though she understood these choices as a reflection of Marge’s mourning process. But even if Marge’s actions are an extreme case, her prioritization of thing relations over human relations is part of a larger social pattern enacted daily in many parts of the world, and should be understood as a form of sociality rather than merely as psychological pathology.

Nicole and Dylan: Storage Containers and Generational Accumulation (North Carolina, 2011) Nicole was a thirty-three-year-old woman who had recently moved into a new apartment with her husband in North Carolina. Even though they had been married three years, they had been moving around for business and living in furnished apartments that whole time and had never actually dealt with the merging of their personal possessions. Over those three years, they had strung together a series of storage units to hold their things from both their pre-marriage apartments, as well as their business, and they had never had the time to sort through it all. They had ended up with five rented storage units, and Nicole hoped that if we worked through the unit full of her personal possessions, they might be able to get rid of enough stuff to consolidate the two personal units into one. Nicole and Dylan had rented an apartment in giant pseudo-Victorian apartment building constructed in about six months, with mansard roofs, Tudor framing, and other details meant to tie the building in with the neighborhood. The interior revealed a more contemporary aesthetic, despite nods to antiquity like the ersatz wood-paneled social room with a pool table and black-and-white 19th century photos. Nicole’s apartment was quite restrained, with carefully placed milk glass objects ornamenting the kitchen and dining room and only a small niche for stuffed animals revealing her propensity to hoard childhood memories. The rest of her childhood memories took up a close to half the space in one of their rental units. Perhaps the niche in the apartment was a concession from Dylan, who only made a brief appearance while I was working with Nicole in the storage unit and left without saying almost anything, but gave a sense of disapproval over the attention given to her sentimental toys. However, only two pieces of Dylan’s furniture had made the cut into the apartment, and one of those was marked for replacement, so Nicole clearly dominated the aesthetic choices. Nicole’s parents had a “very clean house” and yet her mother was an avid collector: For a while, she collected salt and pepper shakers, and so like every holiday we’d give her a different fun set. She got over that one and then it was birds, and then the whole cow parade, then teapots. So when she started collecting stuff, she would display it. So my dad would build her little things to display certain things. And then while she collected stuff, my dad is the one who is more

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Figure 3.2.  A pile of baby dolls from Nicole’s childhood, all of whom she chose to return to storage. © Sasha Newell, 2011 sentimental about things. So even when he retired, he couldn’t get rid of the stuff he kept in his office. So we had a full basement.

It is fascinating to see the way in which certain kinds of patterns repeat over generations. If we consider that objects make up part of our pattern of social relationships, rather than merely a medium for it, then we might consider this a kind of habitus of object sociality, or even a container habitus, if we place it within the frame as the cultural patterning of storage. While I was puzzled how much of their storage space was being occupied by three-year-old office equipment and files, Nicole’s father had preserved his own office, even after retirement, so for her, this was the status quo. Still more important is the way in which stored things are also passed on intergenerationally, such that family storage conglomerates over time, becoming simultaneously even more emotionally invested, given that it comes to represent intimate kin connections and even to become a form

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of kinship in itself. Heirlooms are the most explicit and familiar of these kinds of intergenerational material, and certain kinds of collections are passed along with the tendency to collect those things. Milk glass was one of Nicole’s favorite things, and this she had learned from her mother and mother’s mother. But stored things are also passed onwards to be stored again by the future descendants, mingling together over time with newer additions thrown into the mix. Nicole gives us a nice example of the way that her storage has come to contain this kind of intergenerational material, which becomes all the more poignant when we consider how much was already stored in her parents’ home. When they retired, they moved back to Georgia and downsized, and [now] they have this little cottage on a lake. And at that time—this is how I accumulated a lot of stuff—they made us come up here and they said they were either putting our stuff in a yard sale or throwing it away. If we wanted anything, we had to take it. And so I was like, “Don’t throw it out!” So I brought it all and put it in my storage. So that’s how I accumulated a lot of stuff.

Sometimes such things are even marked to be passed on by parents long before their deaths, and in other interviews, parents would regularly send boxes of things for which they thought their children should take responsibility. In Nicole’s case, her entire bedroom set had been designated to her by her grandmother: And the reason I have this furniture is that my grandmother told me—because this was her bedroom furniture for forever, as long as I’ve been alive—that “One day I’ll get a new bedroom suite and then this will be your furniture.” And then she passed away and I got her suite, but anyway, I was definitely taking her furniture. So I’ve used it everywhere. So all this furniture is hers.

Nor was this the only occasion on which a bedroom set was passed on this way. During an interview, I once had someone try to give me a bedroom set, whose care her mother’s last wish had bequeathed upon her. The research participant accepted me as someone who could take on that responsibility for something she could no longer fit into her life. In short, storage is not only a space for the residual things that do not fit within the social space of the home, but a space of temporal compression that agglomerates such items over generations. Even with the work of purging many carry out both regularly and at every generational transition, some elements, and even unopened boxes, often make it through to hold on for another generation more, gaining in mystery and potency, even as they lose the memories and stories with which they are associated.

Lucy’s Museum (Vermont, 2019) My last example demonstrates the way in which the companionship of clutter can replace people as co-dwellers and take on an even more marked

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Figure 3.3.  Lucy’s dance hall, serving as both living room and external storage unit. © Sasha Newell, 2019

presence as day-to-day kin. Lucy lived by herself up a long dirt track far from neighbors, and paved roads. She had married and divorced an American Indian man, with whom she’d had five boys, two of whom had died tragically in separate incidents. Her house, built by her family without any formal architectural plan, was beginning to sag and shed pieces of itself. The house had no electricity and had been repaired over the years in a haphazard way with scrap material, but there remained visible holes in the exterior siding, and she often spoke of the trouble the squirrels gave her as they penetrated the walls and burrowed within her possessions. She survived on her social security checks of less than $500 a month, plus three hours work a week at a bookstore, and what she could earn at flea markets where she regularly held a stall. Her tiny home was so full that one had to climb over things to get from room to room, and the entire upper floor was reserved as a kind of museum. It required several minutes of reshuffling things from the steps to climb upstairs. One room functioned as a kind of nest, where she had a camp stove to cook and a bed in the corner and some clear floor space. However, in addition to this, she had several outbuildings where she stored more things, one of which she considered a dance hall, which was filled with more piles of stuff, except for a clean space in the middle where she had set up a table of chairs. It was here that she welcomed me with some fresh strawberries and cookies for our interview. She explained that this area was mostly other people’s things, “I’ve been storing things for other people for probably ten years.”

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One of her sons was constantly moving (ten times in ten years), and so he kept many of his things with her for convenience. “He has his own section,” she explained, as she gestured toward the corner. Her ex-husband had another section. He had moved in with another woman, who had a tiny apartment in which he never had space for much of his own. Like Lucy, he liked to sell things at yard sales as a source of income, an activity they continued to do together, and since he could not afford his own storage space “at $90 a month,” he kept his “sale merchandise” with her. Indeed, things had really started getting out of control for her when her husband left, taking the youngest son with him. The older boys were away in college, and perhaps the emptiness of the home called out to be filled. But she also felt that many of the things present were not her own to get rid of. And I was suddenly in a house that was full of everybody’s stuff, not just mine. They just left and didn’t take anything. The whole lot of them. So, it’s hard to clean a house when everything else belongs to somebody else. You don’t know what you can throw out and what you can’t . . . At some point it got to the hoarding level where you could hardly get through the rooms. I mean, it was just . . . so, when summer vacation came one year, I decided that’s it. I’m getting this place so I can at least walk around in it. And so, I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. I just felt so confused as to what should I do with this stuff.

Not feeling ownership over all the things made it impossible to make choices about them, and it was almost as though the things attracted more things. Before long, she found herself at the “hoarding level.” Many of her things things she planned to sell at the flea markets, or to give away to “the Salvation Army, to the church, bazaars at Christmas time, or to the free pile beside the road. It’s just all a matter of getting the time, the energy, and the days when it’s not pouring.” Like Herrmann’s observations around finding acceptable replacement owners at yard sales (this volume), it was important to her that everything found another home. But she worked hard to clear space, for as much as she enjoyed keeping and sheltering her objects, she was quite worried about the burden they represented for her children. So, I would say I think of my possessions now instead of as something I just love, more like a responsibility. Because when I die, it would all end up being my son’s problem and he already works two jobs. He doesn’t need to clean out this whole house. So, that’s why I’m going to get rid of everything that one of the kids doesn’t want and that I’m not using.

Lucy had been reading Mary Kondo and was very inspired to declutter. I never saw what it looked like before the decluttering work, but during my visit, passage through most rooms remained difficult, and only her bedroom space (in the kitchen) had space to sit down. Counterintuitively, she had developed the idea for the museum as a manifestation of her decluttering practices, because as she filtered through the piles, she recognized that she possessed a variety of collections and had

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Figure 3.4.  Lucy’s museum, once the living room of her family home. © Sasha Newell, 2019

begun to organize things she loved into categories. It was actually easier to navigate the museum than the other spaces of the home. However, she presented her museum as having not only personal but objective social value, for it served as a kind of archive for the end of times. Lucy was convinced that at some point in the near future, electricity would fail and her collection of DVDs and VHS tapes would become an important cultural record. This is another rarer, yet still prevalent pattern of thing-sociality, in which some objects are perceived as being orphaned or undervalued and are preserved in recognition of their former importance and future historical value. Those who collect in this manner often speak of being called to by the object and feeling obligated to protect it. In effect, such collectors act as adoptive parents who shelter things cast off as Thompson’s “rubbish” until such time as they will reach maturity and enter the “durable” category. What was clear, above all, was that although she had spent years burdened by the clutter, and continued to struggle with excess throughout her home, she loved the things with which she surrounded herself and felt great pleasure encountering them in her home. As we toured the space, she was full of exclamations of delight and rediscovery as we rifled through everything from valuable American Indian art (part of her family’s cultural heritage), her costume collection, her mother’s scrapbooks, dolls from around the world, and her bookcase of Star Wars paraphernalia. Although she maintained active relationships with her children, whom she continued to drive from place to place despite gas being a significant expense, she was more directly connected to them on a daily basis through the things she

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stored for them. And she felt the presence of these possessions as entities that shared the intimacy of her living space and who, as a community, had also witnessed the most important events in her life.

Conclusion: Concealed Intimacies and Virtual Kinship The house is the very image of intimacy, idealized as the private sphere in which we can let down our defenses and simply be. Of course, pretence never really goes away, even in the most honest couples and the most unvarnished of families, and so the architecture of the home allows for a series of nested intimacies. As I think can be seen the preceding stories, the house itself is not one but a series of encompassing containers, each level of interiority holding greater degrees of intimacy and concealment. In an architectural manifesto from the late 1960s entitled, A Pattern Language, the authors describe what they see as a nearly universal “intimacy gradient”: We see it in widely different cultures—compare the plan of an African compound, a traditional Japanese house, and early American colonial homes—and it also applies to almost every building type . . . it is almost an archetypal ordering principle for all man’s buildings. All buildings, and all parts of buildings which house well-defined human groups, need a definite gradient from front to back, from the most formal spaces at the front to the most intimate spaces at the back. (Alexander et al. 1977: 611)

They suggest that all homes must have a “secret place,” and that the existence of such a space alters the social experience of the home, providing the possibility of revelation and induction into new degrees of social intimacy. In my own research, I found that such storage space is often avoided by home-dwellers themselves—this is even part of the point of it—unburdening the mind, as well as the space of unwanted clutter. While the appeal of storage is that, like memories, such objects can in theory be accessed at any time, they can also be kept in reserve indefinitely (Newell 2014). In one of the more emotionally potent cases I recorded, a woman in her eighties had kept an unopened trunk with all of her daughters’ things from the moment she died tragically as a child. When she downsized from her family home due to age, she brought the trunk with her without opening it. In another case, a woman kept her great-grandmother’s cedar chest with creepy dolls and rotting doilies that came with it, adding her own newspaper clippings and baby clothes to it, but never overcoming a kind of queasy feeling of ambivalence that is often associated with storage space. To store something is to at once keep it and temporarily forget it, to retain the memory but no longer have access to it until something triggers it and you say, “Oh, I forgot about that!” much like the data in your cloud storage that will remain inaccessible until you can find the correct keyword to retrieve it. True forgetting would be to jettison the object altogether, precisely the fear of total loss that causes people to preserve souvenirs of their past in storage.

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Drawing upon my discussion of Thompson’s Rubbish Theory in the introduction, the contents of storage closely resemble Thompson’s definition of rubbish. Thompson distinguishes between things that are actively rejected as rubbish because they do not fit and intrude upon visible space (clutter in my own analysis), and those things that are residual to the system of social definition but remain invisible. Within the home, this is the space of storage, a place par excellence for all that which has lost its publicly recognized value and yet remains personally significant, or things that combine at once negative and positive valences. These are things whose definition and value is so personal and so inarticulate that they no longer have a socially determined meaning—and yet, paradoxically, their affective force comes primarily from their connection to social relations. It is significant the way such things are stored—jumbled together with all manner of other things, such that “trash and treasure” come together and mingle their association, a form of object-to-object sociality outside of the collective taxonomies that take place mostly behind closed doors. Much as Thompson (2017) suggests that the invisibility of rubbish allows the social flexibility for it to transmogrify in value (much as a person can change social status in the bracketed and most often concealed liminal phase of ritual), the concealment of clutter also provides a kind of magical potentiality that makes storage not only convenient but also potentially productive of kinship itself. It is no wonder that stored things produce so much consternation, because through their removal from the capitalist sphere of exchange, their value is no longer quantifiable. In Kopytoff’s terms (1987), they are singularized, too unique to have an equivalent, but this also means that so long as they are not reintroduced to the world as a commodity, they are at once priceless and worthless. In the heterotopia of storage, their value is determined by the social actor, the eye of the beholder, rather than by the objectivizing institutions of market capitalism. An illustration can be found in story related during a tour of the Cauchie house in Brussels, an art nouveau landmark built by one of the influencers of early twentieth-century domestic aesthetics. The guide explained that much of the original furniture that had been designed for the house had been put on the street by the estranged daughter who rejected her parents’ aesthetic sensibilities (reproduced on literally hundreds of facades in Brussels). One chair had been returned by a neighbor twenty-six years after the house was turned into a museum, but the rest was lost. Stored kin-things are just so much junk and sacred heirlooms, all at the same time. It is precisely the withdrawal of objects from exchange, intentionally or unintentionally, that gives them power over their fellow household residents, allowing them to take on a social role as kin-beings who reach across space and time to parlay with the dead, the unborn, and the forgotten. My aim here is to consider the home primarily in its guise as a container for kinship. Such a perspective draws special attention to the entrances and

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exits of persons and things to the home, as well as to the Russian doll effect of the subsidiary layers of containers within containers one finds on the inside (2018). I explore here to what extent these levels of encompassment reflect relatedness and intimacy, and how the opposition between visibility and invisibility mediates our discursive vs. affective apperception of material things. Despite ideological training that renders relationships with ‘inanimate’ objects impossible, participants in my US-based research often admitted to feeling strong emotional connections with things in the home, and the majority of these were not out in the visible public domestic space (with the exception of a few heirlooms of collective familial importance), but rather tucked away in niches of storage throughout the home. A consequence of considering the home a kinship category, such that everything contained within it counts as kin, is that those things that are discarded are at that moment no longer kin, just as everything contained by my skin is my body, except that which I excrete. On the other hand, if people can be given away and yet still remain related (Lévi-Strauss 1969), things too can pass the threshold and remain inalienable (Weiner 1992), often creating more fractal kinds of ownership (gifts that are kept even though the object is not desirable, things that are stored for others, things that are stored because they belonged to others in the past, things that unknown persons might someday want). It is no surprise to anthropologists that people symbolize kin relationships through material objects, and we know that heirlooms are an important source of affective ties in many societies, as well as hierarchical relations. The structure of the home itself is an especially powerful example, close to being synonymous with the concept of family itself. But while North Americans tend to wax nostalgic about family homes, the dominant practice of neolocal residence makes the maintenance of a family home for multiple generations an extremely rare occurrence. Nostalgia thus only reaches as far back as one’s own childhood, reaching perhaps to extended family gatherings in grandparental homes. Meanwhile neoliberal employment practices regularly disperse middleclass families even further around the country, making face-to-face relatedness increasingly difficult to maintain, except through the non-tactile, techno-panacea of social media. Therefore, I speculate here that the fixative affordances of stored objects to capture intersubjective relations may have become a crucial mode of sociality in the contemporary United States, one that provides a haptic connection that virtual media struggle to achieve. As powerful as the feel of home may be, the solidity of its beams and walls and basement, it serves more often as a frame, a container holding in the contents of kinship, its materiality replaced several if not many times over the course of a lifetime for many middle-class North Americans. In such circumstances, while geographic location and residential structures remain important and highly desirable anchors of kinship when they are retained, although this was very rare in my sample (not one of my US interviews took place in a home that had passed hands between generations, though I did

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hear of their existence). Rather, more often than not, material continuity is maintained through the stuffing of the home—the people of course, but within this category of persons, we have to include their dividual extended self: the innumerable lifetime of possessions both actively in use and long ago cast aside but not quite cast away, the stuff that actively binds them to others. In this way, I argue that as kinship relations are increasingly geographically distended and diffused across a mediated and fragmented social landscape, former consumer objects incorporated into domestic relations take on increasingly powerful social roles as kin-things, things that are not only part of how relatedness is enacted through storage, but also are themselves inalienable members of kin-groups. Ridding the house of such relatedness is understandably difficult, just as extending kinship status towards too many possessions runs the risk of alienating human kin. Therefore, storage and clutter are modalities for the expansion of kinship, but the more kept stuff occupies the social space of the home, the more such relationships are strained by the literal blockages in the flow of daily life. Sasha Newell is Associate Professor and Director of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporain at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He is the author of The Modernity Bluff: Crime, Consumption, and Citizenship in Côte d’Ivoire (University of Chicago 2012), based upon field research carried out for his doctorate at Cornell University (2003). While he continues to write about Côte d’Ivoire, with a recent focus on cybercrime and digital sorcery (African Studies Review, Africa), since 2007, he has also focused on questions regarding domestic accumulation in US homes, developing publications on storage, hoarding, clutter, and possession. More recently, he has been investigating the material traces of Belgian colonialism, including monuments, museums, as well as domestic objects.

Notes 1. In Carol Stack’s classic (1974), All Our Kin, the most impoverished rely on expanded kin networks to survive in the absence of material wealth, which makes it tempting to declare these issues a middle-class problem. However, in the decades since Stack’s exemplary ethnography, the relationship between poverty and possession has dramatically transformed as cheap commodities have become ubiquitous and domestic accumulation or “hoarding” became a widely attainable “pathology.” 2. The first season of the soap operatic period piece Downton Abbey can be seen as a portrayal of a family bound to and shaped by the requirement of holding their estate intact.

References Alexander, Christopher, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, and Schlomo Angel. 1977. A Pattern Language:

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Towns, Buildings, Construction. Center for Environmental Studies. New York: Oxford University Press. Bahloul, Joelle. 1996. The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria, 1937–1962. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press Books. ———. 2012. “Powers of the Hoard: Further Notes on Material Agency.” In Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen, 237–69. Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books. Bird-David, Nurit. 1999. “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology.” Current Anthropology 40(S1): S67–91. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1970. “The Berber House or the World Reversed.” Social Science Information 9(2): 151–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/0539018470​ 00900213. Culler, Jonathan. 1985. “Junk and Rubbish: A Semiotic Approach.” In Michael Thompson, ed., Diacritics 15(3): 2–12. Cwerner, Saulo B., and Alan Metcalfe. 2003. “Storage and Clutter: Discourses and Practices of Order in the Domestic World.” Journal of Design History 16(3): 229–39. Herrmann, Gretchen. 1997. “Gift or Commodity: What Changes Hands in the US Garage Sale?” American Ethnologist 24(4): 910–30. Johnson, Paul Christopher, ed. 2014. Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Afro-Atlantic Religions. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press. Kopytoff, Igor. 1987. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, 64–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969 [1949]. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon Press. McKinnon, Susan. 2017. “Doing and Being: Process, Essence, and Hierarchy in Making Kin.” In The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology, eds. Simon Coleman, Susan Hyatt, and Ann Kinsolver, 177–98. London: Routledge. Newell, Alexander [Sasha]. 2019. “L’hospitalité des hoarders. Accumulations et relations dans l’espace domestique aux États-Unis.” L’Homme. Revue française d’anthropologie 231–32 (November): 111–34. Newell, Sasha. 2014. “The Matter of the Unfetish: Hoarding and the Spirit of Possessions.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4(3): 185–213. ———. 2018. “Uncontained Accumulation: Hidden Heterotopias of Storage and Spillage.” History and Anthropology 29(1): 37–41. Peebles, Gustav. 2008. “Inverting the Panopticon: Money and the Nationalization of the Future.” Public Culture 20(2): 233–65. Schneider, David M. 1980. American Kinship: A Cultural Account, 2nd edn. University of Chicago Press.

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Stack, Carol B. 1974. All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. New York: Basic Books. Strathern, Marilyn. 1990. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia, 1st edn. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thompson, Michael. 2017 [1979]. Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value—New Edition, 1st edn. Pluto Press. Weiner, Annette B. 1992. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of KeepingWhile Giving, 1st edn. Berkeley: University of California Press.

4 Topoanalysis

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Hoarding, Memory, and the Materialization of Kinship

Katie Kilroy-Marac

I first encountered Rachel Whiteread’s Ghost at the Young British Artists exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum more than 20 years ago. In a room adjacent to Marc Quinn’s frozen blood head and Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde shark, just beyond Chris Ofili’s elephant dung-smeared portrait of the Black Virgin Mary, was a room—or rather, the negative space of a room— composed of large plaster blocks the size of giant ice chests. It was a room that could not be entered; a room that could be known only by skimming the blocks’ external surfaces for some recognizable imprint or feature—a window frame, a fireplace, a light switch. Imagine if someone were to pour plaster into your living room, fill it to the top, and then dissolve the walls around it. That was Rachel Whiteread’s Ghost: space turned inside-out, a petrified and impenetrable domestic scene.1 As I moved closer to Whiteread’s negative-space room, I remember the fullness of it pressing the breath out of me. It was unsettling. It also felt darkly familiar. And while I did not quite make the connection at the time, it seems obvious now that the room stirred in me my own memories of growing up in a hoarded house, where entire rooms were packed shoulderhigh and could not be entered (at least not without a hop and a dive over the top), let alone used. In a hoarded house, the hoard not only fills space, but it also redefines its very contours—the hoard becomes the house. As a kid, entering the homes of others—houses without hoards—was a trip to another world. The luxury of space in these other houses! The customs and habits of their dwellers! Furniture that was usable, unobstructed, and

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not buried! It mystified me; it was the stuff of dreams. I would come home from these other houses and find myself staring for hours at the ceilings of our own house, fantasizing that the ceilings could become the floors, that everything could be flipped (without the hoard falling on our heads, of course), that the space could be emptied just like that, and that we could restart everything from scratch. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard describes the afterimage of one’s childhood house as nothing less than the “topography of [one’s] intimate being” (1994 [1958]: xxxvi). The house of one’s childhood, he writes, structures and enables the poetic imagination; those “places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time” (6). As you might imagine, this is all somewhat troubling when one’s childhood home was a hoard. 2 But there is more: not only are our memories housed, he continues, but these childhood homes are “physically inscribed in us” (14) and actually make memory. For Bachelard, one’s childhood house is at the heart not just of dreams and imagination but foundational to the very ability to dream and imagine. If houses are, as Mary Douglas has called them after Bachelard, “memory machine[s]” (1991: 294), we might also say that they are kinship machines. Janet Carsten has reflected on the powerful afterimage of the childhood home, asserting that “memories of past houses are not just personally evocative, redolent of domestic kinship—indeed, they make kinship” (2004: 34, my emphasis). But how do kin relations get made, actually, when the house in question is a hoarded house? How might one set out to “topoanalyze” one’s memories of such a domestic landscape? And what happens to both kin relations and to memory itself when one is confronted not only with the afterimage of one’s childhood hoarded home—the oneiric hoarded house—but with the sheer materiality and overwhelming physicality of that same home in the present? In this chapter, I draw on ongoing interviews with people who identify themselves as Adult Children of Hoarders (ACoHs), past research with hoarding intervention specialists and professional home organizers (POs), and my own autoethnographic reflections of growing up in and reckoning with a hoard to consider a few of the ways that memory and kin relations get materialized—and may also come undone—in the hoard. I break my discussion into three parts. In the first, I grapple with the fact that every one of my interlocutors who grew up in a hoarding situation refers to and describes their childhood hoard as both a singular entity and as surroundings: the hoard reconfigures the shapes of rooms, it partitions space and creates boundaries, it produces and restricts pathways for walking and moving, it makes surfaces and depths, it becomes floor and walls. In short, the hoard becomes the house. This house-hoard, as I call it, structures and mediates relationships between the people and things that grow up within

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it, creating distinct ways of moving and being together. It likewise contributes to the formation of distinct forms of spatial sensing and feeling among its inhabitants that remain tucked in memory (the oneiric house-hoard), and that appear to last a lifetime. While the hoard may be perceived as inalienable to the hoarder, its status as such amongst other members of the household appears to be much more complicated and variable. On the one hand, when my interlocutors describe the hoards of their childhoods as surroundings, the hoard takes the shape of what Marcel Mauss (1925) designated as “immeuble”: a form of property that is immovable or fixed and often tied closely to a kin group, such as land, houses, or estates. To Annette Weiner (1992), Mauss’ distinction between “immeuble” and “meuble” (portable, transferable) property signaled an early differentiation in the anthropological literature between inalienable and alienable wealth. Still, as my interlocutors shared memories with me about the hoards of their childhoods, they also highlighted moments when the hoard came into their view not just as alienable, but as alienating. In the second part of this chapter, then, I consider these remembered moments of contestation over the inalienability of the hoard. Entering into conversation with Julie Valk’s (2020) brilliant articulation of the “alienating inalienable” status of Japanese kimono, the last part of the chapter considers what happens to the househoard at the moment of inheritance, when those who grew up in it must sort through and liquidate it. Here, I argue, when the singularized hoard comes into view as a multitude of musty and weathered objects from an earlier time—once-familiar objects now in various states of decomposition and decay—the hoarded house of memory shows itself to be a perverse kind of archive.

Background and Methods My reflections in this chapter have grown out of nearly a decade of research into hoarding and domestic (dis)order. Early on, I conducted participant observation with the Toronto Hoarding Coalition, a working group created in 2011 to bring together first responders, social workers, legal service providers, therapists, eldercare/child protective services, members of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and cleaning specialists to address local hoarding cases, build intervention guidelines, and share information. The Coalition was formed in the wake of a much-publicized hoarding-related fire that took place in a community housing high-rise in downtown Toronto.3 In 2014, a Steering Committee was formed from within the THC that established the Toronto Hoarding Support Services Network (THSSN), an agency that would eventually coordinate hoardingrelated supports for clients in need. I served as a member of this Steering Committee, attending meetings, workshops, and hoarding-related conferences put on by the THC and its affiliates.

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Between 2014 and 2015, I also began a series of interviews with Professional Home Organizers (POs) in and around the Greater Toronto Area. Of the 21 POs I interviewed that year, two had been members of the THC. The others were recruited through local POC (Professional Organizers of Canada) chapters and through direct solicitations of local POs via their public websites. Three POs, having got wind of my research from their colleagues, actually contacted me to be part of the study. Elsewhere (Kilroy-Marac 2016), I describe POs’ professional training and accreditation procedures, give a brief history and background of their profession, and examine a few of the techniques they use to help clients declutter their domestic spaces. Over the course of my involvement with these POs, I came to see them as keen and enthusiastic observers of the relation between people and things, expressing a deep curiosity and almost anthropological desire to understand the material and affective attachments of their clients. This research also led me to look more closely at some of the normative, often-unspoken assumptions that circulate in contemporary North America about material accumulation, and about how our material possessions should be handled, cared for, organized, and discarded (Kilroy-Marac 2018). It was through my hoarding research that I also came to learn about the existence of online peer-support communities for people with family members in hoarding situations. These groups, which serve as sites for sharing resources, exchanging stories, and both asking for and offering advice, have proliferated since 2015, with numerous public and private groups appearing across social media for people who identify themselves as “Adult Children of Hoarders.” I have been personally involved in one of these closed/private groups for several years now, and it was because of this involvement that the moderators permitted me to post a recruitment call for people to be interviewed about their experiences growing up in a hoard.4 Twenty-four people reached out to me as a result of the post; so far, I have conducted thirteen interviews, all of which have taken place via Zoom and were semi-structured in nature, lasting between 1 and 2.5 hours. These interviews form the heart of this chapter. They also laid the foundation of a recently published article in which I examine the hoard as a substance of kinship (Kilroy-Marac 2022).5 My thirteen ACoH interlocutors ranged in age from their mid-twenties to their late forties, and all were raised in the US or Canada. Eleven selfidentified as white, one as Latinx, and another as having mixed European and Indigenous descent. Three of my interlocutors identified themselves as nonbinary/genderqueer/agender, and the rest as ciswomen or women. While several of my interlocutors reported that their families faced financial troubles while they were growing up, either due to job loss or because of a parent’s excessive shopping or spending, none grew up in poverty, and all but two report some degree of affluence. Each had at least one parent— usually a father—who held a relatively stable professional occupation (e.g.,

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doctor, lawyer, nurse, military officer, professor). Five reported having stay-at-home moms, and six had parents who divorced when they were young or who had been previously married. All thirteen of my interlocutors hold bachelor’s degrees, and four hold advanced degrees. And while two currently live in the same city as their parent(s), eleven live more than 200 miles away.6 While the discussions I offer in this chapter are built upon this previous ethnographic research and reflect the experiences, recollections, and stories shared by both my PO and ACoH interlocutors, they are also implicitly and explicitly informed by my own experiences growing up in and reckoning with a hoarded house. Until now, I have been hesitant to write about these experiences. This is, I think, at least in part due to the complex range of prohibitions that develop around the hoard itself. For families living in or dealing with hoarding situations, it often feels difficult or even taboo to talk about the hoard publicly; for children of hoarders, protecting “the secret” often feels like the best way to protect and show loyalty to their hoarding parent. In some ways, then, speaking directly about the hoard may feel like a form of betrayal. Still, it is clear that my desire to grapple with and understand my own experiences has informed every aspect of my hoarding research, from the questions I feel compelled to ask, to the ways I hear and “make sense” of my interlocutors’ stories, to the key points I seize upon and write about, both here and elsewhere. The autoethnographic reflections I include in this chapter, then, signal an attempt to make legible the stakes of (and motivations behind) my research and analysis, and to add an additional layer upon this ethnographic scene.

When the Hoard Becomes the House A starting point for my thinking about how the house-hoard may make both memory and kinship has been to engage the literature that sits at the intersection of new kinship and material culture/ materiality studies, and that considers how kin relations get “made” and “done,” with things, particularly in and around everyday household and domestic spaces (McKinnon 2017). Whether through an examination of consumption practices and commodities (Gregson 2007; Howell 2003; Miller 1995, 2004), household displays and family photos (Bouquet 2002; Hurdley 2006, 2013), the accumulation and management of clutter (Woodward 2015, 2021) or the passing along or inheritance of sentiment-laden heirlooms (Curasi, Arnould, and Price 2004; Curasi, Price, and Arnould 2004; Holmes 2019), much of this work has shown how family bonds are created and sentiments of belonging are affirmed with things. I have found, however, that my own inquiry takes a twist on this literature in two main ways. First, while many of the texts mentioned above describe how people (agentively and with intention) “do” kinship and “make” memory with things, I am just as interested in how the “feelings” of kinship—both

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positive and negative—may accrete in things and their surroundings. Here, I am dually inspired by Carsten’s (2019: 139) intimation that the affective quality of kin relations has a “strong tendency to attach itself to stuff” and the “radical possibility” suggested by Newell “that we actually store memory in things” (2014: 198). What is more, whether due to the fact that personhood (Strathern 1988), or even human agency (Gell 1998), may be dispersed into or extended through objects or because they carry a force all their own (Bennett 2004, 2010, 2012), material things may draw people together, push them apart, and “make” particular kinds of relations and memories. Second, the hoard is a strange and unwieldy kind of “thing,” made up of a multitude of disparate items. While this list is far from exhaustive, my ACoH interlocutors named some of the following items in their parent(s) hoards: old newspapers, broken-down electronics, precious coin and stamp collections, stacks of magazines dating back decades, savings bonds, broken furniture, clothing, toys, crafting and sewing materials, books, unopened bags from Nordstroms, golf shirts, broken plates, toxic chemicals, holiday decorations, bulk goods, heirlooms, photos, “every piece of clothing my sisters and I ever wore when we were kids,” cardboard boxes, “things rescued from their parents’ houses,” garbage, “treasures mixed with trash,” stuff turned to dust, mold, insects, mice, and so on. Still, the hoard is regularly referred to by my interlocutors as a singular entity. As years go by, a strange comingling of the hoard’s disparate elements seems to take place, both conceptually and physically, through processes of disintegration and decay. Further, as the piles slip and settle, the singular hoard also creates new topographies and in turn becomes surroundings. The hoard becomes the house. I am captivated by thinking about the hoard in terms of its topography—its surfaces and depths, its elevation changes, the dimensionality of its features, and the way it reshapes space itself. Reflecting upon the hoards of their childhoods, my ACoH interlocutors describe domestic landscapes replete with mountains and trails, goat paths and steep banks, and unpassable walls. Describing the upper floor of their home, Raz, a queer Jewish person in their mid-twenties who grew up in the mid-Atlantic region of the US and currently lives about three hours (by car) from their parents, recalled rooms so full they had to be climbed to be entered. To do laundry, they had to leave the path that ended at the laundry room and mount the piles. My conversations with Raz and others have led me to imagine what the topo maps of our childhood domestic landscapes might look like. In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard proposes as an “auxiliary of psychoanalysis” a method that he calls “topoanalysis,” which he describes not just as an analysis of place, but of the “localization of our memories” at the “sites of our intimate lives” (1994 [1958]: 8). For Bachelard, it is specifically the house of one’s childhood that structures memory and informs the poetic imagination; one remembers one’s childhood home, but

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even more than this, the home “houses” memory. Carsten (2004: 31) notes the “extraordinary evocative power” of “memories of houses inhabited in childhood,” succumbing even to her own reminiscences, which centered upon “a large kitchen table at which not only cooking and eating but also most family discussions, communal homework, and many games took place.” Eating together, sitting together, reading or watching TV together, performing mundane daily tasks, celebrating holidays—remembering these activities “can conjure up strong feelings of connectedness (even if some are negative)” (Nordqvist and Smart 2014: 153), as can the material objects that were present upon these scenes and the physical space in which they took place. “Remembrance,” writes Joëlle Bahloul in The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria 1937–1962, “is structured in terms of two main fusing dimensions: domestic space and family time” and is “moulded into the material and physical structures” of the house (1996: 29). Within a house-hoard, the sheer volume of the hoard serves to restrict certain interactions, habits, and movements while enabling and requiring others. For example, when a kitchen or dining room table and its chairs are stacked full of stuff and no longer accessible, family members might talk or eat standing up. Jessie, who grew up in the Midwestern US and described herself as a “freckly white Irish woman” in her early forties, remembers that a lot of the time she spent hanging out with her parents at home was in their king-sized bed, which was one of the only places in the house that was consistently cleared of stuff, and which they jokingly referred to as “command central.” There, they would read together, watch TV, chat about the day, and sometimes eat their meals, which mostly consisted of takeout, since their kitchen was too filled with stuff to cook in. In my own house, my mother’s bedroom became so full that it was no longer possible to enter it at all (let alone sleep in it), so she slept on a couch in our living room for nearly twenty years. When bathroom sinks and showers are not functional, teeth may be brushed in the kitchen and people might resort to sponge baths. If a lightbulb burns out and the fixture is unreachable, they may use flashlights to get around. If a washing machine or clothes drier breaks down, they might resort to taking their clothes to a laundromat for washing instead, indefinitely. Conjuring the layout of her childhood home, Heidi, a white cisgender woman in her early forties, who lives in the same mid-Atlantic city in which she grew up, described several large rooms, including a “large living room and a foyer and a dining room,” all of which were packed full, with narrow pathways cutting through steep banks of stuff. The only room that could accommodate her family of five was the TV room, which was also cluttered, but into which they all crammed for dinner each night.7 Catherine, an agender student in their late twenties of mixed European and Indigenous descent, who grew up in a military family in the southwestern US, explained that because there was stuff piled high on every surface and

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Figure 4.1.  My mother’s bedroom. © Katie Kilroy-Marac, 2021.

nowhere to sit anywhere in their house, the family did not spend all that much time together in the home. Indeed, for families living in hoarding situations, spending time together in the hoard is sometimes difficult, even impossible. Several of my ACoH interlocutors recalled dinners in restaurants or family vacations as key moments of family togetherness and

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freedom from the hoard, and even now prefer to socialize in restaurants when they visit. Just as the hoard shapes how family members are able to be (or not be) together and occupy space in a hoarded house, it also structures communication in significant ways. Between the parent who hoards and other family members emerge highly regulated ways of speaking about, around, or in avoidance of the hoard, which may extend to how the hoard gets talked about (or does not) with neighbors, extended family members, friends, teachers, and service providers. Jessie described the hoard as “an ‘elephant in the room’ kind of thing,” where the elephant is not only in the room but takes over the room, and even though “[i]t’s always on the verge of tearing the whole family apart,” nobody ever really talks about it. Communication is never direct, but instead bends around the hoard. To the extent that my ACoH interlocutors remember the hoarded houses of their childhoods in terms of the habits, movements, and relationships that were restricted and produced therewithin, we might say that these hoards were relational. Much more than mere objects of memory or scenes upon which remembering takes place, these houses have served as blueprints for how they have come to experience space and relate to both people and things later in life. Indeed, I would suggest that growing up in a hoarded home produces its own distinct and embodied forms of spatial sensing that are inflected by—and productive of—a broad range of affective orientations, feelings, and emotions, from cozy and secure to overwhelmed, constricted, or distressed. For example, Catherine relayed that because there was really nowhere else in the house for them to be, they spent most of their time in a nook they had hollowed out in their bedroom closet, or they would sometimes curl up inside the large tumble dryer to read. Books and solitude were a kind of refuge for them—both a form of “home” and an escape—and these small spaces felt cozy, even amidst conditions they described as nothing less than “squalor.” On Raz’s part, they told me that now when they go back to visit their parents, they limit the amount of time they spend inside the house. “I realize how much it really affected me and how bad it feels for my body. It’s just disgusting.” Nevertheless, they reflected: “I’ve thought about this a lot, about how comforting it really did feel when I was young, and even now sometimes if I settle in a little bit to the situation. When I’m in the hoard, it feels like a cocoon. It feels like a little nest; it feels safe, in a very bizarre way. And that really conditioned me, I think, to feel sheltered and cared for in small spaces.” Raz was troubled that the hoarded house of their childhood, which they now view as “disgusting” and harmful, might have laid the foundation for how they experience comfort and security. They went on to tell me that as an adult, when they get really upset with someone or about something, they find they need to put themselves in a tight physical space to calm down and feel better. “Wherever I’m living, that can look like something different but, you know, right now there’s this small space

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between my bed and the wall, like in a corner, and so I’ll go in between there and I’ll sit . . . and it feels . . . it feels safer.” Conversely, Heidi’s spatial sensing and the affective orientations that accompany it stand in sharp contrast to those described by Catherine and Raz. For Heidi, who recalls a pervasive feeling of not being in control of her own space as a kid, clutter and disorder cause her anxiety as an adult, and she is prone to feelings of claustrophobia. All surfaces need to be clean, clear, and open in order for her to feel calm. During a recent move, she described feeling overwhelmed and panicked by the slow process of taking things out of boxes and finding places for them, and by the feeling that she was “living out of piles,” living back in the hoard.

The Contested Inalienability of the Hoard In Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving, Annette Weiner articulates a theory of exchange that challenges the norm of reciprocity, positing instead that keeping—that is, the desire and ability to “keep some things out of circulation”—stands as the true energizing force behind reciprocal exchange (1992: x). What is kept close, she continues, are those inalienable possessions “imbued with the intrinsic and ineffable identities of their owners” that would “diminish . . . the self” and weaken the kin group if they were to be lost (6). She includes in her discussion a broad range of examples from across Oceania: a wide array of material objects, dynamic forms of mythic knowledge, land rights, and more. To Weiner, and Maurice Godelier (1999) after her, inalienable possessions are central to the legitimation and (re)production of identity and kinship across generations; keeping and successfully transmitting these possessions is generative of value, social identity, and kin strength. To what extent might the hoard be considered inalienable to the people living within it? For persons with hoarding tendencies, it is not unusual for most or all possessions to be treated as inalienable—as intrinsic and important parts of themselves, their kin, and the house—and kept out of circulation. Gail, a Professional Organizer (PO) who works in the Greater Toronto Area, relayed the story of a client’s hoarded room, filled to the brim with things deemed inalienable: [It] was just full of paper. She kept every single piece of paper from each of her four children from every year of school. Everything they ever did, anything they ever wrote, drew, every birthday card they ever received, every invitation, everything. She saw all of these as pieces of her kids, in a way. And she has the same thing from her own life and she had lots of awards and certifications. And she went through a lot. She did a lot of adventures, and each one of these things she in wrote diaries, and she had dozens of diaries. And day-timers from high school on, and she was in her early forties. Everything was in a day-timer because everything that she wrote in there was indicative of what she had accomplished and this was so important to her. It was her.

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From the perspective of my ACoH interlocutors, when they described the hoards of their childhoods as becoming surroundings and merging with the house, the hoard certainly took on an air of inalienability. At other times, however, they highlighted moments when the hoard came into their view not just as alienable, but as alienating. Heidi, for example, relayed to me that she and her siblings: “were never allowed to get rid of anything, so all the things we accumulated in our childhood, we had to pack into our bedrooms . . . [my mother] even made us keep all the little toys that you would get in McDonald’s Happy Meals, you know?” One day, when Heidi was already a teenager, she decided she had had enough; she “started throwing things in this garbage bag and took it out to the curb.” When her mother realized what Heidi had done, she went out and dragged the bag back inside. “Not two hours later, it was all back in the house,” Heidi said, shaking her head. For her mother, it appeared that everything Heidi had ever touched or played with remained connected to her in some way. It belonged with the family, in the house. It was, in a sense, inalienable. For Heidi, however, all of these objects were suffocating and overwhelming. She viewed them as unimportant and classified them as garbage; she wanted to rid herself of them and make space in her bedroom. These objects limited her self-expression and growth; they alienated her from herself and her surroundings. Her mother’s insistence upon keeping the objects and refusal to let Heidi throw anything away further alienated Heidi from her mother and increased the emotional distance between them. Writing of the transfer of precious kimono collections from older to younger generations of women in Japan, Julie Valk (2020) describes the potentially “alienating qualities” of inherited inalienable possessions. Even when—or perhaps, because—kimono are replete with personal and familial meaning and link the receiver to previous generations, inheriting such collections may be considered an honor and a duty, but it may also be experienced as exceedingly burdensome. Because of the time, space, and emotional labor they require, many inherited kimono collections are experienced as profoundly alienating and end up being turned alienable, given away or sold to second-hand shops. When inalienable possessions cannot successfully be transmitted, Valk writes, “the relational self” on both the giving and the receiving end may become alienated from both the object and the family (2020: 149). Valk’s formulation of the “alienating inalienable” is crucial to my own thinking. A clear difference between kimono collections and hoards, however, is that the hoard’s status as inalienable appears to be far more contested, both within the family affected by hoarding and at a larger social and cultural level. Valk rightfully notes that “object[s] cannot generate inalienability alone: [they] need people to want them to be inalienable, and for the wider social context to validate their inalienability” (160). The designation of inalienability, when not recognized or acknowledged beyond its designator, may give rise to conflict;

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in the case of hoarding and as Heidi’s story demonstrates, this may trouble kin relationality and lead to alienation.

Inheriting the Hoard If the inalienable status of an object depends upon both its legibility to others, Valk’s article reminds us that inalienability also depends upon transmission. Inalienable objects must move successfully from one generation to the next for their status to be confirmed as such. Because inalienable possessions coalesce and demonstrate social identity and kin strength, the inheritance of these objects has the potential to activate and affirm relatedness and belonging, and ultimately, to reproduce kinship.8 When inheritance fails, however, either because inalienable objects prove burdensome and cannot be accommodated, as in Valk’s example, or because the inalienable status of the objects is contested from the start, feelings of kin affinity, relatedness, and belonging may be weakened or diminished rather than affirmed. Much of the writing on how kinship is “made” and “done” with things focuses on success stories—or in other words, how families use things to successfully affirm, maintain, and (re)produce themselves. There are a number of texts, however, that account for moments when kin-affirming practices run into trouble or lead to unintended consequences, or when kinship actually gets “unmade” with things. Some of these draw attention to the material practices that accompany separation, distancing, or “dekinning” (Howell 2007; Nordqvist and Smart 2014; Edwards 2014). Others pay attention to moments when the “making” or “doing” of kinship with things goes sideways or even fails (Hurdley 2007), particularly at the moment of inheritance (Arnaud, Curasi, and Price 2004; Campbell 2015; Valk 2020). In even the best of cases, inheritance can be a tricky matter. In other cases, it may disrupt claims to relatedness in unexpected ways. In a paper titled, “The Inheritor’s Dilemma: The Cultural Biography of the Things You Didn’t Want in the First Place” (2015), for example, Brian Campbell tells the story of a woman in her thirties who was seeking to sell a collection of her father’s books in order to pay for his palliative care. As the executor of her father’s estate, the woman invited a used goods dealer to rummage through her father’s basement full of mildewed boxes that contained upwards of 10,000 books. The books turned out to be pulp fiction, old smut books from the 1950s–80s. The woman, shocked and disgusted by her father’s collection, wondered what else she did not know about him. She felt embarrassed and concerned for his reputation—and, no doubt, her own. Her father had carefully printed his name on the inside cover of each and every book, thus transforming each from a commodity to a singularized, personalized, inalienable possession. Now the daughter furiously grabbed at them one by one to scribble out his name, perhaps in an effort to unlink her father from the unseemly collection. She told the

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dealer she was no longer interested in selling; she did not want his name associated with the books, out in the world. Later, however, she had a change of heart and did end up selling the books; she did not want to hold on to the books either, she needed the money, and she reasoned that they had to go somewhere. Both Valk and Campbell draw attention to the difficulties that may arise at the moment of inheritance, when objects deemed precious or inalienable by a parent are unwanted, objectionable, or impossible to accommodate by those who must inherit, provoking feelings of guilt, anger, misrecognition, resentment, and alienation. But what happens to kin relations—and to memory itself—when the inherited object in question is the hoarded house of one’s childhood, and when the oneiric house-hoard meets the sheer materiality of that same home in the present? I turn now to a brief autoethnographic reflection of my own experience of confronting, sorting through, and liquidating my own childhood hoarded home. In November 2021, I traveled to Minnesota to empty my mother’s hoarded house. She had been involved in a serious car accident several years prior that forced her transition to an assisted living facility. Due in part to COVID-19, the house sat vacant for more than two years, during which time the city received anonymous complaints about the uninhabited and dilapidated state of the house. The next-door neighbor contacted me to tell me they were experiencing a serious rodent infestation, surmising that my mother’s house was the source. This, in addition to the financial costs of keeping the house and my mother’s gradual acceptance of her limited mobility, led her to agree that something had to be done. As with Heidi’s mother, my own mother had always forbidden me from taking things out of the house or throwing things away—even things I regarded as trash—but she was now giving me hesitant permission to begin the process, with instructions that as much as possible should be boxed up and moved into storage, and that as little as possible should be thrown away. She had lived in that house for 50 years, along with my father, who passed away in 2014. I, an only child, had lived there until the age of seventeen. She dictated to me a list of all the things she wanted me to find in the hoard and bring directly to her in her studio apartment. It was six pages long. The night I got in, I went straight to the house to plan my work. It had already been infested with mice while my mother was living there, but now I saw evidence that raccoons and feral cats had also made their way inside. It was an ecosystem of sorts. As I walked the paths around the house and surveyed the hoard’s topography, I tried to focus on individual items—what were each of these things, where did they come from, and where would they go? I heard movement in the depths. Cleaning out a hoard is a big job, and a whole industry has sprung up to help people like me with situations like this. I found a company that was available to start later that week. Over a period of eight surreal days, I worked alongside six people with shovels and respirator masks. We filled

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Figure 4.2.  The basement. © Katie Kilroy-Marac, 2021.

seven semi-trailer-sized dumpsters to the top with garbage taken out of our small suburban house and packed up some thirty boxes for storage. My job was to oversee the process, find the items on my mom’s list, and make decisions about what else to keep. The final cost for all those workers and all those days was $17,500. There is much to say about the hoarding clean-out process, as well as what it felt like to finally confront this object of my dreams (and

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nightmares)—this house-hoard of my childhood that has, for better or worse, shaped me in such profound ways. For the purposes of this chapter, though, I want to highlight a moment from the third day of the clean-out, when we started working on the basement. Perhaps I should have known that the basement would be the most emotionally difficult room in the house to clean out; it was the first room of the house to fill completely, and it had been unenterable for as long as I could remember. I should have known that its depths would contain some of my family’s oldest things, and that big chunks of our long-ago lives would be down there—the skins and selves that were once us but that we had outgrown and left behind, the material remains of unfulfilled projects and unrealized futures, the things we used to love and that seemed, for a while at least, to love us back. The material layers of our lives would be down there, and in a sense, so would we. Up until that point, I had not been sentimental about much of anything at all. The objects we were pulling out of the house had had little resonance to me and were all in terrible shape. There were animal feces spread throughout, and mold; we even found a desiccated cat in the mix. It was easy (and felt great) to shovel things to the dumpster. In the basement, though, as the crew dug down into the hoard, they exposed sediment layers of half-disintegrated objects that were familiar to me from my early childhood. These were things I had not seen or thought about since I was very small—the clothes and shoes we had worn, the toys I had played with, the pipes my dad had smoked, a recliner chair my mom used to sit in before the hoard swallowed it all up. All of these objects conjured memory-images of my childhood, and in the depths of the basement, these were coming up fast. But all of the objects were also in an advanced state of decay, covered in shit, unsavable. And then came my old Dapper Dan doll, ripped and discolored, his face half-chewed off by one of the creatures that had made the hoard its home. A strange Proustian madeleine, indeed. But the memory-images it stirred were not snapshots or movie reels of childhood moments that had been preserved in their fullness against time. Fused with a flickering image of my mother teaching me how to button, snap, and tie my shoes with the doll was the grotesque vision of its current state, which also served as a grim reminder of the hoard itself, of time’s passage, and even of death. And so it was with so many of the things we found down there. Each and every memory or kinship feeling these ruined objects stirred in me underscored kinship and life itself not as durable, but as transient and fleeting, subject to decay, battered by time. In this, I not only experienced alienation in ways described by Valk—from kin, from objects, and even from my relational self. I also experienced profound alienation from my own memories and my own childhood. These feelings were even further amplified when I had to deliver the ruined memory-items to the dumpster and throw them away, once and for all.

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Conclusion What does the hoard do to kinship and memory? If the oneiric house-hoard houses relational memories and serves as a blueprint for how its inhabitants will both experience space and relate to people and things later in life, the actual house-hoard is a perverse kind of archive: it is material accumulation absent of archival imperatives like selection, separation, spacing, curation, care, and retrieval. When the status of inalienability gets extended to all objects without distinction or separation, it not only decreases their value but nullifies it—inalienable objects depend upon this differentiation for their value and meaning to remain intact. For my mother and others who hoard, it may be that keeping is meant to consolidate and bind together the self and the family, to hold onto the objects in which kinship feelings have accrued and memory contained. While the aim of the person who hoards may be preservation, however, the hoard slowly destroys that which it seeks to preserve. Confronting the hoard, then, is bearing witness to this process; it is confronting memories and kinship objects in a state of ruin, such that the objects and their ruination are held together in a new set of memoryimages that populate the oneiric house. Katie Kilroy-Marac  is an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her first book,  An Impossible Inheritance: Postcolonial  Psychiatry and the Work of Memory in a West African Clinic  (University of California Press, 2019), was based on fieldwork conducted at the Fann Psychiatric Clinic in Dakar, Senegal. Her  current research examines the emergence of  hoarding as mental disorder, public health hazard, and media spectacle in North America. Following her interest in how people attempt to craft ethical lives through consumption (and its regulation), she has also conducted a critical investigation of the Tiny House Movement.

Notes 1. The exhibit, titled Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, was shown in London, Berlin, and New York (Brooklyn) between 1997–2000 (see Rosenthal et al.’s [1997] exhibit catalogue for background). In New York, the exhibit was steeped in controversy and became a flashpoint of first amendment rights when then-mayor Rudy Giuliani withheld city funding from the Brooklyn Museum on the grounds that the show was “‘sick stuff’ that ‘desecrate[d] religion’” (Frazer 2001: 127). Arnold Lehman, who was the acting director of the museum at the time of the exhibit, has since published a book about the controversy titled Sensation: The Madonna, The Mayor, The Media, and the First Amendment (2021). 2. Throughout the book, the flickering memory-images of the childhood home (as well as the memory-making capacity of the home’s afterimage) presented by Bachelard are positive, warm, and inspired, filled with nostalgia and reverie. Indeed, as he notes in the preface, “hostile space is hardly mentioned” in the pages of the book (1994 [1958]: xxxvi). He continues: “we shall consider the images that attract. And with

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regard to images, it soon becomes clear that to attract and to repulse do not give contrary experiences” (ibid.) 3. The highly publicized fire took place at 200 Wellesley St. E, a 711-unit subsidized apartment building in Downtown Toronto. It took 120 firefighters and 27 fire trucks more than five hours to tame. Seventeen people suffered fire- and smoke-related injuries and the building itself incurred major damage. More than 1200 residents were displaced from their homes, some for weeks and even months (Vincent 2011). The cause of the fire was determined to have been an active cigarette butt thrown from the balcony of an apartment that landed on a hoarded balcony. 4. My involvement in this ACoH group forum is entirely personal and does not constitute a form of “participant observation.” I take seriously the group’s strict code of privacy and I do not refer to the site’s content or discussions here or anywhere else. My recruitment message was approved by the group’s moderator and posted to the discussion board; all subsequent communication with interlocutors took place via DM or email. 5. My interviews with ACoHs frequently turned into conversations and commiserations filled with many moments of strange familiarity, swapped stories, and incredulous laughter, but also descriptions of unexpected scenes and moments of surprise. I am  humbled and grateful for the generosity they showed by sharing their stories with me. 6. Though it is impossible to draw any kind of conclusion from such a small sample, I was nevertheless surprised to learn just how far these numbers deviate from typical residency patterns in the US. According to a recent study by Choi et al. (2020), nearly 75 percent of US adults live within 30 miles of at least one parent, and only around 7 percent live more than 500 miles away from their parent(s). Further, settlement patterns in relation to one’s parents are closely connected to socio-economic status, level of education, and key demographic variables, with more affluent and highly educated individuals tending to live farther from their parents (see also Murray 2022). 7. All of my ACoH interlocutors opted to pseudonyms in this research as a matter of privacy and confidentiality, with the exception of Heidi. 8. “The reproduction of kinship,” writes Annette Weiner, “is legitimated in each generation through the transmission of inalienable possessions” (1992: 11).

References Arnould, Eric J., Carolyn Folkman Curasi, and Linda L. Price. 2004. “Inalienable Wealth in North American Households.” In Values and Valuables: From the Sacred to the Symbolic, eds. Cynthia Werner and Duran Bell, 209–30. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press. Bachelard, Gaston. 1994 [1958]. The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press. Bahloul, Joelle. 1996. The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria, 1937–1962. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2004. “The Force of Things Steps toward an Ecology of Matter.” Political Theory 32(3): 347–72. ———. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2012. “Powers of the Hoard: Artistry and Agency in a World of Vibrant Matter.” In Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 237–69. Punctum Books.

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Bouquet, Mary. 2002. “Making Kinship, with an Old Reproductive Tech­ nology.” In Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, eds. Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, 85–115. Durham: Duke University Press. Campbell, Brian. 2015. “The Inheritor’s Dilemma: The Cultural Biography of the Things You Didn’t Want in the First Place.” In Keeping Things Alive. Presentation at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings. Denver, CO, USA. Carsten, Janet. 2004. After Kinship: New Departures in Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2019. “The Stuff of Kinship.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Kinship, ed. Sandra Bamford, 133–50. Cambridge Handbooks in Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Choi, HwaJung, Robert F. Schoeni, Emily E. Wiemers, V. Joseph Hotz, and Judith A. Seltzer. 2020. “Spatial Distance Between Parents and Adult Children in the United States.” Journal of Marriage and Family 82(2): 822–40. Curasi, Carolyn Folkman, Eric J. Arnould, and Linda L. Price. 2004. “Ritual Desire and Ritual Development: An Examination of Family Heirlooms in Contemporary North American Households.” In Contemporary Consumption Rituals: A Research Anthology, eds. Cele Otnes and Tina M. Lawrey, 237–65. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Curasi, Carolyn Folkman, Linda L. Price, and Eric J. Arnould. 2004. “How Individuals’ Cherished Possessions Become Families’ Inalienable Wealth.” Journal of Consumer Research 31(3): 609–22. Douglas,  Mary. 1991. “The Idea of Home: A Kind of Space.” Social Research 58(1): 287–307. Edwards, Jeanette. 2014. “Undoing Kinship.” In Relatedness in Assisted Reproduction: Families, Origins and Identities, eds. Fatemeh Ebtehaj, Martin Richards, Susanna Graham, and Tabitha Freeman, 44–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fraser, Andrea. 2001. “A ‘Sensation’ Chronicle.”  Social Text  19(2): 127–56. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Gregson, Nicky. 2011. Living with Things: Ridding, Accommodation, Dwelling. London: Sean Kingston Publishing. Godelier, Maurice. 1999. The Enigma of the Gift, trans. Nora Scott, 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holmes, Helen. 2019. “Material Affinities: ‘Doing’ Family through the Practices of Passing On.” Sociology 53(1): 174–91. Howell, Signe. 2003. “Kinning: The Creation of Life Trajectories in Transnational Adoptive Families.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9(3): 465–84. ———. 2007. The Kinning of Foreigners: Transnational Adoption in a Global Perspective. Berghahn Books.

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Hurdley, Rachel. 2006. “Dismantling Mantelpieces: Narrating Identities and Materializing Culture in the Home.” Sociology 40(4): 717–33. ———. 2007. “Objecting Relations: The Problem of the Gift.” The Sociological Review (Keele) 55(1): 124–43. Kilroy-Marac, Katie. 2016. “A Magical Reorientation of the Modern: Professional Organizers and Thingly Care in Contemporary North America.” Cultural Anthropology 31(3): 438–57. ———. 2018. “An Order of Distinction (or, How to Tell a Collection from a Hoard).” Journal of Material Culture 23(1): 20–38. ———. 2022. “Hoarding and the Substance of Kinship.” Anthropological Quarterly 95(4): 761–84. Lehman, Arnold. 2021. Sensation: The Madonna, The Mayor, The Media, and the First Amendment. London New York: Merrell Publishers. Mauss, Marcel. 1925. “Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l’échange dans  les sociétés archaïques.”  Année sociologique  Nouvelle Serie 1: 30–186. McKinnon, Susan. 2017. “Doing and Being: Process, Essence, and Hierarchy in Making Kin.” In The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology, eds. Simon Coleman, Susan Hyatt, and Ann Kinsolver, 177–98. London: Routledge. Miller, Daniel. 1995. “Consumption and Commodities.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24(1): 141–61. ———. 2004. “Making Love in Supermarkets.” In The Blackwell Cultural Economy Reader, eds. Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, 251–65. Wiley Online Library. Murray, Stephanie H. 2022. “How Affluence Pulls People Away from Their Families.” The Atlantic. 11 May 2022. https://www.theatlantic.com/fa​ mily/archive/2022/05/living-close-to-family-parents/629819/. Accessed on 30 November 2022. Newell, Sasha. 2014. “The Matter of the Unfetish: Hoarding and the Spirit of Possession.” HAU 4(3): 185–213. Nordqvist, Petra, and Carol Smart. 2014. Relative Strangers: Family Life, Genes and Donor Conception. Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rosenthal, Norman, Lisa Jardine, Richard Shone, Martin Maloney, and Brooks Adams. 1997. Sensation: Young British Artists from The Saatchi Collection. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Valk, Julie. 2020. “The Alienating Inalienable: Rethinking Annette Weiner’s Concept of Inalienable Wealth through Japan’s ‘Sleeping Kimono.’” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10(1): 147–65. Vincent, Donovan. “We Know Cause of 200 Wellesley Fire, but Who’s at Fault?” 2011. Thestar.Com. 5 July 2011. https://www.thestar.com/news​

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/gta/2011/07/05/we_know_cause_of_200_wellesley_fire_but_whos_at​ _fault.html. Accessed on 23 October 2022. Woodward, Sophie. 2015. “The Hidden Lives of Domestic Things: Accumulations in Cupboards, Lofts, and Shelves.” In Intimacies, Critical Consumption and Diverse Economies, 216–31. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2021. “Clutter in Domestic Spaces: Material Vibrancy, and Competing Moralities.” The Sociological Review. Weiner, Annette B. 1992. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of KeepingWhile Giving. 1st edn. Berkeley: University of California Press.

5 Locating Hoarding

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How Spatial Concepts Shape Disorders in Japan and the Anglophone World

Fabio Gygi

It is generally agreed that including areas of no particular use when making a building creates visual interest and they can be made to serve all sorts of purposes. —Yoshida Kenkō (1332), Essays in Idleness Saffron: “What is it?” Edwina: “It’s an Eskimo papoose.” Saffron: “Why?!” Edwina: “Because, sweetie, what you can’t tell about a person by what they have chosen for you to see on their coffee table isn’t worth knicker elastic!” —Absolutely Fabulous, Season 2, Episode 1, “Hospital,” 1994

The question as to where “hoarding” is located has two different, but equally valid answers: it is both in the environment of hoarders and in the hoarders’ brains. The diagnosis provides the connection that links these two loci in a hierarchical fashion: the external chaos mirrors the internal “disorder”; that is, the hoarded things are but an outside manifestation, the symptom of an inner dysfunction (Frost and Steketee 2010), chemical imbalance (Saxena 2007), genetic trait (Hirschtritt and Mathews 2014; Sinopoli et al. 2020), or of a pathological style of decision-making (Tolin et al. 2012; Wheaton and Topilow 2020). These different explanations are undergirded by two factors. The first is the slippage of meaning that is enabled by the term “disorder,” which can elastically link and mix concrete instances of disorder with metaphorical uses of the term. The term “mental

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disorder” itself is notoriously difficult to define (Horwitz 2002; Wakefield 2007). Medical anthropologists, on the other hand, have pointed out that it is precisely the conceptual slipperiness of “disorder” that opens the notion up to a rich metaphorical play that allows new theoretical connections to emerge (Good et al. 2008). The second factor is the way in which the “interior” provides a metaphorical bridge from one kind of interiority—the Cartesian theater of the mind—to another, in this case, the domestic interior. Both terms share the semantic territory of opacity, privacy, intimacy, and subjectivity, but also of possession, mastery, and a certain idealized impermeability. This discursive formation of the “interior” has fundamentally shaped the way we conceive of subjectivity on one side, and domesticity as an expression of this subjectivity on the other. This chapter argues that this understanding of hoarding has a long and complex pre-history and is culturally specific to Euro-American notions of space and the selves that inhabit it. By contrasting some of these ideas about interiority with data from my own fieldwork among hoarders in Tokyo, my aim is to show how assumptions about space and the subjects it accommodates shape the ways in which mental and material disorders become intelligible in different cultural contexts. This becomes even more important when we consider that the “species of spaces” that we live in are, in Georges Perec’s wording, “infra-ordinary”—so underwhelmingly ordinary that we scarcely notice how they shape perceptions, relations and the particular kinds of sociability that they afford. This is the reason why underlying assumptions about spatiality are difficult to access; they form the perennial, inert background, in front of which the gestalt of the material and relational configurations of psychosocial life emerges. My argument, in short, is that the understanding of hoarding in Japan as a social rather than a mental pathology is partly conditioned by the spatial seclusion of privacy. Conversely, the Western understanding of hoarding is made possible by a metaphorical link between exterior and interior space. Following Harman (2005), I understand the metaphor—here the mind as interior chamber—not as based on a series of resemblances, but as creating a new reality in which both the mind and the interior take on aspects of each other. In that sense, the metaphor organizes our understanding of a new entity instead of merely comparing two already existing things. Such abstract musings about “space” may seem removed from the more practical concerns of materiality and kinship. As I will try to show, however, both the meaning of objects and the meaning of social others is determined by either their spatial containment or their exclusion from it. Objects, for example, only become problematic in cases of hoarding once they are removed from circulation and contained. Kinship, on the other hand, especially in the Japanese case, is present as a negative space: the absence of others and their capacity to control what is accumulated and what is discarded leads to accumulation, or so the narrative goes.

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The chapter will follow the chronological order of the research process. I will start with the interlocutors, whose responses have drawn my attention to the dialectic relationship between what becomes visible and what remains hidden.

Scopic Regimes of Order Kaori1 was in her 30s, worked in a department store for the well-heeled, and lived alone in central Tokyo. Untidy rooms were the norm in her family, and during our interview, she described how she became aware of the “oddity” of her room, which was filled to capacity with towers of books: We never received visitors. When I was at middle school, a friend came to visit me once, but I was in a state of stupor/paralysis (mahi). The friend was astonished. “What is this?” she said and started throwing books into a random box [to help me tidy up]. I was very surprised and thought “Oh I see, put them in a box,” which had never occurred to me before. (Interview, 29 January 2016)2

Kaori described her normal, everyday state of mind as a kind of stupor/ paralysis from which she occasionally awoke only to realize the state her room was in. These moments were usually triggered by somebody else’s presence. But they would never last long and the everyday stupor would return. When asked about the frequency of such “awakenings” (mesame), she said “about once a year,” and it was indeed a recent New Year’s visit of her concerned father that had triggered her willingness to do an interview with me. But this return to my senses (shōki ni kaeru), never lasts. For a moment I think “I need to change this environment,” but this feeling is only momentary . . . I read a book [for example], and just put it to my side. It is like if I cannot see it, it does not exist anymore. As soon as I let go of a thing, it ceases to be.”

Despite several interventions, things always return to chaos within a week or two. This is even more surprising, as Kaori is known at work as exceedingly tidy: I am often only in the office for an hour or so, so I take care to tidy up everything. When somebody is untidy at work, I get angry, shouting “clean this up!” I feel very guilty after that and think to myself, “that’s a bit rich coming from you” [she laughs], so it feels a bit schizophrenic.

Other participants in my fieldwork on hoarding in Tokyo vividly remember the moment when their taken-for-granted cluttered space was suddenly exposed to scrutiny by a third party. Kobayashi Mitsue,3 for example, never gave much thought to the fact that her private quarters (a two-­ bedroom apartment in suburban Tokyo) was untidy until a new tower

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block was built next door. A deep excavation was necessary (the average Japanese house does not have a cellar and stands on low stilts over the ground to provide ventilation from below essential for traditional rice straw matting), and her insurance company sent around a team of photographers who would document the state of affairs before construction work began, so any ensuing damage could be assessed against the “before” photographs: The research team was going around, taking detailed photographs of every room in the house. They were minutely observing how many cracks were appearing in the walls and to what degree the beams were bent out of shape. I was following them around, and being seen having such a scattered inside of the house, I felt such shame that my face seemed to be on fire. I kept repeating “I do apologize for the disorder,” “I am very ashamed of this disorder,” “I wonder why it is so scattered.” (Kobayashi 2005: 32)

While Kobayashi was, on some level, aware that her things were in disarray, she was quite surprised by the intensity of what she felt. The feeling of intense shame was triggered by the eyes of the others who came to document her house. The manga artist Ikeda Kyōko had a similar experience that she transformed into a manga called This Time for Real! Tidying Techniques for Women Who Cannot Tidy Up (2007). She is a freelance illustrator and works from home. She knew that her apartment was untidy, but, like Kobayashi Mitsue, she had never given it much thought. She was dating a colleague of one of her office lady friends when the following incident happened. One late evening while watching television, Ikeda received a phone call from this colleague saying that he just happened to pass near her house on the way home from a drinking session and whether he could have a glass of water. As he was heavily drunk, she did not think about cleaning up or hiding her disorder. But when she saw his shocked reaction, she shut the door in his face and broke down, trembling. Such an initial shock of recognition often marked a turning point in the narratives of women who started to think of themselves as “women who cannot tidy up” (katazukerarenai onna). The shame experienced in both cases is not merely felt because something shamefully hidden is exposed to others. What happens is that the presence of a social other allows the women to see their own intimately known environment through the other’s eyes. These others are usually referenced in Japanese as mawari or seken. Mawari simply means “one’s surroundings” and seken “refers only to the world of one’s own social relations and those with which we may have social relations in the future” (Abe 2008: 8). Seken, in Abe’s description, is thus the Japanese indigenous term for the more abstract Western import “society.” What the seken knows about the world can be summarized as common sense or tacit knowledge (Abe 2008: 56). The gazing others of the mawari and seken should not, however, be mistaken

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for the arbiters of a disinterested objectivity; quite the opposite, they are moral agents in their own way that have the power to shame those exposed and to jolt them into action: “Seken . . . inevitably expresses in one way or another its evaluations and strong feelings about the self.” Abe 2008: 8). In my fieldwork, the real or imagined gaze of seken (seken no me) was part of a gendered scopic regime that enforced change through revelation. The term scopic regime originated in cinema studies, but has been used in various ways to indicate the predominance of the visual in modernity (Jay 1992) or to refer to the technologically mediated nature of seeing. I used it in my initial analysis of the ethnographic material because “regime” suggests the systematic organization of coercion that emanates from the gaze and its power to render the hidden visible. “Scopic” indicates the visual, but in the context of making things visible  and thus discoverable. A scopic regime not only enlightens what is there, but it also brings with itself a paradigm of evidence—only what is visible is real—and by doing so undergirds the primacy of vision over other modalities of perception. The shock that both Kobayashi and Ikeda felt was a shock of recognition that exemplifies the power of the scopic regime: borrowing the eyes of the seken, they could see themselves as seen by others amidst their clutter. It was not so much a shock of recognition of their disorder, of which they were aware on a certain level, but a recognition of themselves as belonging to a certain category of people. As we saw in Kaori’s example, the exposure to the gaze of others was experienced like an awakening and impelled her to act, at least for the duration it lasted. But Kaori could also occupy the position of the seken when she scolded her subordinates about their untidy desks at work. The coercive power of the seken is thus partly internalized and partly realized through the agency of others. It is through these others, their perception of the self and their judgement, that the disorder enters the social world and becomes something of consequence. Reformulating William James’ notion that ideas become real when they start to have effects on reality, the disorder becomes a reality only when it becomes efficacious in the social world. This “reality,” however, is unstable and ambiguous rather than constituting some stable truth about a person. It is the raw material from which the “truth” about things and persons must be assembled. Rather than to conceptualize the intrusion of the gaze as a “revelation” that reveals the inner workings of the person, its “truth,” in a Japanese context, is better understood in terms of an ongoing process of the constitution of the social through shifting boundaries. While something hitherto invisible is revealed, the other visible “surface” becomes ­temporally obstructed. So far so good, but what was the nature of the problematic hidden space that had to be elucidated by scopic regimes? What containment was being breached by gazing into the interior? Here, a more concrete investigation of the political and cultural economy of housing in Japan in necessary.

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Cultural Economies of Housing and Kinship in Japan Many observers have commented on the jarring difference between a sense of refined aesthetics on the small scale and the oddly “faceless” look of Japanese cities: Ever-changing backdrops and odd adjacencies are as much part of the neighborhood as the local shrine or temple. Though Tokyo`s urban infrastructure remains remarkably unchanged—for the most part its residential areas comprise blocks of tiny buildings bound by narrow streets—individual buildings are caught up in a never-ending cycle of demolition and reconstruction. They come down and go up practically overnight without a thought to shared architectural vocabulary or stylistic continuity along the street. On many residential streets, the only constant is the steady march of electricity poles. (Pollock 2005: 9)

The main reason for this is the transience of the built environment. Most modern three- to five-floor buildings are still essentially made from wood. They often have ceramic tiles and other surface finishes that give them a much sturdier and permanent look that disguises the wooden substructure. Most of these structures do not have cellars and thus require no timeconsuming digging, which reduces the overall expense of building considerably. Individual buildings have a life expectancy of only about twenty years4 and show considerable wear and tear after that (Ozaki 2002). This is, however, not perceived as a problem, as scrapping and rebuilding is part of the normal process of dwelling and growing, during which adjustments for children, in-laws, grandparents, or hobbies can be made. Family homes thus grow and shrink together with the biographical trajectories of their inhabitants. As building materials are comparably cheap, value is not embodied in built houses but in the land on which they stand, the exorbitant price of which is used as security to get mortgages. The other reason is that there is very little regulation that directs building activities, whether on the level of individual houses or on the level of large-scale developments. The size of plots of land is constantly shrinking because of the substantial inheritance tax that often forces those inheriting to sell a slice of their land when their parents pass away. Apart from this tax obstacle, there is no legal limit or urban planning act that interferes with even the most outlandish of schemes. There is still only a small market for second-hand housing; the taste in general is for new houses (Brumann 2002), and there is no equivalent to the English fascination with Victorian or Georgian houses, nor the continental European infatuation with parquet floors and stucco ceilings. While everybody agrees that old houses such as machiya should be valued for their cultural significance, very few people want to live in them as they require a great amount of maintenance and tend to be drafty and dark. This leads to a tension between houses and the things that they contain: there is no expectation that the house will outlive its inhabitants, and

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cherished objects may easily outlive houses. The house as container is thus not thought of as a stable entity, but, like the objects and people contained therein, a thing with a temporal horizon of about twenty to twenty-five years. Whether such a place is privately owned or not, whether accumulation happens in a rented single-occupation apartment or in a family home, changes the way it is understood and approached by different actors and institutions. Thus, rather than to think of houses as containers with fixed, material boundaries, it makes more sense to think of them as temporal abodes or envelopes that one occupies for a set time in one’s lifespan. If houses are enveloped space, what is contained in them? The answer to this question opens a complex field of inquiry debated in Japanese anthropology since the beginning of the discipline. Early anthropologists that dealt with Japan were often puzzled when trying to find a terminology to describe Japanese kinship systems. A careful analysis by Ariga in 1943 showed that it was the household, the ie (家), that should be seen as the unit of kinship rather than co-sanguinity. Contrary to other forms of kinship in which individuals were the basic units, a Japanese household was both a material and a relational entity: a household would comprise the male head of the house, his wife and children, along with his parents and the in-laws, but also adopted others and servants, often recruited from the side branches of the family (bunke). Sugiyama Lebra describes the ie as follows: First, the ie refers to a spatial unit—physical, social, and symbolic—to which all the co-residents “belong.” A person not only belongs to and stays in an ie, but may “depart” from one ie and “enter” another ie. This spatial image of ie, while the ie itself is no longer recognized as a legal unit, is retained even now in the form of the koseki or house register. The koseki is an official, cumulative record of a household cycle regarding the “entries” and “departures” of family members through birth, death, marriage, adoption, and divorce. Second, interlaced with this spatial dimension of the ie is its temporal one. The ie exists not only here and now but is an entity durable over generations . . . Viewed this way, the ie includes not only the living generation but ancestors who are dead and descendants yet to be born. (Lebra 2007: 250)

As the emphasis is on co-presence under the same roof, we can say that the house enacts the family by containing human beings. Although the family (kazoku, literally “tribe of the house”) did not necessarily end at the boundary of the house, in most cases, to be a member of the household required some form of co-presence, no matter what the blood relations were (Ryang 2004: 101–38). From the point of view of unilateral patrilineal systems, the traditional Japanese notions of the household left space for a degree of elasticity, and it is important to note that the ie was also the unit that mattered when it came to reproduction. Furthermore, distinct types of housing in contemporary Japan correlate with the class position of their inhabitants. From the standard suburban one-family-house, the middle-class dream of every salariman (Jinnai 1995), to the social housing in high-rise buildings

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(danchi), class is woven into the infrastructure of post-war Japan. But as much of the attention given to hoarding cases in Japan focuses on singleoccupant condominiums, an elaboration of the “living alone” (hitorigurashi) stage of the biographical trajectory is required. The transition from being a senior high school student to becoming a university student is of great significance in the Japanese biography. While the large majority of high school students live at home with their parents, becoming a university student often means to leave home and live alone in a larger city or the capital. As the concept of flat sharing (Meagher 2021), based on informal friendship, was rarely practiced before 2007 (and there was no type of building that would support such a way of living), most students live in university dorms or alone, usually in cheap apāto, containing a small genkan where shoes are left before entering the flat, and a unit bath (bathroom and toilet made out of one single piece of molded plastic). After the fierce competition and cramming of the last year of senior high school, university life itself is comparably relaxed. The time as a student is understood as a period of freedom and experimentation after the rigor of “examination hell,” a ludic interlude before the circle of perseverance and hardship begins again, usually at the eponymous firm, where the new members have to start again at the very bottom of the hierarchy, irrespective of their education and skills. Being a student in Japan means living in a liminal space: while one’s “exterior” identity is fixed through the allegiance to the university, there is a high degree of freedom in terms of who one can and wants to be in terms of social identity. The university experience is often described as a sort of simulacrum of real society, a test-run in which one can still make mistakes and blunders without carrying the full brunt of responsibility. This liminal state is reflected in the single-person accommodation most students live in and was brought home to me when I moved into such a one-person-unit myself in January 2006. It was a “room of my own,” and I felt a kind of ownership because I had acquired (read rented) it all alone, without help from my host family or connections from my university. I wanted to understand the whole process of dwelling, and simply went to a real estate agent immediately after arrival, albeit one that stated “foreigners welcome” (Gaijin OK). I moved into a small apāto a few days later, amidst unusually heavy snowfall, and the first thing I did was write my name on the sign next to the doorbell in large letters. I literally claimed this space for myself with an almost comical colonial gesture, rather than to first check what others had done, which I did immediately after putting the sign up. Nobody had put down their name; in fact, the whole row of flats (six units) was unsigned, although I knew from the soundscape and the umbrellas hanging from the doorknobs that all of them were occupied. A small informal survey among students and friends gave a range of possible explanations, but they all turned around the theme of a desired anonymity: to feel unknown was to be removed from the sphere of obligations that

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are invariably connected to one’s name (embodying one’s social identity), it meant freedom without having to take responsibility, it meant not being addressable from the outside and protected from stalkers, religious missionaries, and door-to-door salesmen. In a similar manner, the bell was rarely answered unless a visit or a delivery was announced by other means, usually the mobile phone.5 The saliency of this only struck me when, towards the end of my fieldwork, a nameplate suddenly appeared on one of the doors, cheerfully declaring this to be the home of a newlywed couple. To declare this openly is to create a household, an ie, independent of the specific form of accommodation it is housed in.

Imported Domesticity and the Social Pathologies of Privacy The notion of “domestic space,” with all the virtues it entailed, was imported to Japan from Europe and America at the beginning of the Meiji period (1868–1912). Although one of the Meiji slogans was “Japanese Spirit—Western Technology,” technology, architecture, and infrastructure carried many of the social forms of modern Western society. In his seminal work on the home in Japan, the social historian Jordan Sand attacks the ethnocentric and ahistorical “naturalness” of domesticity: The Japanese case offers a means to do this by providing an instance in which the ideology of modern domesticity was recognized from the beginning as foreign—its foreignness being an important part of its significance in fact—and posed against very different native domesticities . . . “Home” in Japan thus struggled into existence, consciously cobbled together from a variety of native and foreign models. (Sand 2004: 6)

Rather than being the product of the division of labor in an industrialized nation, domesticity was present in Japan as a moral and normative discourse on a set of conditions that had happened elsewhere. The promotion of the nuclear family and domestic values was one of the most pressing concerns of the state in order to create a workforce that was no longer bound by family loyalty, but could be linked to the nation by means of production. The American occupation of 1945–54 actively contributed to the dissemination of the values of domesticity, now with a democratic twist instead of the earlier Imperial ideology. As the first post-war generation entered middle age, ironically, the pathologies of modernity that domestic space should have helped to cure in a Western context were increasingly attributed to the modern nuclear family and the domestic space it inhabits. Since the 1980s, a host of “syndromes” such as “kitchen neurosis” and “moving day hysteria” are topics of discussion as part of “illnesses of civilization” (bunmeibyō), which Margaret Lock puts into perspective: In contrast to the “warm” extended family, the nuclear household in which approximately sixty percent of Japanese live these days is thought by many

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commentators to be a fragile “pathological” conglomeration because it lacks both enshrined ancestors and because the juridical powers of the male household head were stripped away at the end of World War II, leaving a vacuum devoid of an authoritative voice. (Lock 1996: 81)

This sense of pathology as a place without jurisdiction or a link to the spatial and temporal dimensions of the family also appears in the discussions surrounding private space. There is no direct Japanese equivalent; the word is rendered in katakana as puraibashii. Its meaning is accordingly culturally nuanced. Boundaries that protect this sphere of privacy are symbolic and relational rather than material, and what is contained within jars with our notion of individual privacy, for once inside a traditional Japanese house, there are often no clear demarcations of space in terms of ownership. Space is used flexibly depending on the time of day, and puraibashii does not at all mean being alone, but with family members whose presence requires little restraint to be shown. Having said this, it would be easy to think that traditional Japanese family life was just a happy conglomeration of people chatting away behind closed doors. This notion is misleading, and the emphasis is clearly put on non-verbal communication and what could be called “skinship” (Daniels 2010, 2015; Tahhan 2014), a version of being together by proximity rather than through self-expression and dialogue. One of the most frequent wishes modern Japanese couples ask from architects when setting up their own houses is a space in which copresence can be felt, where the members of the family can go about their own business without losing touch with each other (Ozaki 2002). In fact, “privacy,” as understood in the West, is created not by closed doors, but by the mental operation of ignoring others. Cramped dwelling spaces and boundaries such as paper walls, which are permeable to sound and light, have augmented people’s ability to simply ignore disruptive elements of the environment (Enders 1979). This ability allows for a transfer of these boundaries wherever one goes. The local bathhouse, the local twenty-fourhour convenience store can thus be seen as an extension of domestic space, literally as a bath or kitchen. People who would rather die than to be seen in sloppy informal dress venture out to the convenience store in pajamas, by studiously ignoring everybody else and counting on being ignored. The clerks in these shops again behave in a completely ritual way and never acknowledge one as individual person, even if one shops there every day. Joy Hendry suggests that the metaphor of wrapping can be used to understand Japanese uses of space, and more specifically, the way different spaces are created. She also warns us that “we are perhaps overly concerned with ‘unwrapping,’ with revealing the perceived essence of things, where we might do well to examine a little further the nature of the concealment used” (1993: 5). Rather than envelop a center (such as the hearth, the warm center of the family home in Western ideology), spatial layering often creates the illusion of interiority (oku) that the Japanese architect Maki Fumihiko interprets as central tenet of Japanese aesthetics, together

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with the notion of “something hidden glimpsed from behind concealment” (1979: 5). This interior, however, is not a reachable place, but rather a relational emptiness that is always somewhere else, a kind of deferred space that structures the visible inside of the house. These understandings of co-presence and interiority as deferred space have been challenged by the post-war ascendancy of Western-style housing (Ronald 2010), in which Japanese-style rooms are absent or there is only one room equipped with tatami matting. Despite these changing spatial arrangements, customs did not change significantly, and it remained rare for people to invite work colleagues, acquaintances, or non-family members to one’s house. The middle-class families who lived in them were more interested in having study desks or later entire rooms for their children. Having a dedicated space for studying and cramming for exams was seen as a precondition for educational and thus social success. It was only after I realized that the crucial difference in this case was that Japanese interior spaces rarely represented the person(s) dwelling in them. Recent fads of interior decoration occasionally swept through the country, but the fact remained that colleagues, acquaintances and friends apart from intimate partners were not entertained at home—the exception being the hōmu pāti (home party), whose katakana spelling betrays its foreign origin and the very recent increases in shared apartments (Meagher 2021). It took me a while to see domestic space in these terms: unstable over time, a backstage to the self linked to a biographical life stage, an ephemeral container for one’s enduring possessions, a Schrödinger’s box housing a diffuse self temporarily untethered from social relations, as a refuge from the gaze of others as opposed to a platform to present the self to the world.

Savage Space and Social Seclusion The condition of living alone or being secluded in one’s own room, is considered a temporally delimited liminal space, a particular stage in one’s biographical trajectory that has to be overcome in order to create a shared life (Ronald, Druta, and Godzik 2018). There is a sense in which a life away from social others is considered abnormal, if not dangerous, the more, in fact, the longer it continues. It also became the precondition of a series of social problems like social withdrawal, called hikikomori (Saito 2013; Rubinstein and Sakakibara 2020; Tajan 2021). It is dangerous because it is concealed from public view, because what is invisible remains outside the social sphere. Only what becomes visible can have social efficacy, and while in the Western model the inner core of the person is seen as radiating out into the world as self-expression, in Japanese conceptions of the person (Doi 1981; Sugiyama Lebra 2004), the inner core, the true feelings, are removed from the public sphere and only attain efficacy in the rare case they are expressed. In that sense, privacy, both as a mental phenomenon (that which one does not choose to express) and as

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a spatial phenomenon (the space in which one is alone), is an ambiguous category. Hoarding does not only happen in; it is also made possible by the seclusion of private space and the absence of the gaze of the other. While it is the flow of things into this space through processes of acquiring, receiving, and keeping that creates material accumulations, it is the gaze of others that turns the accumulations into a matter of concern. In the same way that interior space only becomes an expression of the self if it is seen/visited by others, hoarding as a category only gains traction once what is private is revealed. In Japan, this can happen when concerned neighbors complain to the local authority about houses from which things start to overspill—in the form of rubbish bags, or cockroaches or, more immaterially, in the form of smell, especially in summer. This overspill is typical of gomi-yashiki, literally ‘rubbish house’ in Japanese, a term widely used by the media since the late 90s. As the rubbish house is a privately owned location rather than directly linked to a person or a behavior, there is little that the local authorities can do: offer to clean up, help with disposal equipment, contact relatives to get the person living inside to cooperate (Gygi 2018). To sum up, hoarding, in a Japanese context, emerges when the chaotic surplus of things that the gaze of others has revealed is translated into a lack: a lack of discipline to tidy up, a lack of femininity (because domestic space is still strongly associated with female work and responsibility), even a lack of Japaneseness. Unlike the hoarders I had interviewed in San Francisco at the Hoarding Conference in 2006, in the Japanese case there was no hard truth about oneself to accept, no identity to embrace, no right to difference to espouse. The perception of lack created its own social pressures to address the issue. Once I had acquired the spatial lens that allowed me to see this, what my interlocutors said fell into place as the pieces of a scopic regime. At the same time, the ways hoarding is understood in the Anglophone world became more and more peculiar to me. It is to the latter that we turn now.

Domestic Interiority: Dwelling as Self-Expression The Western episteme of hoarding is undergirded by a particular understanding of houses, homes, and rooms as part of a private domestic sphere (Rotman 2006), a conceptual set up that has been at the heart of Western political thought since the Greek distinction between oikos (“the household”) and the polis (“the city/public sphere”). Originally conceived in tension with each other—the private delimiting the reach of the public, but also subjecting its inhabitants to the unchecked power of the head of the household—the interior isolated from the public becomes the cubiculum cordis, the closed room of the heart, a space in which to encounter God in medieval monastic culture (Chrétien 2014: 47). This figuration of subjectivity—Montaigne’s arrière-boutique in the famous essay on solitude (1595 [1965]: 100)—with its focus on memory, intentionality,

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and imagination transforms into the post-Enlightenment domestic sphere, a place to encounter oneself in Rousseau’s romantic Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761[2018]). Arendt refers to a similar shift when she writes, “[o]nly the modern age, in its rebellion against society, has discovered how rich and manifold the realm of the hidden can be under the conditions of intimacy” (1958: 72). Increasing division of labor and new understandings of the nerves have reinforced and re-gendered the distinction in which middle- and upperclass women were relegated to domestic tasks in the house and middle- and upper-class men left the home to be “public” entrepreneurs and politicians (Petit 2019). In a world increasingly animated by the nervous energies of capitalism, the home provided a space of rest and insulation that allowed for a replenishment of life energies (Asendorf 2000). In the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin likens the bourgeois dwelling to “a receptacle for the person”: “it encased him with all his appurtenances so deeply in the dwelling’s interior that one might be reminded of the inside of a compass case . . . embedded in deep, usually violet folds of velvet” (1939 [1999]: 165). The protective interior became a site of self-creation and identity formation that was precisely not modern, but removed in time and space from the necessities of everyday life. As Bresnahan writes: The interior was the site of a refusal of one’s own time, in which the bourgeois individual constructed the illusion of a space of memory, without history. The historical mimeticism of the interior was effected through an evasion of history, in a space of memory that flattened out historical difference and saw objects from diverse historical periods as occupying a single physical and discursive space. The neurasthenic subject, victim of his own success, retreated into the casement of an interior not simply separated from the shocks of the modern urban environment but constituted through an evasion of this milieu. (Bresnahan 2003: 176)

Bachelard’s phenomenological approach to the intimate sphere in which subjects inhabit houses as much as houses inhabit them further contributed to an understanding of domestic space in terms of interiority (1958). The more recent academic focus on house and home in anthropology and sociology mirrors and reinforces the discursive formation of the home as a direct reflection of the self housed in it (Cieraad 1999). The home as site property relation (Hirayama and Ronald 2007), as a site of contestation between the state and its citizens (Hoare 2015), as embodiment of cosmology, social lineage and kinship (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995), as technological artefact connected to infrastructure (Putman 1999), is eclipsed by the home as personal expression, a space in which appropriated material culture is turned into personal objects (Miller 2001: 1). Paradoxically, interior space only works as an expression of the self if it is seen/visited by others. Countless interior decoration publications bear witness to this mythology of the home and the genre of ‘shelter porn’ is recession-proof precisely because it emphasizes the house/home as personal

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fantasy (Castle 2010). My argument here is that the understanding of private space as expression of the inner self enables and tacitly compels a reading of hoarding as mental disorder.

The Cluttered Cartesian Theatre How has the notion of the mental interior been elaborated? For this chapter, I will limit myself to the theories of perception that later were extended into theories of mind and the technological developments that provided concrete models to think about interiority. Descartes posited a center in the brain where all the sensations received from the outside world were represented to the soul; in his polemic about understanding consciousness, Daniel Dennett calls this the “Cartesian theatre” (1993). Note that in this model images and sensations flow from the outside world to the interior to be reconstructed and represented there. In other words, the mind is constituted as a mirror image of the world, gazed upon by the mind’s eye. Such understandings were supported and metaphorically elaborated through the camera obscura, a simple device that produced an inverted image of the outside world through a small hole in an otherwise dark room (Shapiro 2007). The camera obscura, as used and described by Locke, Newton, and Hume, is “inseparable from a certain metaphysic of interiority: it is a figure for both the observer who is nominally a free sovereign individual and a privatized subject confined in a quasi-domestic space, cut off from a public exterior world” (Crary 1992: 39). The second device was the magic lantern, in which the direction of the flow is reversed: now the image emerges from the interior and is projected towards the outside. In the eighteenth century, magic lantern spectacles were an important aspect of the developing romantic and gothic sensibility. In her work on phantasmagoria, the historian Terry Castle argues that the demystification of the spirit world was achieved by turning external hauntings into interior experiences. New psychological explanations of uncanny events replaced beliefs in ghosts: [T]his internalization of apparitions introduced a latent irrationalism into the realm of mental experience. If ghosts were thoughts, then thoughts themselves took on—at least notionally—the haunting reality of ghosts. The mind became subject to spectral presences. The epistemologically unstable, potentially fantastic metaphor of the phantasmagoria simply condensed the historical paradox: by relocating the world of ghosts in the closed space of the imagination, one ended up supernaturalizing the mind itself. (Castle 1995: 161)

At the end of the nineteenth century, these “mental phenomena” become the subject of the new sciences of para-psychology, psychoanalysis, p ­ sychology, and psychiatry. Introspection and free association are considered royal roads to the interiority of the patient, whether this interiority is conceived of as conscious—in the method of introspection developed by Wundt

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(1888), for example—or unconscious, as in Freudian thought. Even after the banishment of subjectivity from empirical psychology (Martin 2013), the metaphor of an enclosed space is still present in the black boxes of the behaviorists (Rose 1999). Spatial interiority is also invoked in alternative neuroscientific explanations of human subjectivity, such as the notion of the bicameral mind put forward by Julian Jaynes, who defines consciousness as “mind-space” that is accessible to introspection (2000: 56). There is even a small and contested revival of the notion of the “Cartesian theatre” in Bayesian approaches to neuroscientific explanations of dreaming (Hobson and Friston 2016). All this simply serves to argue that in hoarding the division between mind and body is bridged by a refractive theory of mind in which exterior and interior are translated into each other. In creating this link, the episteme of hoarding has succeeded in achieving what anthropologists still dream of: to overcome the mind-matter dualism (Damasio 1996), to understand property and owners as being parts of each other in fractal relationships (Strathern 2005; Wagner 2001), to conceive of objects as cyborg extensions (Haraway 1991) and sometimes as replacements of persons (Gell 1998), to understand people as being entangled in networks of actants (Latour 2005), and to talk about objects in a way that gives rise to new forms of personhood (Holbraad 2012). This has, however, resulted not in a dethroning of the human subject and a return of the person to their more humble place in networks of assemblages, but in the emergence of a monstrous, pathological new being: the hoarder.

The Rise of the Hoarder Any definition of hoarding must join together persons and things, the material accumulations and the people who are understood to be their cause. From the perspective of the social sciences, the history of a phenomenon must necessarily include the history of its descriptions and how different forms of naming change the framework and context in which a phenomenon is said to occur (Barad 2007). Such a short history of hoarding must focus on how excessive accumulation becomes a “matter of concern” (Latour 2008), a process that is closely linked with the advent of mass society, mass consumption, and mass media. Material accumulation in curiosity chambers, treasure houses, and private or national collections of course predate this debate, but they are not widely seen as psychologically problematic up to the beginning of the twentieth century (Bredekamp 1999; Pearce 1995). Early psychiatry treats compulsive accumulation as a symptom of schizophrenia or neurosis. Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926), one of the founding fathers of comparative psychiatry, significantly describes “disorder” rather than accumulation as pathological symptom and adds that that a certain level of development (a certain number of personal possessions) is necessary for dementia praecox to materialize itself in this

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particular way (1904 [2000]). Freud’s psychoanalysis, on the other hand, theorizes excessive accumulation as a symptom of a regression to the anal stage of psychosexual development (1908 [1959]): the person who hoards symbolically reverts to retaining their feces, something that gives the child pleasure and a sense of control over the immediate environment. Elements of this theory are developed by Alfred Adler as part of his characterology, but they do not reach mainstream psychology that is emerging as an empirical discipline at roughly the same time. Hoarding makes a brief appearance as “syllogomania” in the description of “Diogenes Syndrome” in the context of elderly care in Britain (Clark, Mankikar and Gray 1975), but it is not until the late eighties and early nineties that new terms of reference appear: one is “messie,” marking the appearance of a “new type of person” (Hacking 1999) that emerges out of the self-help movement instigated by Sandra Felton (1999). The “messie” is proffered as an identity to be embraced as part of a method based on a twelve-step program that through the use of group sessions and “clutter buddies” who help each other clean up their “mess” is meant to help people and their families to deal with “overwhelmed houses” (a term widely used in Californian clutter consultant circles). In her early writings, Felton associates “being messy” with suffering from ADHD (1999), but this medical diagnosis is only of minor relevance for her approach, although the term and its association have an interesting afterlife in the German-speaking world (Wettstein 2005). In opposition to the more informal “messie,” hoarding gains traction as technical term through the psychological research of the group surrounding professor Randy O. Frost at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In a series of highly influential articles, Frost and his collaborators set out an empirical theory that defines hoarding as a form of obsessivecompulsive disorder (Frost and Gross 1993), develop the hoarding scale as an objective form of measurement (Frost, Steketee, and Grisham 2004) and proffer empirical data relevant for therapists, social workers, and health care practitioners (Frost and Hartl 1996). They also debunk widely held beliefs about hoarding: that it is predominantly the elderly (as accumulation progresses with time if becomes more visible, but it is by no means just a geriatric problem) and that experiences of early deprivation are the key factor for hoarding in later life (Frost and Hartl 1996 only found a weak correlation, see Landau et al. 2011 for a follow-up6). The choice of the term ‘hoarding’ implicitly suggests a parallel to animal behavior, and thus suggests a link to genetic/inborn traits rather than to a psychodynamic understanding. This gives the term ‘hoarder’ a more pathological ring, which lends itself less to self-identification than the more “lovable yet chaotic” messie (Felton 1999: 23). Frost’s collection of data was crucial for the inclusion of hoarding as diagnostic category in the “Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (5th ed.), issued by the American Psychiatric Association (2013),

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where it now features as a stand-alone category within the larger framework of Compulsive Obsessive Disorders. Alternative understandings of hoarding as “disorder of the executive function” lost out in this process (Amdur 2005). The power of definition invested in the DSM has given hoarding a new and enhanced weight and has contributed to its recognition as a mental disorder in and beyond the Anglophone world. It is the only disorder in the DSM-V that requires the presence of material objects to be diagnosed. Public interest and media attention have shaped perceptions of the phenomenon from the start: the case of the Collyer brothers in Harlem, New York, in the 1940s, triggered a series of reports and led to the codification of the term “Collyer’s mansion” for a fire and health and safety hazard involving extreme accumulation (Lidz 2003; for a fictionalized account, see Doctorow 2010). Sensationalist television programs, such as “Extreme Hoarders” (A&E channel, 2009–13) and “Life Laundry” (BBC, 2002–2004) have contributed to the spread of the category ‘hoarder’ into everyday language where it is in the process of displacing “messie.”7

Conclusion This chapter has focused on the ways in which assumptions about interior and exterior space enable an understanding of disordered dwellings as expression of a mental disorder. By assembling an admittedly unruly and somewhat eccentric history of interior space and contrasting this with more socially inflected understandings of accumulations in Japan, my hope was to illustrate how culturally and historically specific, how peculiar this spatial episteme of hoarding actually is. Exaggeratedly put, while the notion of hoarding is based on a refractive theory of mind in which exterior and interior are mirrored, Japanese approaches to understandings of extreme accumulations tend to start at the boundaries of private space and pivot around a dialectic of concealment and revelation, visibility and invisibility. The intrusive gaze of the others does not reveal the truth about a person (“s/he is a hoarder”), but makes manifest a temporary weakness, a weakness moreover, that the gaze itself is supposed to help overcome by inducing shame. Instead of a psychological or psychiatric disorder, what emerges is a social pathology: a local interpretation of the origins of a social problem, that does not locate the pathological in either body or mind, but in the changing structure of society and the social fabric itself, here in the form of the ascendancy of private space. Social pathologies are etiologically mixed forms that proffer a “diagnosis” for a metaphorically sick society. This diagnosis is, despite the metaphor, precisely not medical, but disciplinary. It is the gaze of others through which social control is extended that is held at the same time to be the cure. Neither of these spatial conceptions brings us closer to the “truth” of hoarding. But in understanding how they shape the different realities that

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hoarding becomes part of, we can momentarily glimpse the norms and assumptions that are embedded in species of spaces, ours and others. Fabio  Gygi  is a senior lecturer in anthropology with reference to Japan at SOAS, University of London. He is interested in the intersection of material culture and medical anthropology, with a focus on how medical and social categories are formed around practices of disposal. He is the co-editor of “The Work of Gender: Service, Performance and Fantasy in Contemporary Japan,” and has written about animism, dolls, robots, and Marie Kondō. His most recent publications are “Falling in and out of Love with Stuff: Affective Affordance and Horizontal Transcendence in Styles of Decluttering in Japan” (Japanese Studies) and “The Afterlife of Dolls: On the Productive Death of Terminal Commodities” (Ars Orientalis).

Notes 1. All participants in my fieldwork have been anonymized, apart from the two published authors, see below. 2. All translations from the Japanese are my own. 3. As she is a published author and has written about her difficulties, I here give her full name without anonymization. 4. This is not only true for homes but also for shops and other larger buildings. When I went back to Tokyo for a research follow up after nine months of absence in 2008, I found, to my surprise, that the largest bookstore in Shibuya, First Book, a large conspicuous shoe-box like building, had simply disappeared. It was due to be rebuilt after only ten years of service, apparently because of structural deficiencies. 5. This is very different from the rural family homes where the doors are usually open and people would peer into the genkan and call out a greeting. The genkan is also where much of these transactions take place and it is usually the housewife who will answer such calls. In such a situation, anonymity is no great help as family names are displayed outside the gate. Polite and sometimes too polite language, creating a chilly feeling of distance, are used to repel unwanted intrusions (see also Hendry 1993). 6. Contrary to Frost and Hartl, Landau et al. do find a correlation between traumatic experiences and hoarding behavior, but as they rely on self-reporting of “traumatic events,” there is some doubt as to whether the suggestive nature of the questions does not turn the inquiry into a site of meaning-making for the hoarders. 7. To compare: when I started my research on hoarding in Japan in 2004, most of my cohort at UCL initially assumed that my research would be about billboards and advertising. During subsequent cleanups, I sometimes wondered whether I would have had a more pleasant fieldwork experience had I gone with “billboards in Japan.”

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Doctorow, Edgar Lawrence. 2010. Homer and Langley. London: Abacus. Doi, Takeo. 1981. The Anatomy of Dependence. Tokyo: Kōdansha International. Enders, Siegfried. R. 1979. Japanische Wohnformen und ihre Veränderung. Hamburg: Institut für Asienkunde. Felton, Sandra. 1999. How Not to Be a Messie: The Ultimate Guide for the Neatness-Challenged. New York: Galahad Books. Freud, Sigmund. 1959 [1908]. “Character and Anal Eroticism.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey. Vol. 9, 167–76. London: The Hogarth Press. Frost, Randy, O. and Tamara L. Hartl. 1996. “A Cognitive-Behavioral Model of Compulsive Hoarding.”  Behaviour Research and Therapy 34(4): 341–50. Frost, Randy O., and Gail Steketee. 2010. Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Frost, Randy O., Gail Steketee and Jessica Grisham. 2004. “Measurement of Compulsive Hoarding: Saving Inventory-Revised.” Behaviour Research and Therapy 42(10): 1163–82. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Illustrated edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Sarah Pinto and Sandra Teresa Hyde, eds. 2008. Postcolonial Disorders. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gygi, Fabio. 2018. “The Metamorphosis of Excess: ‘Rubbish Houses’ and the Imagined Trajectory of Things in Post-Bubble Japan.” In Consuming Life in Post-Bubble Japan: A Transdisciplinary Perspective, eds. Katarzyna. J. Cwiertka and Ewa Machotka, 129–51. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Hacking, Ian. 1999. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 2nd edn. London: Free Association Books. Harman, Graham. 2005. Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Chicago: Open Court. Hendry, Joy. 1993. Wrapping Culture: Politeness, Presentation and Power in Japan and Other Societies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hirayama, Yosuke, and Richard Ronald, eds. 2007. Housing and Social Transition in Japan. London: Routledge. Hirschtritt, Matthew. E., and Carol A. Mathews. 2014. “Genetics and Family Models of Hoarding Disorder.” In The Oxford Handbook of Hoarding and Acquiring, eds. Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee, 158–76. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoare, Anna. 2015. “The View from the Traveller Site: Post-nomadic

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Subjects and the Material Relations of Permanent Temporary Dwelling.” Opticon 1826 16: 1–16. Hobson, John A., and Karl J. Friston. 2016. “A Response to Our Theatre Critics.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 23(3–4): 245–54. Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Horwitz, Allan V. 2002. Creating Mental Illness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ikeda, Kyōko. 2007. Katazukerarenai Onna no tame no Kondo Koso! Katazukeru Gijjutsu. Tokyo: Bungei-Shunshū. Jay, Martin. 1992. “Scopic Regimes of Modernity”. In Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique. New York, London: Routledge. Jaynes, Julian. 2000. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Jinnai, Hidenobu. 1995. Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kobayashi, Mitsue. 2005. “Katazukerarenai onna” ha futoru. Tokyo: Shinkōsha. Kraepelin, Emil. 2000 [1904]. “Comparative Psychiatry.” In Cultural Psychiatry and Medical Anthropology: An Introduction and Reader, eds. R. Littlewood and S. Dein, 38–42. London: Athlone. Landau, D., A. C. Iervolino, A. Pertusa, S. Santo, S. Singh, and D. MataixCols. 2011. “Stressful Life Events and Material Deprivation in Hoarding Disorder.” Journal of Anxiety Disorders 25(2): 192—202. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to ActorNetwork-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2014. “What Is the Style of Matters of Concern?” In The Lure of Whitehead, eds. N. Gaskill and A.J. Nocek, 92–126. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lebra, Takie. 2007. “Confucian Gender Role and Personal Fulfillment for Japanese Women.” In Identity, Gender, and Status in Japan: The Collected Papers of Takie Lebra, 248–63. Folkestone: Global Oriental. Lidz, Franz. 2003. Ghosty Men: The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers, New York’s Greatest Hoarders: An Urban Historical. New York: Bloomsbury USA. Lock, Margaret. 1988. “New Japanese Mythologies: Faltering Discipline and the Ailing Housewife.” American Ethnologist 15(1): 43–61. ———. 1996. “Centering the Household: The Remaking of Female Maturity in Japan.” In Re-Imagining Japanese Women, ed. A. E. Imamura, 73–103. Berkeley: University of California Press. Maki, Fumihiko. 1979. “Japanese City Spaces and the Concept of Oku.” The Japan Architect 54: 1–15.

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Martin, Emily. 2013. “The Potentiality of Ethnography and the Limits of Affect Theory.” Current Anthropology 54(S7): S149–S158. Meagher, Caitlin. 2021. Inside a Japanese Sharehouse: Dreams and Realities. London: Routledge. Miller, Daniel. 2001. “Behind Closed Doors.” In Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors, ed. Daniel Miller, 1–22. London: Routledge. Montaigne, Michel de. 1965 [1595]. Essais. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Ozaki, Ritsuko. 2002. “Housing as a Reflection of Culture: Privatised Living and Privacy in England and Japan.” Housing Studies 17(2), 209–27. Pearce, Susan. 1995. On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition. London: Routledge. Perec, Georges. 2008. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. London: Penguin Classics. Petit, Bruno Cruz. 2019. “From Interior to Interiority: Locating Key Historical Moments in the Relationship between Spaces and Individual.” Interiority 2(2): 195–211. Pollock, Naomi. 2005. Modern Japanese House. London: Phaidon. Putnam, Tim. 1999. “Postmodern Home Life.” In At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space, ed. Irene Cieraad, 144–52. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Ronald, Richard. 2010. “Homes and Houses, Senses and Spaces.” In Home and Family in Japan: Continuity and Transformation, eds. R. Ronald and Allison Alexy, 174–99. London: Routledge. Ronald, Richard, Oana Druta, and Maren Godzik. 2018. “Japan’s Urban Singles: Negotiating Alternatives to Family Households and Standard Housing pathways.” Urban Geography 39(7): 1018–40. Rose, Nikolas. 1999. Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. London: Free Association Press. Rotman, Deborah. L. 2006. “Separate Spheres? Beyond the Dichotomies of Domesticity.” Current Anthropology 47(4): 666–74. Rousseau, Jean Jacques. 2018 [1761]. Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse. Paris: Flammarion. Rubinstein, Ellen B. and Rae V. Sakakibara. 2020. “Diagnosing Hikikomori.” Medicine Anthropology Theory 7(2): 58–81. Rupp, Katherine. 2003. Gift-Giving in Japan: Cash, Connections, Cosmology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ryang, Sonia. 2004. Japan and National Anthropology: A Critique. London: Routledge. Saito, Tamaki. 2013. Hikikomori: Adolescence without End, trans. Jeffrey  Angles, illustrated edn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Sand, Jordan. 2004. House and Home in Modern Japan: Reforming Everyday Life 1880–1930. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Saxena, Sanjaya. 2007. “Is Compulsive Hoarding a Genetically and Neurobiologically Discrete Syndrome? Implications for Diagnostic Classification.” The American Journal of Psychiatry 164(3): 380–84. Shapiro, Alan. E. 2007. “Images: Real and Virtual, Projected and Perceived, from Kepler to Dechales.” In Inside the Camera Obscura—Optics and Art under the Spell of the Projected Image, ed. Wolfgang Lefèvre, 75–94. Berlin: Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science. Shove, Elizabeth, Frank Trentmann and Richard Wilk. 2009. Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture. Oxford: Berg. Sinopoli, Vanessa M., Lauren Erdman, Christie L. Burton, Laura S., Park, Annie Dupuis, Janet Shan,Tara Goodale, S.-M. Shaheen, Jennifer Crosbie, Russel J. Schachar, and Paul D. Arnold. 2020. “Serotonin System Genes and Hoarding with and without Other ObsessiveCompulsive Traits in a Population-Based, Pediatric Sample: A Genetic Association Study.” Depression and Anxiety 37(8): 760–70. Strathern, Marilyn. 2005. Partial Connections, updated edn. Lanham: AltaMira Press. Sugiyama Lebra, Takie. 2004. Japanese Patterns of Behavior. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Tahhan, Diana Adis. 2014. The Japanese Family: Touch, Intimacy and Feeling, 1st edn. London: Routledge. Tajan, Nicolas. 2021. Mental Health and Social Withdrawal in Contemporary  Japan: Beyond the Hikikomori Spectrum. London: Routledge. Tolin, D. F., M. C. Stevens, A. L., Villavicencio, M. M. Norberg, V. D. Calhoun, R. O. Frost, G. Steketee, S. L. Rauch, and G.D. Pearlson, 2012. “Neural Mechanisms of Decision Making in Hoarding Disorder.” Archives of General Psychiatry 69(8): 832–41. Vander Wall, Stephen. B., and Stephen H. Jenkins. 2003. “Reciprocal Pilferage and the Evolution of Food-hoarding Behavior.” Behavioral Ecology 14(5): 656–67. Wagner, Roy. 2001. An Anthropology of the Subject: Holographic Worldview in New Guinea and Its Meaning and Significance for the World of Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wakefield, Jerome C. 2007. “The Concept of Mental Disorder: Diagnostic Implications of the Harmful Dysfunction Analysis.” World Psychiatry 6(3): 149–56. Wettstein, Anina. 2005. “Messies”: Alltag zwischen Chaos und Ordnung. Rastede: Offizin Verlag. Wheaton, Michael G., and Kimberly Topilow. 2020. “Maximizing Decision-Making Style and Hoarding Disorder Symptoms.” ­

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Comprehensive Psychiatry 101, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comppsych. 2020.152187. Wundt, Wilhelm. 1888. “Selbstbeobachtung und innere Wahrnehmung.” Philosophische Studien 4: 292–330.

Part III Decluttering and Minimalist Aesthetics

Decluttering and Purification

6 Decluttering the House, Purifying the Self

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Women Discarding Objects and Spiritualizing Daily Life in Buenos Aires (Argentina)

María Florencia Blanco Esmoris

Today is a holiday and I cleaned my house. Outside a filigree of water was delicately weaving as I moved furniture and cleaned the corners. I scented the rooms with palo santo, shook the cushions and carpets, cleaned the mirror, the bathroom, the table, dusted the books on the shelves, listened to the records you gave me, and felt that I was airing my heart. Now the house is clean and smells like a mud pot. . . —Camila Sosa Villada, La novia de Sandro (my translation)

In this paper, I analyze the logic of discarding objects in domestic life in Buenos Aires (Argentina). I am particularly interested in studying how discarding operates as a way of maintaining class status, family ties, and culturally shared values, in which women play a fundamental role as architects in the linking of people, spaces, and things, thus producing what I refer to as lugaridad crítica (critical placeship) (Blanco Esmoris 2022). Saving and accumulating, discarding and shedding are practices related to life cycles that intertwine people, objects, and spiritual expressions, a key aspect for at least some of the middle-class women with whom I work in Morón (Buenos Aires, Argentina). Audiobooks listened to whilst doing other household chores, insights from tidying gurus put into practice as an argument for getting rid of objects, and family days devoted to discarding “stuff” function as vital actions to give meaning to their lives. Such decisions articulate deeper ways of dealing with contexts of uncertainty whilst producing diverse forms of autonomy and agency for women through their

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households, perhaps as a way of materially re-sculpting social experience. This is the case of Luisa and Gloria.1 “Bringing the house to life” (in Spanish dar vida a la casa) was the phrase Luisa used that morning in 2017 to express her need to affectively and physically reconnect with her home, a construction that had been conceived, designed and built for a family that had already traveled a different path. She was a sixty-year-old dentist, the mother of two sons and two daughters, who had decided that in order to “feel good” about herself and re-establish a bond with her home, she was going to follow and embrace whatever advice she was given. In this regard, Luisa’s sister told her to try biodecoding 2 as a way of understanding the ancestral causes of their problems. Another friend instructed her to start practicing mindfulness3 in order to “live consciously,” while a colleague suggested she should listen to audiobooks by Home Organizers (HO) to “tidy up” both herself and her home at the same time. All these forms of “letting herself be advised” involved Luisa’s self-management in both material and emotional aspects to undergo the moment she was facing through a set of practices and decisions involving objects. This pursuit took place in a complex economic context in which Luisa was experiencing a fall in her income and could not afford to remain in her house.4 After exchanging WhatsApp messages with her sons and daughters, Luisa explained the upcoming changes. Then, week after week, family members started to show up at their family home to declutter, and either store, discard, sell, or give away some of their belongings, a resolution that also triggered old family experiences and tensions. On the other hand, in the midst of the mandatory lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Buenos Aires (between March and August 2020), 5 Gloria, a forty-year-old entrepreneur married to Ariel and the mother of two sons (Nicanor and Santiago) and a daughter (Mona), felt it was necessary to ask herself what was really “essential.” To cope with confinement, Gloria found herself “compelled” to make personal and family decisions about how to arrange spaces in the house and what objects to keep in such contingencies. Donating and giving away clothes, objects, and artifacts that she or her family no longer used was a way of organizing their lives, both materially and affectively. “Forcibly shedding” was a phrase expressed repeatedly in her audio messages because her context had accelerated decisions that included “shedding things,” maybe before “their time” came. A sense of urgency, combined with a quest to keep a home during the sanitary crisis, seemed to structure this family’s daily life. This paradoxical character that ties and detaches things and people implies a set of ordering and separation operations that underlie a decisionmaking process and the moral values embedded in such decisions. For some middle-class women, the impossibility of remodeling or selling a house, or acquiring a new one, underpinned by socioeconomic changes at the national level and lack of access to durable goods, translated into a need to seek alternative mechanisms to reconnect with the place where they

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live. I hereby consider that in the social organization of discarding things, relationships with space and spiritual ties are transmitted. I demonstrate how the ability to discard objects and organize the home symbolizes women’s empowerment by producing what I consider critical placeship (Blanco Esmoris 2022). This notion is supported by Katya Mandoki, who refers to place as a site with a symbolic significance and historical-cultural memory: “Place is a body that is born and grows, that gets sick, heals, and dies. It can be violated and broken, or welcomed and cared for; it has a biography and an affective memory; it is a landmark of collective subjectivity” (Mandoki 2018: 48) (own translation). In this case, I am referring to the possibility of living, maintaining, and caring for the house by turning it into an appropriate space through principles of discarding and organizing. I show that the experience of managing what is to be discarded allows women to build a sense of hope and a future for themselves. Women understand that making the process of organizing and discarding objects a collective experience renews kinship and reaffirms projects for the future. Based on the two aforementioned cases supported by an ethnographic study6 with middle-class families, one mainly pre-pandemic and the other conducted during the pandemic, I attempt to make sense of the actions of sorting, discarding, cleaning, purging, and shedding objects in urban Buenos Aires that are intertwined with kinship roles and moral values. These decisions can be read in a larger context of how the mandate to gain access to one’s “own” house among the middle classes has gradually shifted to ways of keeping the house “well,” in which recently discarding has been added as a way of keeping a house while being a form of self-fulfillment, and thus highlighting new forms of consumption, use, and replacement.7 I also draw attention to how different digital or remote mediators intervene in the scene and how housekeeping and bonding practices are carried out in a self-managed/self-taught manner when professionals cannot be hired on a one-to-one basis.

Saving for a Property of One’s Own among Argentina’s Urban Middle Classes Since the second half of the twentieth century in Argentina, home ownership has become one of the most significant cleavages to be part (or not) of the narrative and experience of the middle classes as a material expression of upward social mobility.8 Thus, home ownership has become the epitome of social status among certain sectors, consolidating a domestic culture and desirable family planning (Aboy 2008). Progressively, the housing pattern that implied having an independent home became a prerogative that was assumed and amplified by the urban middle classes, to the extent that it reinforced their appreciations and expectations concerning progress, social ascent, merit, and national development, as well as their role in these

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phenomena. This was driven by strong access to consumption in the form of the acquisition of kitchen furniture (household appliances), the purchase of a vehicle as a means of locomotion, and the possibility for a family to go on vacation. For these middle classes, this was accompanied by the spread of values and lifestyles that emphasized the nuclear family model, the independent residential unit, and a certain notion of “respectability” within this sector (Liernur 1999; Aboy 2008). Considering the amplification of a migrant narrative, the sense of rootedness to the land was, to a large extent, strongly mobilized by the middle classes. As already mentioned, self-perception and belonging to the middle class were linked not only to home ownership but also to the consolidation of ways of maintaining and caring for the home, in which women assumed the role of homemakers. Taking care of appearances (both inside and outside the home) was part of women’s domestic tasks, which had been naturalized for at least several decades. Consequently, the issue shifted from possession to dispossession. This movement implied paying attention to the moral meanings that coexist symbolically and materially in the domestic order.9 Therefore, my approach to the private, and often considered “silent world” of houses starts from an imperfect knowledge of the many possible ways in which families and individuals access and maintain their homes. These ways are often traversed by models disseminated and sustained around certain values that regulate esthetic, symbolic, and spiritual issues.

Houses, Objects, and Daily Spirituality for Middle-Class Women In recent decades, social anthropology has renewed its interest in understanding the house as a social and symbolic framework for the unfolding of domestic and emotional life (Samanani and Lenhard 2019). In this regard, several works have addressed those aspects related to the private sphere and intimate space (Miller 2001: 1).10 Such developments (Mallet 2004; Hurdley 2006; Blunt and Dowling 2006) connect better-known studies on private life, family, social class, housing organization, material life, and consumption while offering an innovative perspective on the relationship between the diverse forms that habitable spaces assume, and certain ways of conceiving such spaces as appropriate (or otherwise) for living from a particular point of view that is frequently defined as being moral (Howell 2005; Kilroy-Marac 2018). In Argentina, studies have been made on some of the aforementioned fields (Arizaga 2004, 2005; Wortman 2003; Cosacov 2017; Felice 2017; Funes 2018; Blanco Esmoris 2019, 2020). However, research into the specific ways in which certain social sectors, in this case the middle classes, organize their homes in material and symbolic terms, endowing them with meaning through concrete actions, such as finding a place of residence and arranging, furnishing, decorating, maintaining, and cleaning it, etc., is still

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difficult to find in the country, especially if we consider actions that address issues related to the accumulation and discarding of objects. In recent decades, the so-called “material turn” has revealed new insights into the life of objects and artifacts in social interactions, and has also made it possible to look again at objects linked to human life. Arjun Appadurai (1986) proposed “following things” in order to understand their “social life” in their relationship with people. In the same volume, Igor Kopytoff (1986) pointed out that the commodity phase, one of the most studied stages in relation to commodities is just one moment in a broader process of the circulation and use of goods, which is why he emphasized their cultural biography. It is thus a matter of longitudinally capturing the uses and meanings of objects, either in recurrent exchanges (Küchler and Miller 2005) or in their inalienable character sustained in the action of keeping-while-giving (Weiner 1992). Along these lines, several studies have focused on actions linked to accumulation, the storage of collections, and classification (Kilroy-Marac 2018), as well as on throwing away and discarding practices by problematizing the naturalization and pathologization often granted to the first set of actions, mainly supported by Westernized approaches (Newell 2014). In order to understand such complex discarding experiences in heuristic terms, I consider Weiner’s (1980) allusions to life and material cycles, and the way in which objects often—positively or negatively—shape relationship tactics with others.11 In her ethnographic research in the Trobriand Islands, Annette Weiner (1976, 1980) claims that the cultural processes of regeneration and rebirth involve enormous efforts, energy, and resources to ensure social reproduction. She understands that in order to carry out this enterprise successfully, it is necessary to combine human life cycles and the life trajectories of material and immaterial resources (Weiner 1980). The American anthropologist focuses on understanding such revitalization tactics in the context of positive or contradictory social processes, whether through loss or attrition, and the way objects enter and/or exit such events. In this context, even in spheres recognized as reproductive, women produce value by deploying a set of domestic-productive activities whose effects transcend the place where they are performed and from which they manufacture ritual goods. Thus, Weiner believes that objects cannot be separated from human experience (1976: 231). Although risky, this invitation might entail an understanding of life from its material resurgence. Furthermore, women’s actions involve discursive mediations, active listening, and practices specifically coupled to personal/spiritual cultivation as part of a New Age spirituality or a command centered on a multi-religious logic that amplifies the experience of the self. As Carla Graef Velázquez (2006) points out, the New Ager is characterized as a person who seeks, through the triad of body, spirit, and mind, a balance and harmony in spiritual terms with him or herself. Some elements of the New Age are compatible with multi-religious phenomena.12 According to María Julia

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Carozzi (1999: 36), “the New Age interpretative framework sacralizes individual autonomy, conceiving it as contact with a divine or perfect part not socialized within the individual, and energetically connected to a whole that is also sacralized and asocial, i.e., nature, the planet or the cosmos” (own translation). Such conceptions allowed people both to sustain stylistic and habitational decisions, especially profoundly in times of crisis, as well as to support possible spiritual connections between mind and body in the domestic environment.

Bringing to Life by Purging and Bond Regeneration One winter afternoon, while we were in the kitchen preparing to listen to an audiobook entitled The Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo,13 Luisa told me that she was tired of “being there” in her house. She was tired of being held responsible for every detail that was “falling apart” and, above all, she was tired of “being her own boss.” Then, she asked me to accompany her along the hallway that connects the kitchen with the rest of the first floor to reach the bathroom. We walked in, she raised her hand, and with her index finger she pointed to a hole above the toilet—where the toilet flush button was supposed to be—and said, “Do you see this? It hasn’t worked for years and I can’t get anyone to come and fix it . . . I’m not here all day long . . . We live with a hole in the wall and the floor is often flooded, it’s a mess.” Then, we returned to the kitchen. She also spoke of a weird musty smell, the dampness in the air, the peeling leather of the chairs and armchairs, and the darkness that seemed to expel everything. Luisa insisted that she was not enjoying her home because she felt trapped. Somehow, the problem with the toilet button was an explicit metaphor for other things that were damaged. When I began my ethnography in 2015, Luisa was living in a family house opposite the town square in Morón Sur. Her house was large and spacious as it had been planned by herself and her ex-husband Gerardo in the 1990s for themselves and their four children (Jaime, Martín, Isabella, and Rosario). The plot measured approximately ten by twenty meters and the house had a chalet-like appearance, with exposed brick, wooden latticework, and high ceilings. The building had a front yard with a fence that marked the beginning of the property. The buzzer had not worked for years, so you had to ring a bell to announce yourself. The two-story, three-bathroom, five-bedroom house seemed to be the backbone of a past family project from which Luisa sought to withdraw. She felt that if she did not inject life into her house, then she would have to leave, but selling it was difficult since they were unable to find a buyer. So, she and Gerardo were in full back-and-forth mode. These limitations overshadowed her experience in a house that had once been inhabited by six people, then five, four, three, two, and soon she would be alone. Luisa told me that throughout her life, she had changed house many times, moving around different

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neighborhoods and living in different buildings as part of a housing itinerary characterized by “inter-residential mobility” (mobilidad interresidencial) (Martorell Faus and Carrasco Pons 2020). Nevertheless, she expressed how difficult it would be for her to leave the house because it was part of an intergenerational experience of consecration and upward social mobility that had begun with the migration of her parents from Paraguay.

“Moving Forward”: Listening and Order-Embracing-Self For Luisa, keeping the house afloat involved a great deal of management and resources, of which she was fully aware. She also needed to rely on certain services such as plumbing, masonry, and gardening. It was not only a question of time and dedication, but also of valuable resources and mental and body availability. Her daughters, Isabella and Rosario, who worked the same time slot as her, contributed nothing to the upkeep of the house. Even so, they suggested possible changes in the decoration to “boost its energy.” Isabella felt that everything had to be changed, whereas Rosario thought that with a just a few adjustments it would look “pretty good.” They realized that their house was old and had not adapted to the changes in the composition of the family and its needs. In one way or another, they understood that ties and affections had shifted and their house had failed to accompany such changes. “We’re not the family we used to be . . . I don’t know, we’re something else, we’ve changed but this house must follow its course . . . I don’t know . . . and be transformed,” Isabella commented while looking at some decorating influencers on Instagram. Luisa knew all this and somehow felt the same way, although she was aware of the effects entailed in trying to tackle a project of such magnitude as the renovation of the house. In this context, and in order to relate to herself and her home from another perspective, Luisa followed suggestions from acquaintances and family members that she should listen to audiobooks on YouTube about mindfulness and meditation. She even participated in several biodecoding sessions, during which she sought to reconnect with her own family history. In fact, biodecoding brought to light several conflictive episodes from her childhood that led her to reconsider her ties with her relatives, while breaking others. Through these actions, she sought to understand her parents’ decisions linked to uprooting, the “desperate” search to be part of the national identity, and to break, as she said, with the “toxicity” of certain established gender roles under which she had been raised, and which had prevented her from “moving forward.” We would always talk about her online searches, and she would even share the websites she consulted. A while back, a co-worker of Japanese descent had suggested that she listen to audiobooks by a Japanese “­decorator”—an organizational consultant, in fact—who would teach her to tidy and organize her home by learning to differentiate between “what

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is meaningful and what is accessory,” as her colleague said. To do this, she had to learn to classify her objects according to their emotional value—not by a logic of storage—also based on categories that “the decorator” had pre-selected. Luisa decided to listen to those audiobooks and had a hard time convincing herself that the method could apply to her. However, she soon realized that the question of what to select was not hers alone but involved more people, such as her nuclear and extended family. She knew that part of what she wanted to do involved calling others and having them also connect with their things and their choices because it was not a one-way experience. Listening to these audiobooks marked the beginning of her “new era” as an expression of a desire to modify her environment. Being in her pajamas, listening while cooking something, or preparing a space in the kitchen for crafts already felt to her like mocking the environment. This disposition was less linked to the possibility of actually “organizing the space” in situ and more about taking time for herself. It was a kind of staging of the “self” that allowed her to think of herself and her own space in a different way. The tips and techniques of the KonMari method were important in revitalizing her way of being and being at home. This method, devised by Marie Kondo, consists in getting rid of what is no longer of use to organize the place where one lives. The five points that Marie Kondo suggests as a starting point for the organization of material goods in the home are: clothing, books, paper, komono (miscellaneous items),14 and mementos, respectively. Luisa said that the method helped her “catharsis,” as she always put on her headphones and went round the house trying to complete her reorganization point by point. On her website, Kondo explains six basic rules for decluttering: 1) Commit yourself to  tidying  up; 2) Imagine your ideal lifestyle; 3) Finish discarding first; 4) Tidy by category, not by location; 5) Follow the right order; 6) Ask yourself if it “sparks joy.” For Luisa, this implied establishing a new order of priorities in her decisions, where imagination and joy emerged as guiding factors in the relationship with objects. The limiting factor was the things that her children had left in her house: although only her daughters continued to live there, they had all left things such as clothes, slippers, suitcases, paintings, and decorative objects; items that were neither sought nor discarded. One of the most important issues that Luisa repeated like a mantra referred to the action of “emptying.” The emotional character assumed by the renovation of her spaces and her links with objects of the past was significant in a daily life that did not include the presence of her children, and that coexisted with the intermittent presence of her two daughters, Isabella and Rosario. Since the sale of the family house had been postponed and Luisa had no money to move out, she realized she needed to do some work on her house and on herself. So, she repainted some of the spaces where the paint had peeled in white and tones of grey. She also bought plants to place around

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the edges of each space to change the energy and asked her children to come to the family house on weekends. In Marie Kondo’s proposal, the principles of Feng Shui seemed to sneak into the senses and into the explanations that Luisa herself gave for each spatial change she undertook, where she prioritized “green” and her “present time.” Her sons and daughters considered the family home to be “forever,” so even though her eldest sons, Jaime and Martín, had moved out, they never finished removing all their possessions and objects from Luisa’s house. The idea was that they should pull out the boxes and belongings they had accumulated and decide what to throw away and what to keep. Therefore, sorting became part of the schedule for Saturdays and Sundays. In a way, these actions allowed her to reconnect with herself and to rebuild her relationship with her children. I participated in some of these scenes in which the sorting was done by the sons and daughters, who sub-classified their belongings according to whether they would donate them, give them away, or keep them. Mostly, there were clothes, and in Martín’s case, there was a lot of his own artwork. Isabella had many shoes and fabrics, while Rosario had lots of slippers. Jaime had not lived there for many years and, as his sister had occupied his old room, he had already made a “first cleaning process” years before and, as he told me, one “of detachment.” Luisa chose to keep some objects, especially sentimental ones linked to her children’s upbringing, such as a stuffed rabbit they adored. She was thus able to start with the generalized order proposed by Marie Kondo, and she at least felt that she had been able to move forward with points one and four of the basic rules. She discovered that imagining a coherent and homogeneous lifestyle (rule two) was not possible until she knew what spaces she would eventually have available and what tools—materially and economically speaking—she could count on to achieve it. Consequently, she could not follow point five (follow the right order). It was not a question of good or bad will, but the possibility of doing what she could to carry out Marie Kondo’s integral proposal, which, in her case, meant “disorganizing” these steps to carry them out in another way, according to her possibilities. Similarly, she felt that from her own purge and what her sons and daughters were doing, she began to reconnect. At that time, she also realized that certain objects belonged to other family members, and she decided on such objects because she understood that it was one thing to share the decision with her children and another to share it with the extended family—who had decided to leave things there for years. Then, among her other tactics, she renewed small appliances by purchasing stainless steel items to make better use of “what she had.” She also invited friends over for dinner so as to share her home. However, she was not happy with the fragmented walls on the first floor which, for example, did not allow her to share in conversations while cooking. The design was part of an outdated layout that prioritized partitions and separated rooms in houses as a way of maintaining privacy. Luisa could not

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afford to repair or renovate the house since, ideally, she wanted to live elsewhere. During my fieldwork, she reminded me to listen to the audiobooks that would accompany me during “the journey.” It would imprint a sort of pedagogical sense and would also underpin my listening. She insisted on how to listen and how to translate the tips “your own way.” These changes eventually took more than a year. Listening to Marie Kondo allowed her to create a world of reconnection and to make her own decisions in everyday life (DeNora 2000)15 as a type of agency, even in complex or unstructured family contexts. One afternoon, Luisa said: “When you clean the house, you clean the soul,” and that was how she had recovered the interconnection and continuity between her house, her body and her soul. Somehow, the bodily experience of the house, in the house, was not inseparable from her sensitive and emotional condition (Merleau-Ponty 1997). Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones (1995) highlight how the relationship between body and dwelling densifies the senses and affects the complex experience of the world. They understand that the materiality of housing is entangled with the body and with oneself. In Luisa’s case, such an experience implied a kind of “purification” necessary as a step to breathe life into what seemed to have come full circle. Consequently, the progressive spiritualization of Luisa’s daily life, manifested in the experience of order and reengagement with the soul, was significant in what several recent works have recognized as spiritualized lifestyles (Funes 2018).

Object Detachment amid the Pandemic Gloria worked while raising her children, and also set up her own clothing business. Ariel worked in a concrete company he had built up with his siblings.16 A few years before I started my research, the whole family had moved into a house of their own built a few blocks from the train station, in what is known as Haedo Chico (Morón, province of Buenos Aires). As soon as I entered their newly inhabited house, I was struck by how spacious, open, and bright it was. Contemporary in style, with a smooth concrete façade, this two-story house was the tallest on the block. Among its features were its large windows, the predominance of white, the spaciousness provided by an open-plan concept and the flexibility of its rooms, which made it possible to convert a living room into an office by simply moving some furniture. They both enjoyed the house and considered it to be a source of wellbeing. Nonetheless, the pandemic imposed a change in the way they lived and circulated in the house, as well as in the relationship they established with their spaces and possessions. They had to adopt extreme sanitation and cleanliness measures, as well as reconsider what and what not to keep as the days of mandatory confinement went by. The so-called ASPO modified the ways in which they existed and connected with the home, implying

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extended presence in spaces where previously they had only spent a few hours, such as at their big table in the dining room. Her husband started working from home and her children switched to virtual school. Being “at home” encouraged Gloria and Ariel to redefine what to keep and what to throw away. She understood that “letting go” was by no means an idea she had initially sought, but that confinement had forced her to do so. The pressure to “be” imposed on her the need to select and classify objects following criteria that perhaps differed from those she used to have, and that were now more focused on quality and on the possibility of being able to have even larger, better tended, and functional spaces. In decorating their house, Gloria and Ariel followed the advice and tips of several lifestyle and decorating magazines, such as Revista Living, Revista LN—the Sunday magazine of the La Nación newspaper, Revista Brando—La Nación’s hipster magazine—and Ohlalá—a magazine for “a community of women.” These publications had served as “orientation” in incorporating a modernist decoration according to their aesthetics and space. Now came the question of rearranging and reorganizing “with what they had,” since they could not afford to spend a great deal, nor did they like the idea of being assessed virtually. They pursued a twofold objective, to create more space and to get rid of stuff. So, they took the opportunity to review relevant tips on Instagram. Normally, in early winter and early summer every year, Gloria used to sort out her own, Ariel’s, and her children’s closets. This time, she also decided to get rid of objects that had been in the house for a long time, pondering a principle also linked to hygiene and cleanliness. It was not only about tidying the house and being able to live in it in what she considered to be an “extreme” experience, but also about preserving the quality of life and health of her family. Being at home made the whole family help with a task Gloria used to do by herself. Her children were in charge of taking all the clothes out of their closets and the sorting was done together with Gloria and Ariel. The first question related to the clothes had to do with whether they fit, and the second with whether they wore them. If they did not fit or were not worn, they would be placed in a pile to “give away” to relatives and acquaintances, or donate, mostly to the church. This could take all day and included planning contact with one person or another, or figuring out when to go to church when the lockdown was over. As Gloria told me: I spend my time cleaning and disinfecting the house . . . My hallway looks like a hospital . . . We also spend a fortune on this, but you have to keep the “bug” [COVID-19] away . . . With Ariel [her husband] we took the opportunity to sort and donate clothes and things we did not use. We realized that our house was full of junk. (Audio message from Gloria, August 2020)

In Gloria’s case, being at home made her realize that many things that seemed to be necessary were, in fact, “junk.” Involving her children in these

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tasks meant that they could identify which activities their mother usually did, and Gloria adopted a pedagogical and demonstrative character on what to keep and what to discard: showing them how to prioritize quality over quantity, and how they could see that a garment was untidy and did not make them “look good.” Gloria sought these moments to spend with her children, who were often at school, or were involved in extracurricular activities. For her, the domestic chore of cleaning was also linked to this possibility of transmitting values. In addition, Gloria and Ariel tried to ensure that the “forced” change give them some satisfaction or, to a lesser or greater extent, “joy.”17 Unlike Luisa, Gloria never spoke to me about Marie Kondo, or practices such as mindfulness, yet the language seemed to be shared. Words and actions alike tended to be found in both houses, pondering different aspects of the effects of tidiness. Such allusions seemed to manifest at least a floating narrative linked to the house and its (dis)possessions among certain sectors of the middle classes. In such a context, those who were able to tidy up, throw away, clean, fix, and even build over time aimed to translate such actions into positive principles and values oriented to produce some kind of (new) normality. Indeed, cleaning items were brought in, the almost compulsive use of soap was embraced, and alcohol-based hand sanitizer was constantly used in day-to-day activities. The pandemic revealed folds in coordinating daily life in the home when the future horizon was interrupted, and hygiene and cleanliness emerged as crucial in ensuring a personal and family-centered tomorrow. Some of those whose economic situation had suffered radically modified their domestic routines, even without resources. The mass circulation of ideas on how to cope with home confinement was accompanied by a set of actions and preaching aimed at order as an achievable moral value. For Gloria and Ariel, being with their children while giving away possessions became a possible and legitimate form of confinement.

Discarding as a Material-Spiritual Reordering I began this paper with a quote from Camila Sosa Villada, in which she poeticizes the actions involved in a house, its materialities, and how cleanliness becomes a vital way of being in it as a moral sense that is trafficked among common sense assumptions. As mentioned in the review of the literature, the so-called material turn has paved the way for thinking about materiality not only in terms of what is possessed and given, but also in terms of what is kept, reorganized, and discarded. The present study confirms that women placed their attention, effort, and dedication into maintaining their homes, thus preserving a social status. In part, such precisions are linked to Luisa and Gloria’s descriptive vignettes, in which the discarding of material becomes a spiritual tactic of reconnecting with the place where one lives, and thus produces a kind of

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critical placeship. Both socioeconomic and sanitary uncertainty produced by COVID-19 were embodied in housing repair decisions. I sought to think of the actions of cleaning, tidying, purifying, and discarding as tactics to reconnect with the space one inhabits, as well as with the people who inhabit or have inhabited it. This manifests itself as a way of giving shape to the practices and, through them, being able to transmit the domestic knowledge learned. Thus, what might be called social mediators, ranging from audiobooks to guru advice, enter and exit Luisa’s domestic scene providing “tips” for selecting what and how to discard objects. Such advice constructs grammars of dematerialization that guide practice, yet Luisa agencies a time of her own through which to carry this out. Moreover, for Luisa listening to audiobooks reflected a particular willingness to produce a certain placeship within a dual logic of disconnection/reconnection with her home and her own social position that implied ordering, classifying, and giving away as a collective form of managing the house and, with it, the family ties. In Gloria’s case, moral values and principles oriented toward positivity and wellbeing were mobilized to manage isolation and uncertainty. In these stories, reconnections with families and homes through order, as a form of purification, are tactics for surviving an uncertain order (before and during the pandemic) that creeps in like a moldy stain. Consequently, spiritualized discourses in everyday life seem to permeate decisions beyond what they are expected to do, and deepen decisions on how to keep house. These findings can help us understand how discarding actions can build a bond, a tie, and a deep relationship between people and things, such as that of accumulating, and generating a common experience among those who participate, in this case, referring to social status. There is much room for further progress in determining the therapeutic meanings and the wellbeing assumed by the domestic order in the rewriting of a social class position that is based on the possibility of choosing what and how to discard.

Acknowledgments The research that served as the basis for this paper was supported by the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET, Argentina). I am grateful to Analía N. Kerman and Lawrence Wheeler for checking the use of English in the manuscript. María Florencia Blanco Esmoris is a researcher at the Centro de Investigaciones Sociales (CIS-CONICET/IDES) with a focus on urban and housing studies and material culture. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from EIDAES-UNSAM (Argentina) where she also serves as an Assistant Professor.

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Notes   1. This paper derives from my doctoral research carried out between 2015 and, 2019 in which I adopted an ethnographic approach and method to study the forms of creating “the appropriate house,” and what domestic life meant for four middle-class families in the Municipality of Morón (Buenos Aires, Argentina). I rely on remote records collected between March and August 2020, specifically from families with whom I had done previous fieldwork, i.e., Luisa’s and Gloria’s. For this article, I have used material arising from field notes on Luisa’s from 2016, 2017, and 2018, and on Gloria’s family between March and August 2020.   2. A type of alternative therapy oriented to build and analyze the family tree by encountering deep emotions and embodying them, and recreating ancestors’ stories. According to this technique, people repeat or recreate the sufferings and/or mistakes of their ancestors, so it seeks to break this “genealogical unconscious” or “familial genetic memory.”   3.“Mindfulness is the common denominator at the base of different meditation currents derived from the Buddhist tradition and currently incorporated into various treatment models in psychotherapy” (Vásquez-Dextre 2016: 43). “Mindfulness can be used to refer to three situations: a construct, a practice, and a psychological process. As a construct it has multiple definitions, all of which focus on the experience of the present moment with acceptance and non-judgement. Mindfulness can be related to other constructs such as metacognition, reflective awareness, and acceptance” (Vásquez-Dextre 2016: 44) (my translation).   4. From December 2015 to December 2019, the Argentine national government was headed by Mauricio Macri, whose policies of dismantling the State in broader terms produced profound social and economic damage. The 2018 report elaborated by the Latin American Strategic Center for Geopolitics (CELAG) characterized the economic situation as follows: “Recession, record inflation, poverty, and rising unemployment are the economic results to be displayed by the government . . .” (Wahren, Harracá, and Cappa 2018: 24). Such changes were experienced differently among social classes, even by those social sectors who did not “normally” seem to be affected by economic crises: the middle classes. This experience was aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic scenario.   5. In Argentina, the global spread of the virus led in March 2020 to Preventive and Mandatory Social Isolation (Aislamiento Social Preventivo y Obligatorio—ASPO) ordered by President Alberto Fernández under National Decree (297/2020). For more than 150 days in the Province of Buenos Aires, ASPO phases advanced and retreated until the DISPO (Social, Preventive, and Mandatory Distancing) was established by decree (677/2020) on August 17. The prolonged confinement produced significant changes in social conditions.   6. I conceive ethnography as an analytical-reflexive disposition and an epistemic construction that allows me to understand the “vivid worlds” of people (Quirós 2014) and to penetrate in capillary fashion beyond the surface by building bridges of knowledge. Since the beginning of my doctoral research, I have cultivated personal and trusting relationships with these women and their families. This was the foundation that enabled the continuity of links, despite the physical isolation imposed by COVID-19. As a result of this scenario, the fieldwork took the shape of an ethnography (Hine 2000; Miller & Slater 2000), where communication was activated in all supports (through the use of videos, audios, blogs, etc.) and digital platforms (WhatsApp, Facebook posts, interaction on Instagram, etc.).   7. Notions that, as we shall see, seem to live in contradiction with those visions of abundance linked to access to consumption by the middle classes.

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  8. In Argentina, the term “middle class” constitutes “a strongly normative category; its very use carries implicit messages about how social life should be, which in turn convey strong Eurocentric and classist biases” (Adamovsky 2014: 133) (own translation). It has often been perceived as homogeneous and immutable, or characterized by attributes that have linked it to development, industriousness, and modernization (Germani 1942). Alternatively, it has had negative, anti-popular, racist, white, superficial, and conservative connotations (Guano 2003; Adamovsky 2015). Local intellectuals have noted that the category has been problematically used as objective and universal, and upon classification there has been a tendency to homogenize its characteristics according to the criteria of the researcher or expert (Visacovsky and Garguin 2009) either from quantitative studies—many of which have focused on economic dimensions—or from a qualitative approach that focused on insertion in the labor market (Tevik 2007), or the acquisition of consumer goods (Arizaga 2004, 2005; Wortman 2003). However, the frequent appeal of the public media and citizens themselves made this category of analytical interest.  9. For more references about this socio-historical background, see Blanco Esmoris (2020, 2021a). 10. Regarding how to study households, the Anglo-Saxon and North American contributions are significant. They claim that household refers to both the spatiality of the dwelling, to narratives and their metaphors (Tucker 1994), and to the forms of the ideal and imaginary home (Saunders and Williams 1988; Sommerville 1989; Douglas 1991, among others), to possessions (Miller 2001), and the presentation of the self (Hurdley 2006). 11. In another work (Blanco Esmoris 2021b), I refer to the affective-habitational regeneration that women produce to inhabit their homes while reconnecting with themselves in the context of family changes and dismemberments. 12. On this last point, see Masferrer (1998), and on the new spirituality movements, see Hanegraaff (1996, 1999). 13. See Newell’s introduction, this volume. Marie Kondo’s conception of order articulates many “worlds” and traditions by bringing oriental philosophy and feng shui into dialogue with inspirational coaching. Terms such as: undoing, daring, “beautiful,” “what really fulfills you,” and “joy” appear to be significant. 14. In Japanese, the word komono means “miscellaneous” objects that circulate in a house and that are difficult to classify. 15. In this sense, it interests me to think of Marie Kondo’s listening in terms of how Tia DeNora (2000) conceives listening to music in everyday life as a privileged resource for engaging in a reflexive practice of subjectivation. 16. Gloria and Ariel moved between what is known as the “expansion stage” (nuclear family with a conjugal nucleus and children between the ages of six and twelve) and the “consolidation stage” (nuclear family with a conjugal nucleus and children between the ages of thirteen and eighteen). 17. In recent decades, several authors have drawn attention to the proliferation and circulation of positive psychology discourses (Seligman 2003) that propose orienting actions toward happiness. “Sarah Ahmed points out that the limits of the promise of happiness in these times are presented as a form of ‘duty’ that tinges readings of how we live, as a kind of ‘shield’ (2019: 437) against the recognition that other realities are possible” (own translation) (Hijós and Blanco Esmoris 2021). Such discourses appeared to situate themselves as expected modes of ought-to-be, putting pressure on people’s expectations.

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7 The American Garage Sale

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Liberating Space and Creating Kin

Gretchen M. Herrmann

Home is a site for nurturance, reproduction, and the creation of identity. It is also the repository for personal possessions and storage. Mary Douglas characterizes home, first and foremost, as a space: “home starts by bringing some space under control,” (1991: 289) and residents continue to curate that space over time. Yet the consumer shopping binge over the last seventy years has overfilled our living spaces and left our cupboards, closets, and garages bursting with excess such that many Americans are trapped in a sort of Manichean struggle between the forces of organization and the specter of hoarding (e.g., Lepselter 2011; Kilroy-Marac 2016, 2018, this volume). Holding a garage sale can be a welcome mechanism to help tame this clutter. Through sorting, clearing, organizing, and selling unneeded but still useful household goods, proprietors, disproportionately women, assert some control over the cascading mountains of things. Garage sales are linked to the home in other ways. Janet Carsten reminds us that kinship is developed in the home and is creatively “made,” not “given” (2004: 9); thus, the direct transfer of the goods to appreciative recipients may evoke imagined kin-like relations. In garage sales, then, intimate belongings, possessions steeped in domestic space and suffused with lingering familial affect, are transferred in face-to-face interactions to “worthy” shoppers, often familialized as “kindred spirits,” providing renewed life to used possessions. This article, based on over thirty years of research on the American garage sale, examines how sellers view their activities as a means of reducing excess stuff, thereby reclaiming space,

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Figure 7.1.  Garage Sale in Ithaca, New York. © Gretchen M. Herrmann, 2022

often measured in rooms liberated. Simultaneously, they create mental space, clearing the way for additional psychological development, and possibly creating nascent kinship ties through the transaction. The article also examines the nature of used goods in the garage sale setting in light of their affect, agency, and thing-power.

Garage Sales A garage sale is defined here as the temporary public sale of predominantly used goods, primarily household items and clothing, from in and around a private residence. Such sales can be found in virtually all American and increasing numbers of Australian communities (Garage Sale Trail 2017), conducted and attended by a cross section of the populace, although in the US, middle- and stable working-class participants predominate. The garage sale ethos includes a generalized friendliness and overall egalitarianism, bringing shoppers and sellers from diverse backgrounds into informal contact. The facts that sales transpire in and around the home, i.e., that public commerce and proprietary hospitality are juxtaposed, and that proprietors are selling (more or less) their own goods are very important in establishing the breadth of social relations found in this exchange (Herrmann 1997), ranging from the highly impersonal and commercial to the more intimate and gift-like. Sellers participate with a wide range of styles and motivations, from periodic housecleaning and socializing

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to generating cash and profit-making, as do shoppers, whose motivations include recreation, recycling, and bargain-hunting (see Herrmann and Soiffer 1984). Most participants do not derive major financial benefits from garage sales, but dealers and those in financial need may be especially profit-oriented. Public and private are brought together in an unusual synthesis in the garage sale (Herrmann 1997), and women, the primary garage sale participants, combine their traditional domestic concerns with those of public commerce to play a key role in creating the mixed and multilayered nature of garage sale exchange (Herrmann 1997). According to Octave Debary (2015), in the last thirty years in France, “yard sales” called “videgraniers” or “attic clearances,” have been held at the homes of deceased members of a village after their heirs have already selected goods. These sales, similar to American garage sales, attract collectors and the curious on Sunday outings.

Clutter For the last seventy years, Americans have been on an extended shopping binge. By 2008, average Americans consumed three times as much as they did in 1960 (Schor 2010: 26), marked by a considerable increase in furniture, clothing, and household goods. The shopping spree has been fueled by a decline in the real cost of items (adjusted for inflation) and easy credit (Schor 2010: 33). By 2007, the percentage of the gross domestic product dedicated to personal consumption reached a full 70 percent, up from 61.5 percent in 1969 (Schor 2010: 25), and has remained at high levels (e.g., 71 percent in 2013). As a result of the steady influx of goods into their homes, Americans are experiencing an epidemic of “clutter” or a surfeit of possessions in their living spaces. There is a fundamental mis-match in Americans’ abundant consumer consumption and the size their homes. Researchers Arnold and Lang note in their 2007 observation of home use in Southern California that families were “battling a nearly universal over-accumulation of goods. Most homes, almost all garages, and even some outside spaces have become storage areas for growing piles of consumer goods. “From construction materials to excess furniture and toys, we find items blocking driveways, cluttering back yard corners, or spilling out of garages” (2007: 36). Not surprisingly, they find that few of the families observed actually used their garages for cars; garages were far too precious as storage space. Americans have utilized various strategies to deal with the tsunami of stuff. Some turn to the growing cadre of professional organizers who assist in handling, organizing and disposing of goods for clients overwhelmed by consumer items (e.g., Belk 2007; Kilroy-Marac 2016, 2018). Approximately one in ten American households rents a storage unit (Mooallem 2009: 26), and the storage industry has expanded robustly until 2019, providing better facilities and services (Acitelli 2020). Containers and closet

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organizing schemes are other means of managing and organizing the piles of stuff that threaten to monopolize peoples’ living spaces. Still, other Americans choose to get off the entire work-consumption—debt treadmill and practice “voluntary simplicity,” which, at the very least, requires that practitioners reduce the number of possessions in their lives (Ballantine and Creery 2010). Despite the Great Recession and the COVID pandemic, the parade of stuff continues flowing into the households of those Americans who, based on class and income, can afford purchases increasingly home delivered by Amazon. There are mental, and some would say moral, concomitants to the amount of clutter in a home (Gould, this volume). Clutter is seen as a reflection on selfhood, and peoples’ lives are viewed as visibly out of control in an environment overstuffed with accumulated possessions. Kilroy-Marac (2016) observes that those who practice simplicity and minimalism are, ironically, deemed virtuous on the basis of what they do not have visible in their homes, as opposed to personal possessions that might otherwise be on display. Anthropologist Mary Douglas notes that such “matter out of place” (1966) fosters an undercurrent of danger to the moral order in that clutter is dirty and psychically polluting. Excess clutter can evoke such emotional responses as shame, disgust, and embarrassment among those who experience it. When making the analogy of the home to the human body, clutter is viewed as waste or feces (Belk et al. 2007). Many feel that disposing of excess stuff is akin to spirituality (Ballantine and Creery 2010). Objects must be properly managed and the living space absent of clutter to properly tend possessions (Isenhour 2012; Kilroy-Marac 2018). Ironically, Americans are encouraged to purchase to excess, but are disparaged for allowing the surplus to overtake living space. This is similar to the negativity aimed at those who cannot control their eating and body weight in the midst of the food that plentifully surrounds us. There are numerous ways to dispose of consumer goods in addition to the trash. The US garage sale is major means for the disposition of Americans’ numerous possessions and their capacity to promote reuse has been embraced as a way to lessen use of the landfill (Herrmann 2019) alongside such pathways to reuse as Craigslist, eBay, Poshmark, articles for sale, consignment shops, thrifts, charities, numerous online selling sites, and freecycling. There is also the time-honored practice of putting things at the curb. The garage sale is one of the major “safety valves” for overcrowded homes and garages. I will focus here on the disposal of possessions in the garage sale and how this cleaning can lead to personal and “thingly” change and growth, along with increased household space.

Too Much Stuff/Too Little Space When I attend garage sales, I often ask the sellers why they are holding their sales. Almost universally, I get a response that indicates: “I have too

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much stuff.” Often, the sellers will say those very words, but frequently it is implied when they say they are moving (a major reason for a sale), downsizing, or combining households. When sellers use such terms as “purging” or “cleansing,” they speak directly to a perceived moral imperative to reduce their possessions. They evoke the same sort of psychological/spiritual need to “cleanse” their environments as do those who take up voluntary simplicity; they express their distress at “suffocating in stuff” (Ballantine and Creery 2010). Sellers more often use morally neutral expressions that include such terms as “divesting,” “decluttering,” “shedding,” “cleaning out,” “housecleaning,” and “creating space.” Many hold semi-regular garage sales as part of their household cleaning and management. Here are some responses concerning why they are holding sales: “Clearing out. Too much stuff for this little house.”; “To get things out of my life an into someone else’s life”; and “Downsizing, moving, too much stuff.” While many sellers seek additional space overall, others have specific plans for designated room(s). Sellers also are interested in gaining additional space, be it visible or “hidden” (Newell 2014). Physical space is often needed for a workshop, remodeling, a new baby, or a study, so the removal and disposition of excess items to create room is often a paramount reason to hold a sale. A woman in her late twenties, upon moving back into her house that had been rented, held a sale to clear out the tenant’s remaining possessions, noting, “I want to create space. This room needs to be empty so I can do my framing [her business]. I just want the space.” Other sellers’ responses that directly refer to the need to create space include: “I’m still digging, but I’ve managed to excavate two rooms. I got two rooms back!”; “We have to get rid of half our stuff. I measured. This is hard to do. I like my things, but there’s just not space for everything  . . . [moving to an apartment in NYC]”; and “We really need to make deals . . . the car has got to fit in the garage for the winter!” Such depictions of trying to wrest some physical space from the piles of clutter come as no surprise given the degree to which Americans’ possessions’ have eclipsed the size of their houses and apartments for containing them. In her essay about the “idea of home,” Mary Douglas uses the metaphor of “space,” more specifically “an organization of space over time,” to signify home (1991: 294),” and this space must continue to be controlled and managed (1991: 289). Surely these garage sale sellers are engaging in the activities, at once quite mundane and simultaneously profound, of creating a home. Through sorting, clearing, organizing, and selling their unneeded but still useful household goods, garage sale sellers are asserting their control over the mountains of stuff that threaten to inundate their living spaces and suffocate their lives. In addition to physical space, many garage sales also create “mental space,” or the emotional and/or cognitive room that allows people to pursue new endeavors and other potential selves (Cross and Marcus 1991). It is next to impossible to separate the physical and mental dimensions,

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since the transformation of the physical space usually has a correlative transformation of identity/status. This frees up corresponding mental clutter, given the mutual influence of mind and matter and their mimetic sympathy (Kilroy-Marac 2016: 452). One seller, for example, rid herself of the goods that reminded her of her past marriage to a male, which then allowed her the psychic room to develop something new with her partner Barbara. Aside from the very real practical aspects of selling unneeded goods before moving across country, a garage sale seller may also shed her local life and identity, allowing her to create a new identity in a new locale. As I have noted elsewhere (Herrmann 2011), most sales signify some sort of personal transformation, however small or mundane, in a rite of passage. Seemingly mundane sales for cleaning out possessions can have profound implications. Sometimes the notion of life transformation, through the creation of more psychic space, is quite dramatic. What follows is an extended narrative by Colleen Caveney, a Euro-American woman of fiftyone years of age, concerning a sale she held with her twenty something son named Terry. In order to prepare for the sale, Colleen noted: I looked around the house for things that were clutter, in the way or that I hadn’t used in a really long time. Or another category was things that were unfinished. There were quite a few of them. There was a great huge release from that. Plus, I have roommates and I had collected a lot of odds and ends from garage sales to stock the kitchen. So, I was eager to take out things they were not using just to create more space.   The motivation of this garage sale was to create more space . . . There were some animal related things, like the invisible fence. We used to have rabbits, and so there was a bunny cage. A lot of the stuff was related to my past life and my past interests, which were home-based: you know, the kids, being home and having pets. So, it was a real-life shift, in that sense. It was a life shift garage sale.   And my marriage fell apart . . . but it’s taken me all that time to really release things connected to that. So, I saw this as just a shift in occupation where I was shifting from teaching to . . . writing . . . There were a lot of things that suddenly became clutter, they became in my way. But this was a significant beginning for me and it really felt different to me afterwards. I had this sense of release of no longer keeping that which does not nourish me, but clutters my way. I looked at what was around and it looked like other people’s junk! I realized it was my old dreams and my old patterns to fix everything . . . So, I was letting go of the stuff that didn’t fit, didn’t feel good and had no art and had no meaning . . .

The profundity of the life shift represented in Colleen’s garage sale was unusual, but the fact that there was a shift, a “release,” as Colleen puts it, is not. It was a dramatic example of the sorts of smaller transformations many experience in their ongoing efforts to create and curate the space of home (Herrmann 2011). Many sellers have periodic clean outs, but often find that they quickly fill whatever space has been created through their sales. As one of my informants observed: “I’ve got too much stuff. I just moved in, but I have too much to use. So I’m selling it. And probably next

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week I’ll go garage saling and get it all back again!” This seller was making a joke, but it is one that is perhaps closer to the lived reality of many Americans who strive to gain control over the piles of consumer goods that clutter and choke their homes, psyches, and lives. I must note that the discussion thus far has been from the seller’s perspective, but we should also remember the shopper’s experience. Just as garage sales afford a relatively easy means to dispose of household goods, shopping at sales can quickly and inexpensively lead to numerous purchases and related clutter. As a mathematician I once interviewed cautioned, bringing a couple cubic feet of goods into a living space each week can quickly add up to significant clutter.

Home and Family The fact that garage sales take place in and around the home is significant both materially and symbolically. Culturally, the home is the center of life for Americans, as we voice such notions as “there’s no place like home,” “home is where the heart is,” “a man’s home is his castle,” and repeatedly espouse the need to “get home” for Christmas. Home is the nexus of our individual identities, constructed by family relations and, in part, by personal possessions. The home is also the materialization of the family, the symbolic container of family relations. Hence, the identity-laden belongings of the home, steeped in domestic sentiment and experience, are also imbued with family and kin relations. This is especially so concerning family heirlooms that may tell the family story and constitute almost a family cosmology, as delineated by Nicolette Makovicky (2007) about the china, fancy cut glassware, and heirloom displays and the linen closet treasures that form the heart of the homes in Central Slovakia. Most of the goods traded in garage sales emanate from the home (Arnold et al. 2012), such as housewares, kitchenware, decorative items, furniture, clothing, and recreational goods. The monetary value of such used possessions is highly variable and modified by positive (and negative) valences of sellers’ attachment and affect (Herrmann 2015). Sellers are relatively neutral or mildly ambivalent about most of the items they sell, and usually just want to clear necessary space and make a little extra cash. Few sellers actually sell their “most special” or cherished items (e.g., Curasi et al. 2010), unless forced to by drastic events such as illness, foreclosure or forced disbandment of the home (Ekerdt et al. 2004). Behavioral economists have conducted research on what they term the “endowment effect” (Kahnman, Knetsch, and Thaler 1990), which demonstrates that, even with new, fungible goods such as coffee mugs and ballpoint pens, the sheer act of ownership keeps possessors from trading them and only exchanging them for a price higher than many buyers are willing to pay. Goods from the home, then, presumably accrue additional meaning and value from time served at the heart of most Americans’ identities—home and family.

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Thus, sellers are motivated by finding good new homes for their possessions, essentially creating adoption exchanges in their garages for their used belongings. Janet Carsten notes that kinship is “an area of life in which people invest their emotions, their creative energy, and their imaginings . . .” (2004: 9). In the American garage sale, participants engage in creative kin-making through the unlikely activity of passing used possessions from one owner to a relative stranger for a little cash, while creating space. Intimate, value-laden belongings to a greater or lesser degree carry sellers’ histories, identities, and attachments. Finding such belongings “a good home” poses various issues, but can be done by familializing buyers as “kindred spirits” and/or deputizing them as substitute kin. Given the extent to which Americans create their identities and mark their social status through consumer goods (Belk 1988), and through narratives involving loved objects (Ahuvia 2005), exchange of such identity-laden goods in the garage sale can unite shoppers and sellers in a unique psychological way. Possessions (Carrier 1990) help to narrate a personal history. They tell stories about life phases, interpersonal attachments, and even achievements, and they carry unique marks of wear and tear from actual use. Personal possessions can index our identities over time: “Possessions create a tangible residue of past, present, and possibly anticipate future development. A special possession, therefore, could facilitate self-continuity by connecting a person with a desirable past self (e.g., memories), a present self (me now), or a future self (who I am becoming)” (Kleine et al. 1995: 328). Reminiscent of those in some in pre-industrial cultures, many Americans believe that objects can be affected, for better or worse, by sheer contact with the owner in a form of symbolic magic called “contagion” (Newman et al. 2011; Rozin et al. 1989). Contagion implies that something of the previous owner(s) can be transferred along with the goods exchanged, echoing Mauss’ description of the gift: “To give something is to give part of oneself . . . while to receive is to receive a part of someone’s spiritual essence” ([1925] 1967: 10). Possessions in the garage sale have become singularized (Kopytoff 1986) by the sellers, who transfer some of the meanings, affect, and history of the possessions to the buyer, who, in turn, singularize it once more. Many view an object that has belonged to someone as a stand-in for that person, a common perception often associated with relatives. Newell refers to them as “kin-things” (2014) in that they store the person in their possessions, often family related items. Colleen Caveney provides an example as a seller: “I’m a keeper. I’m under the illusion that if I keep things, then I can keep the memory alive and the moment alive . . . Everything that is in my house is related to the memory and to the person. So, I have a lot of furniture from my grandmother or grandfather’s house that I’d seen at dinner, etc.”

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One can even utilize the metaphor of a hard-drive to depict how objects contain our memories (Newell 2014: 198) . . . But these identity- and affectimbued objects present a problem to discard because that becomes tantamount to throwing out grandpa or throwing out important experiences, a problem Professional Organizers (Kilroy-Marac 2016) must work around. One technique they use is to have their clients imagine making the objects happy, as if they have feelings. And the familialized exchange at sales is a perfect way to adopt out such belongings to welcoming homes in order to make the objects happy.

Kindred Spirits and Finding a Good Home Identifying or recognizing “kindred spirits” constitutes the major form of kin-making engendered through the exchange of possessions in garage sales. In face-to-face interaction, garage sale sellers may identify prospective buyers who demonstrate some similarity or mutuality in values, appreciation, experience, aesthetics or affect concerning such belongings that are a bit too special to be anonymously placed in a Salvation Army box. Thus, sellers assess that the objects have found a good home. As one informant observed, “Because the seller cherishes the belonging, she wants the buyer to cherish the item too.”1 Satisfactory placement of household possessions occurs frequently, and often concerning relatively mundane objects. One morning, I witnessed a middle-aged man beckon his wife to his side, saying, “Come meet the nice lady who is buying our pillow. She really likes it and she’ll give it a good home.” He noted to his customer that they had had the pillow, a handsome, tapestry piece from Turkey, his wife’s native country, for some twenty years. But it just did not fit into the new home they had purchased. Later that morning, a seller, upon transferring a stained-glass cat face window ornament to a shopper, exclaimed, “I’m so glad this is going to a good home” with a kindred cat lover. Shoppers may also offer their appreciation and willingness to adopt a special object by noting they will take good care of it and provide it a proper home. One seller moving to Hawaii who, because of the distance, had to sell even special items, found it helped her when shoppers volunteered their appreciation of her things: “they would tell what they were going to do with the things [they bought]. Certain people said, ‘I’m going to give it a good home.’ And those phrases were meaningful to me.” Palpable appreciation demonstrated by shoppers can not only characterize them as proper recipients, but also can induce sellers to reduce prices, passing along the special items as a partial gift, or giving them away outright (Herrmann 1997). One shopper was so enthusiastic and appreciative about purchasing plants that the older woman proprietor kept adding extra plants, leading the shopper to observe: “It was the first time I’ve really seen anyone get so excited at the thought that she was passing on a part of her existence to someone else, and really sort of checking out to see if these

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plants were getting a good home . . .” Sometimes a seller simply gives something to a buyer appreciative of the special object. For example, a female seller in her fifties noted: “I have often at a sale given things to people. I remember this man was buying a violin. He used the parts. I had two extra ones and he couldn’t pay for them. I gave them to him because I would much rather that someone who appreciated what was there had them than someone else. Probably he was the only person I was going to have all day who really understood.” In this case, appreciation for the object was paramount and readily eclipsed any desire for monetary gain.

Substitute Kin Another way sellers—and buyers—create informal kinship is through a sort of substitution of transactors for some deceased or current relative, such as a father, daughter, or aunt. A lovely example is supplied by a woman in her late twenties about a sweater she had purchased from a mother at a sale: Once I got a sweater that was this beautiful hand-knit wool sweater for $1. It was a gorgeous, gorgeous sweater of Huntington wool, a plaid knit sweater . . . It is real complicated and real gorgeous. I have had it for a long time now. I just started talking to this woman and I just liked her so much. She was such a Mom. She knitted this sweater for her daughter and her daughter was like my age and hated it. She just hated this sweater; she never once wore it . . . I was trying to communicate to her, ‘Look, your daughter is a jerk and she should appreciate this whether she likes the color or the style or not because there are all these hours of labor and time and all this attention to detail.’ I remember where this woman’s house is. This sweater is starting to fall apart, but it is something like a memorial to her, you know, her motherly love.

This emotionally-imbued sweater was thus ultimately cherished by a shopper, an appreciative substitute for the seller’s unappreciative daughter and a buyer who recognized the seller as “mother” and the motherly love that suffused that hand-knit sweater. In another example, a female seller spoke of all the children’s clothes she had sold to a young mother for next to nothing, in part because the buyer’s little boy “reminded me so much of my son Chad.” One dramatic incident of creating kin with the transfer of garage sale goods involves a crystal necklace purchased from a man a woman vaguely knew for only $1 (the clasp was broken). It had belonged to his Aunt Ginny. Some years later, at a regular music event often attended by both parties, the seller asked the purchaser of the necklace if she would wear it the following month, as that was the seller’s birthday. The woman remembered to wear the necklace to the event, making the seller immensely pleased. He escorted the purchaser of the necklace around to his friends who had come to celebrate his birthday, saying, “Aunt Ginny is with us tonight! Here she is with her necklace.” In this unusual way, the buyer of the necklace became a temporary embodiment of a deceased member of the seller’s family, an unusual and imaginative means of kinship-making.

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Identifications of substitute kin and kindred spirits tend to be momentary recognitions of affinity and affect (Herrmann 2015) between buyer and seller. Most garage sale exchanges are one time only transactions, so more long-tern creative kinship relations, i.e., those not based on blood or law, such as “fictive kin,” “chosen kin,” “quasi-kin,” and “voluntary kin” (Braithwaite et al. 2010; MacRae 1992) do not readily apply. Nevertheless, goods can be passed along or swapped through voluntary kin networks (Stack 1975), and special items can be passed along to voluntary kin in lieu of traditional family.

Legacies The felt need to find kindred spirits to adopt personal belongings in a garage sale is heightened when there is no other viable kin to whom to pass along special goods or even family heirlooms. Such situations are increasing in contemporary American society. Families are smaller, many are childless, members live further apart, and, at least among younger people, a premium is placed on personal style and taste as opposed to preserving family “treasures.” So, when giving items to family members is not an option, sellers try to find buyers who appreciate the objects and create something of a legacy (Marcoux 2001; Price et al. 2000). This can be seen in the example of a couple in their early sixties, Jake and Paula, who held a number of garage sales to liquidate their belongings before moving south for retirement. Jake noted: When we think about divesting an object, it’s purely whether it’s going to impact us or not . . . The choices are not in the family. In the next generation—there is no connection.   The [personally meaningful or family] things we’ve sold at yard sales are to people who valued things because they wanted the things so bad. You could tell that they wanted it and that satisfied the need to have that object go somewhere where it was appreciated. For example, that one big teak hutch that that woman . . . had always wanted a . . . teak hutch but she could never afford it . . . She came early and she got it and the price was right . . . Everything was in perfect condition. It made her so happy.

Paula interjected: She said, ‘I have waited for years and I don’t care if I have to move everything out of my dining room. This hutch is going in my dining room!’ . . . She was so happy.

Jake resumed: The point is that we found people, even if we did not know them prior to the yard sale. We knew they loved it so much, it wasn’t just a casual purchase. It was for something they always wanted. And we knew that they were going to appreciate it.

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Sometimes an entire collection of goods gets transferred to kindred spirits in a garage sale. Colleen, quoted earlier, hosted a major “life shift” sale in which she let go of numerous, special identity-imbued items from her past, and she found the last sale on Sunday to be especially profound and moving in that she could pass on a “legacy” of her old domestic life: I was in the kitchen and I turned around and there was a young man and a young woman . . . And they were having a wonderful time. They were sitting in chairs, they were putting hats on their heads, they were picking up housewares. So, I went out. And, ‘Are you interested in anything?’ ‘Well, is the sale still on?’ ‘Well, it is now since you’re here. What are you interested in?’ They told me that they had just formed a relationship and they were thinking about moving in together. And there was just something so resonant about the young woman who was a student and so reminded me of myself . . . ‘And how much for this?’ ‘I wanted $50, but for you, $10.’ And they bought a few more things. And, after that, anything that caught their eye and paid attention to, when they went to their car, I just packed up and brought over. And that was a lot of fun. I found great joy in that, them riding off with all this stuff. From the moment that couple showed up on Sunday, I recognized myself in that woman . . . She was picking up all the things having to do with nesting. And the things that were meaningful to me, I had a sense of releasing them to another life.

In this way, Colleen provided an intimate legacy of family and nesting belongings to a young couple who she recognized as kindred spirits. A garage sale letting go of family items can be a noteworthy tribute to family. One group of three adopted multiracial adult siblings, now scattered across the States, held a sale liquidating their mother’s possessions. It was a time for them to exchange stories and reminisce as they knew they might not see one another again for a long time, with the loss of their mother and the family home. When a female shopper appeared interested in the dining room table, an old oak one with large claw foot legs, they wanted her to know how important the table had been for them as they threshed out life’s challenges and issues with one another. The table had been a central part of their lives and they wanted the new owner to respect that spirit. However, family sales can also be poignant when fraught with jealousies and different assessments surface concerning what gets sold, to whom, and for how much. For example, Aunt Betty may want to keep grandma’s china bowl, but Anna, in charge of disposing the possessions, wants to sell it. Conflicts can arise.

Provenance and Story Telling Sellers often relate histories and stories attached to the meaningful ­possessions they pass along, in part to ensure that these histories will remain integral to the items once the goods leave their possession. One participant, a woman in her early seventies, who is both a seller and a shopper, observed:

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Figure 7.2.  Garage Sale in Ithaca, New York. © Gretchen M. Herrmann, 2022 Everything has a history and I enjoy passing on the history to someone who might use it. And when I buy something, I’d be interested in knowing who has had that. And it becomes a social-historical kind of exchange in the best garage sales, because you want to know, because it’s coming into your possession, so you want to know whose possession it was before. And why it was precious to somebody else at one time. So everything almost can have a story to it and I like stories. So . . . I envision that with someone it will really find a home someplace. A nice thing that someone will be very happy to receive and I will tell them the history.

A marketing scholar refers to such storytelling as a means to ensure “safe passage” (Roster 2001) of the meanings attached to possessions, however, I prefer to view it as adding provenance. This is similar to Kopytoff’s point (1986) concerning the cultural biographies of things: objects transition through different phases of circumstance and ownership, and, much like fine art, they accrue provenance and singularization from past owners as they change hands. The stories related by sellers add provenance, as Jake, a participant mentioned earlier, related: “Whenever people tell a story, the object has more of an essence, has more of a meaning. They’re attaching something that’s not just an object. It’s an object which is connected to someone else’s life . . .” Home-based familial objects in garage sales have a genealogy, and the tales that sellers relate concerning such items document the lineage as provenance. Ekerdt et al. observe (2011: 37), “An antique

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is just an old object, but an heirloom has a genealogy.” Further, “safe passage” of the constellation of the meanings the seller has for an object is not ensured by telling stories or simply by finding a kindred spirit buyer. As Paula said of finding kindred spirits for their valued goods: “You find someone you think will value that thing and you part with it because you feel they will.” She also noted of an art object she had once purchased, assuring the seller she would give it a good home, that “I had to make clear that we would not attach so much value to it that we would never get rid of it.” Anna Bohlin (2019) has found that second-hand objects lend themselves to intense bonding with their owners, but they need not have a relationship for life. The deeper obligation is to the objects themselves, to keep them alive and in circulation; passing them along and extending their lives is viewed as virtuous. There are shoppers, however, who take seriously their role in keeping histories of purchased objects alive. Sylvia Wykes, a reporter in the Bay area remarked: “Things do have a past and. . .you’re probably going to hear about it before the item becomes yours . . . Many times I have heard the words, ‘My mother brought this back from . . . Will you take good care of it?’ or ‘We had it on our living room wall . . . for years.’ I walk away from those moments knowing I have a permanent responsibility to those previous owners. I am a guardian of one small piece of that family’s history” (Wykes 2005: 1). Some forms of second-hand selling in Europe approximate the ability to pass along stories related to belongings, as in the American garage sale. In Sweden, written stories and sentiments may be attached to such pre-owned objects for resale as blue jeans (Applegren and Bohlin 2015) or through QR codes (2017). But even the richness of this sort of contact between a previous owner and potential buyer is eclipsed by the garage sale in the face-to-face interaction it affords, although the garage sale selling in France does foster the same story transfer ability as found in American sales. This ability to engage the previous owners, or by extension their associates, is unlike other second-hand exchange venues besides some flea markets, boot sales, or pop up sales. Garage sales also provide more of the original context of items, i.e., house, yard, and landscape. As Octave Debary put it in his study of emotional qualities attached to garage sale items in France, sales are “where personal stories change hands [and] where new memories are cobbled together from old objects” (2015: 123).

Affect, Vibrant Matter, and Thing-Power Scholars are currently viewing material things in terms of agency. Jane Bennett asks how we “forget thing-power, to overlook the creative contributions of nonhumans and underhear their call” (2012: 263), particularly since “every day we encounter the power of possessions, tools, clutter, toys, commodities, keepsakes, trash.” “Possessions themselves can become

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bodies through which spirit takes on material form” (Newell 2014: 195), therein such things “engage us socially, obliging us to treat them in certain ways” (Newell 2014: 196). There is an engagement between humans and their possessions that can develop into agency. Newell refers to it as the “shiftiness” of vibrant energy that admits spirit to material involvement. Anna Bohlin asserts that ordinary second-hand shoppers may actually be heeding the call of used possessions (Bohlin 2019) and recognize their thingly powers. Further, Debary notes, “These second-hand markets give objects a reprieve by extending their lifespans, by keeping alive something that buyers see in them: a reserve value, an opportunity to seize passing time; an opportunity to remember” (2015: 139). These researchers advocate that used things at least passively convey some essence, whether some residue, affect, or traces of previous owners. Used possessions in the garage sales, after Ahmed (2010), may carry considerable affect from earlier owner(s), which speaks to current purchasers (Herrmann 2015). That affect is sticky, not unlike Newell’s notion of “residue,” primarily of person or moment. Earlier in my research career, I explored the question of whether goods in garage sale exchange are gifts or commodities (Herrmann 1997). Today, I might ask if used possessions that change hands, in the garage sale and other second-hand sites, are spirit or matter, alive or inert, subject or object. If belongings do in fact have agency, or the ability to compel certain human activity, then it is possible that used goods actually do select their new owners, rather than the other way around. We do speak of items as “calling” to someone or as having “someone’s name” on it, in an acknowledgement of things claiming specific humans. We can see Coleen Caveney’s ensemble of household goods calling to the young couple about to enter into a domestic relationship. Similarly, the sweater that had been rejected by the daughter called to the shopper as someone who could recognize its deeper value. Or the graduate student who had a bass guitar but no case and the garage sale across the road selling the right case for the bass. This lead the student and other shoppers to say she had been “summoned” across the road by the case to purchase it. It had her name on it. When we depict such communications from objects, they are usually concerning special items: unique, decorative, expensive, or otherwise noteworthy. We do not usually imagine a generic butter knife as calling to us, but an embroidered shawl would be a likely candidate. Bennett notes that hoarders and others may have a special attunement to the call of objects, such as those who frequent flea markets, thrift stores, antique stores, garage sales, and other such venues where used items change hands are likely to be attuned to the call of vibrant matter. They may also be concerned about the future life of the goods that, at least in the garage sale, have already been rejected. The fact that the objects are in the sale means that they have not been selected to remain in the household, despite any prior decision based on insufficient space. Joshua Reno (2016) speaks

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of waste as a byproduct of organization, of creating and maintaining form. Ridding excess items to retain household order means that some items become classified as “waste” or superfluous. These “rejected items may wind up in a garage sale. Yet, scavenging through waste, as in the garage sales, is fecund with possibility (Reno 2009: 33). The objects themselves are essentially seeking to be rehomed, and all of the memories, stories, and creative utilization by shoppers lend themselves to developing future histories for the objects. Nonetheless, objects in the garage sale are what Fabio Gygi (this volume) calls syngenophilic or relationship-friendly exchange, such that they are engrossed in a social event in which the goods can be celebrated and re-appreciated and there is some concern about their future fate.

Conclusion Countless Americans find their homes and themselves overwhelmed by the surfeit of consumer goods cluttering their living spaces for the last seventy years. They find their mental clarity and their psychological well-being is hedged in by an overabundance of possessions. However, the dispossession of meaningful belongings, steeped in the intimacy of family life and the “sacredness” of family space, presents special problems. Instead of anonymous donations, many householders choose to host garage sales where they can screen prospective purchasers in a face-to-face exchange to find those who will provide their special possessions with a good home. Sale proprietors try to continue the cherished lives of special goods through passing them along to “worthy” recipients whom they familialize as substitute kin or kindred spirits. Kindred spirits are recognized in several ways. Shoppers who exhibit ample desire and/or appreciation for special items may be embraced as kindred spirits, i.e., the correct recipients of the meaningful goods and unique histories of possessions sellers’ seek to place in a good home. Other buyers may have similar life histories or experiences as the proprietors. Sellers try to perpetuate histories and meanings through telling stories of the possessions, which add to the provenance of the belongings as they pass from one family to another, one chapter to another. Marshall Sahlins (1972) ascribes family as the primary site of generalized reciprocity, so it comes as no surprise that many exchanges become increasingly giftlike (Herrmann 1997) and notions of reciprocity become more generalized in this form of trade from the home and family. When there is no available kin as heirs, the imperative to find kindred spirits to whom to pass along belongings is more intense, particularly with heirlooms or legacy-like collections of goods. Sellers then attempt to rectify the situation by engaging their creativity and imagination in conjuring temporary kin—kindred spirits and substitute kin—as recipients of their family belongings. Stories told about the objects and their human related histories become integral to the transactions and the objects themselves. This transfer of affect (or

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residue or vibrancy) with the used possessions enlivens the objects with agency and new life with thing-power. It also engenders new depth and richness to the analysis. Gretchen M. Herrmann is an emerita librarian and anthropologist at SUNY Cortland where she taught Anthropology and Women’s Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Binghamton University and has published numerous articles on garage sales, reuse, local currencies, and Christmas games. [email protected]

Note 1. Lastovicka and Fernandez (2005) refer to the recognition of kindred spirits in garage sales as moving from “me” to “we” in acknowledging a shared perspective about we and object(s) between seller and buyer. This representation loses the intimacy of home and family to the relations created in transferring such domestic items.

References Acitelli, Tom. 2020. “Americans Hunker Down, Threatening the Self Storage Industry.” New York Times, 21 July. Ahmed, Sara. 2010. “Happy Objects” In The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 29–51. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ahuvia, Aaron C., Dawn Iacobucci, and Craig Thompson. 2005. “Beyond the Extended Self: Loved Objects and Consumers’ Identity Narratives.” Journal of Consumer Research 31(5): 171–84. Appelgren, Staffan, and Anna Bohlin. 2015. “Growing in Motion: The Circulation of Used Things on Second-hand Markets.” Culture Unbound 7: 143–68. ———. 2017. “Second-hand as Living Heritage: Intangible Dimensions of Things with History.” In The Routledge Companion to Intangible Cultural Heritage, eds. Michelle L. Stephano and Peter Davis, 40–259. New York: Routledge. Arnold, Jeanne E., and Ursula A. Lang. 2007. “Changing American Home Life: Trends in Domestic Leisure and Storage Among Middle-Class Families.” Journal of Family Economic Issues 28: 23–48. ———. Anthony P. Graesch, Enzo Ragazzini, and Elinor Ochs. 2012. Life at Home in the Twenty-first Century. Los Angeles: Costen Institute Press. Ballantine, Paul W., and Sam Creery. 2010. “The Consumption and Disposition Behaviour of Voluntary Simplifiers.” Journal of Consumer Behaviour 9: 45–56. Belk, Russell W. 1988. “Possessions and the Extended Self.” Journal of Consumer Research 15(September): 139–68.

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———. 2019. “Reminiscence and Recompense: Reuse and the Garage Sale.” Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 2(1): 4, 1–10. Herrmann, Gretchen, and Stephen M. Soiffer 1984. “For Fun and Profit: An Analysis of the American Garage Sale.” Urban Life 12: 397–421. Ingold,Tim and Elizabeth Hallam. 2014. “Making and Growing: An Introduction.” In Making and Growing: Anthropological Studies of Organisms and Artefacts, eds. E. Hallam and T. Ingold, 1–24. Farnham: Ashgate. Isenhour, Cynthia. 2012. “On the Challenges of Signaling Ethics without the Stuff: Tales of Conspicuous Green Anti-consumption”. In: Ethical Consumption: Social Value and Economic Practice, eds. J. G. Carrier and P. Leutchford, 164–80. New York: Berghahn Books. Kahnman, Daniel, Jack L. Knetsch, and Richard H. Thaler. 1990. “Experimental Tests of the Endowment Effect and the Coase Theorem.” Journal of Political Economy 98(6): 1325–50. Kilroy-Marac, Katie. 2016. “A Magical Reorientation of the Modern: Professional Organizers and Thingly Care in Contemporary North America.” Cultural Anthropology 31(3): 438–57. ———. 2018. “An Order of Distinction (or, How to Tell a Collection from a Hoard).” Journal of Material Culture 23(1): 20–38. Kleine, Susan Schultz, Robert E. Klein III, and Chris T. Allen. 1995. “How Is a Possession ‘Me’ or ‘Not Me’?: Characterizing Types and an Antecedent of Material Possession Attachment.” Journal of Consumer Research 22: 327–43. Kopytoff, Igor. 1986. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commodification as Process.” In The Social Life of Things, ed. Arjun Appadurai, 64–91. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lastovicka, John L., and Karen V. Fernandez. 2005. “Three Paths to Disposition: The Movement of Meaningful Possessions to Strangers”. Journal of Consumer Research 31(4): 813–23. Lepselter, Susan. 2011. “The Disorder of Things: Hoarding Narratives Popular in Media.” Anthropological Quarterly 84(4): 919–48. Mackovicky, Nicolette. 2007. “Closet and Cabinet: Clutter as Cosmology.” Home Cultures 4(3): 287–310. MacRae, Hazel. 1992. “Fictive Kin as a Component of Social Networks of Older People.” Research on Aging 14(2): 226–47. Marcoux, Jean-Sabastien. 2001. “The ‘Casser Maison’ Ritual: Constructing the Self by Emptying the Home.” Journal of Material Culture 6(2): 213–35. Mauss, Marcel. [1925] 1967. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York: Norton. Mooallem, Jon. 2009. “What Is It about Americans That Makes Us Store Elsewhere All That Stuff We Accumulate?” New York Times Magazine. 6 September, 24–9.

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Newell, Sasha. 2014. “The Matter of the Unfetish: Hoarding and the Spirit of Possession.” HAU 4(3): 185–213. Newman, George E., Gil Diesendrik, and Paul Bloom. 2011. “Celebrity Contagion and the Value of Objects.” Journal of Consumer Research 38(August): 215–28. Price, Linda L., Eric J. Arnould, and Carolyn Folkman Cursai. 2000. “Older Consumers’ Disposition of Special Possessions.” Journal of Consumer Research 27(2): 179–201. Reno, Joshua. 2009. “Your Trash Is Someone’s Treasure: The Politics of Value at a Michigan Landfill.” Journal of Material Culture 14(1): 29–46. ———. 2016. Waste Away: Working and Living with a North American Landfill. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Roster, Catherine A. 2001. “Letting Go: The Process and Meaning of Dispossession in the Lives of Consumers.” Advances in Consumer Research 28: 425–30. Rozin, Paul, Carol Nemeroff, Marcia Wane, and Amy Sherrod. 1989. “Operation of the Sympathetic Magic Law of Contagion in Interpersonal Attitudes among Americans.” Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 27: 367–70. Sahlins, Marshall. 1972. Stone Age Economics. New York: Aldine Books. Schor, Juliet. 2010. Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. New York: Penguin Press. Stack, Carol. 1975. All Our Kin. New York: Harper Colophon. Woodward, Sophie. 2021. “Clutter in Domestic Spaces: Material Vibrancy, and Competing Moralities.” The Sociological Review 1–15. Wykes, Sylvia L. 2005. “Garage Sale Treasures: Millions Who Reject the Mall Embrace Community Values and Find Good Buys with Rich Pasts.” San Jose Mercury News. 29 May, 1.

8 Minimalist Mortality

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Decluttering as a Practice of Death Acceptance

Hannah Gould

Thomas W. Laqueur opens his treatise on the treatment of human remains in western death culture, The Work of the Dead (2015), in argument with Diogenes, a founder of the Cynicism school of philosophy. Diogenes (ca.  412–323 BCE) is famed for his simple, sometimes vulgar, lifestyle: he begged for food, performed obscene acts in public, and slept in a large ceramic jar in the agora.1 Striving to divest himself from worldly goods, once, upon seeing a young boy drink water out of the hollow of his hands, Diogenes destroyed the single bowl in his possession, exclaiming “Fool that I am, to have been carrying superfluous baggage all this time!” (Laërtius and Hicks 1925: 37). His asceticism was both performative and political. Diogenes avoided material pleasures as a lived philosophical critique of Athenian society and what he regarded as its excess, pretense, and vanity. In perhaps the ultimate statement of this renunciation, Diogenes asked his followers that when he died, his body be excarnated: tossed over the wall where it might be devoured by beasts.2 It is this disavowal of the distinct status of the human corpse, as something demanding careful, ritualized handling, that Laqueur ultimately finds unacceptable. He argues that Diogenes was “existentially wrong, wrong in a way that defied all cultural logic,” because “the dead body matters, everywhere and across time as well as in particular times and particular places . . .” (2015: 1). Human corpses exemplify a class of material goods that are, if not sacred, then at least charged or animated in some way. Corpses challenge the line between subject and object, occupying a space of the “abject” or uncanny,

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that which is familiar but Other, powerful, and dangerous (Nations et al. 2016). For this reason, bodies cannot usually be disposed of via regular pathways for waste, at least not in ways that are socially recognized (see Olson 2016 on the creation and obfuscation of “necro-waste”). The impact of Diogenes’ refutation of this norm, and the strength of Lacquer’s rebuttal, shows how death amplifies claims of value. It forces a confrontation with the question of what can or cannot be waste, and how different kinds of matter should be handled. The handling of material objects, including the corpse, is central to how people navigate mortality, their own and others. Death triggers all kinds of practices of divestment and disposal. These acts vary in scale and sentiment: some people leave behind more than others, and some people’s remains are deemed to matter more. Given a historical rise in domestic accumulation within industrialized society, questions of inheritance have expanded beyond the propertied upper classes to become middle-class concerns (Finch and Mason 2000). The task of post-mortem divestment has thus become increasingly large. In many locations, such as the United States of America, a whole industry has sprung up to support the clearing of deceased estate houses, in line with the rapid growth of an ever-expanding storage industry (see Newell 2014: 186). At the same time, popular attention toward end-of-life and death care has burgeoned throughout the USA, UK, and Australia, with the conventional sector and communities of “death positive” activists (Westendorp and Gould 2021) locked in debate. Members of the “death acceptance,” “death positive,” or “home funeral” movement (see Lofland 1978) advocate for more open, equitable, and ecologically friendly ways of death outside of current ways of doing. The technical possibilities for how to dispose of dead bodies have also broadened, to include not only cremation and burial, but also new methods like natural burial, alkaline hydrolysis (“water cremation”), and natural organic reduction (“human composting”). As well as meeting a practical need to “deal with” remnant stuff, posthumous material divestment generates meaning and affect. For example, divestment might “control and the extend the process of separation,” facilitating a more relaxed and/or satisfying farewell with the deceased (Miller and Parrot 2009). Disposal can also protect the dead’s memory or spirit. For example, Patrick Williams (2003) describes how French Gypsy communities mourn by destructing the deceased’s personal effects, refraining from eating the deceased’s favorite foods, and avoiding camping near the place of their death. Similarly, the destruction of goods can facilitate the peaceful transition of the dead through the afterlife to another ontological state. In Japan, ancestral tablets (ihai) engraved with the Buddhist name of the dead are traditionally intended to be burnt after 100 years of being tended to by temples and families, signifying that the deceased has passed from the status of individual spirit to communal ancestor (Smith 1974). Such acts of destruction speak to one of Robert Hertz’ fundamental

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insights on the anthropology of death, that “to make a material object or living being pass from this world to the next, to free or create the soul, it must be destroyed” (1960 [1907]: 46). Death equally triggers consumption. Surveying the death cultures of Great Britain and Europe, Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey (2001) describe how memory is materialized and visualized in various media, from gravestones to mourning jewelry. Material culture is also used in the experience and process of grief via “transitional objects” that orientate emotion in time and space, making inexplicable experiences sensible (Gibson 2004). In this role, the specific material qualities of objects offer different interactive possibilities for grief: teddy bears can be embraced, gardens tended to, photographs are stroked. People might actively amend that material form. For example, Robert Desjarlais’ ethnography (2016) of funerary rites among the Hyolmo people in Nepal describes how the crafting of (smaller and smaller) effigies enacts the unmaking or absence of the dead from this world, what he calls “the making of unmaking.” For some, however, death triggers a more comprehensive shift in orientation to the material world. In the course of researching self-described “minimalists” living in Melbourne, Australia, I discovered that these people often describe encounters with death—via health crises, miscarriage, or the enfeeblement of elderly parents—as the core motivation driving their minimalist lifestyle. In some case, death is the inciting incident to becoming minimalist. In others, it acts as reaffirmation of one’s commitment to the lifestyle. Almost always, it is the origin of conflicts between family members concerning matters of heirlooms, inheritance, burdens, and care. For minimalists, death acts as a clarifying force that brings into focus the limited temporality of human life and thus the social and moral implications of a lifestyle of accumulation and storage. Instead of things, minimalist advocate for investing in less tangible phenomena, like time, space, and relationships. In this manner, the inter-generational legacy which minimalists covet is not contained in heirlooms or a large inheritance, but transmitted through material absence, which becomes framed as the ultimate gift to future generations. The paper draws on fieldwork with self-identified minimalists living in Melbourne between mid 2020 and the end of 2021. In comparison to previous studies of aging or end-of-life downsizing (e.g., Addington and Edkert 2012), the majority of participants were between 25 and 40 years of age, and often positioned their decluttering in relation to the aging or death of kin. As well as participant observation at minimalist meet-up groups and book clubs, I conducted interviews with central figures in the community. Due to strict social distancing regulations imposed in Melbourne to combat the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, interviews were initially conducted via video calls, with follow-up face-to-face meetings and house visits in a number of cases. This context is important as people’s reflections are filtered through the events of the past few years, during which they

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spent long periods of time inside their homes, amongst their possessions. I place these interviews in conversation with the teachings of popular minimalist authors, which were often the basis of discussions in minimalist meetups and book clubs and were frequently referenced by participants in my interviews.

The Modern Minimalist Movement The renunciate lifestyle of Diogenes is a far cry from the lifestyle practices espoused within the “new” or “modern” minimalist movement (occasionally styled “MMM”). The MMM responds to the shortcomings of uncontrolled accumulation within contemporary consumer capitalism by prescribing the active curation of material absence as a moral good. Rather than a state of deprivation, under the maximum of “less is more,” modern minimalism emphasizes the richness of experiences; mental, physical, and spiritual wellness; and human-to-human relationships brought about by owning fewer things. Here, we might draw instructive comparison to the concept of “affluence without abundance” that Marshall Sahlins (1968) described in his analysis of hunter-gatherer communities as the “original affluent society”: minimalists draw direct causation between fewer material goods and more immaterial, lofty pursuits, if not pleasures. The movement rose to global prominence over the last two decades on a wave of popular media, including multiple Netflix series (e.g., Minimalism: A Documentary about the Important Things, 2015 and Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, 2019); self-help books (e.g., Kondo 2011; Magnusson 2017), and blogs (e.g., Becoming Minimalist). Like Diogenes, minimalism operates on the level of both the mundane and philosophical. That is, it equally consists of practical advice about how to manage the flow of goods in and out of one’s home, from folding laundry to gift-giving etiquette; and it represents a system of ethical living and self-improvement premised on deeper ontological assertions about the nature and relation of people and things (see Gould 2022). However, unlike Diogenes, many strains of the MMM are notable for affirming the value of stuff—or at least particular kinds of stuff—in their ability to facilitate freedom of movement or bring about happiness. In particular, stuff is deemed valuable when it is intentionally purchased, curated mindfully, and displayed carefully (see Kilroy-Marac 2018). This position is perhaps best articulated by Kondo herself, who attempts to disassociate her brand from the label of “minimalism” on her website: “minimalism champions living with less, but Marie’s tidying method encourages living with items you truly cherish.” This investment in particular goods lends MMM its much-caricatured visual image, a puritan aesthetic that writer Kyle Chayka derides as “white walls interrupted only by succulents” (2016: 1). Cognate critiques of minimalism highlight its historical relation to the 2008–2009 global financial crisis and social inequalities. Mariam Meissner points out

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that minimalism teaches people to “settle for less” in a moment where previous cultural aspirations of owning property and amassing wealth have become largely unattainable to the working classes (2018: 186). Although both critiques are, I think, valid, the absence of minimalists’ own narratives reveals a real disconnect between scholarly or popular imaginations of minimalism and its lived reality. My informants are critical in their reading of minimalist teachings and the popular “aesthetic” of minimalism, just as they adapt teachings to their own personal circumstance and goals. Most approach minimalism as a continuous personal “journey” of self-improvement, rather than an end goal or a description of their current circumstances. Additionally, modern minimalism is a broad church. Minimalists are motivated by a variety of reasons, from lessening one’s environmental impact, to gaining financial independence, and supporting mental wellbeing. In North America, MMM has roots in the “voluntary simplicity” or “simple living” movements that sprung up through countercultural movements of the 1970s (Shi 2001: 3). However, although sustainability and “no waste” lifestyle movements often overlap in their teachers and philosophies, modern minimalism tends to problematize accumulation (“holding on to things”) rather than consumption (“buying new things”) per se and expresses less concern for the environmental impact of the waste generated by minimizing. Today, minimalism is a global socio-spiritual movement with at least three intersecting lineages: North American, Japanese, and Scandinavian (Gould 2022). Each has its own major teachers, practices, and texts, including different approaches to consumption versus anticonsumption, storage versus divestment. For example, in Japan, the lifestyle practice of decluttering or danshari (a compound word of “refuse,” “dispose” and “separate”) draws on influences from yoga, Buddhism, and architecture to address the mental and emotional side of clutter. For the purposes of this paper, it is notable that several major minimalist texts explicitly orientate their teachings around the life event of death, including The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning (Magnusson 2017), which many of my informants read, and in Japanese, Ashita shindemo ii katadzuke (Clean so that you might die happily tomorrow) (Gonobachama 2019). A final distinguishable characteristic of the MMM is gender. Different minimalist teachers present their aspirational lifestyles to differently gendered audiences, from the high-tech, low social commitment, global nomadism of “The Minimalists” Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, to the domestic bliss of ordered family life presented by Marie Kondo. Just whose life (and death) should be minimalized or memorialized is shaped by the gendered dimensions of material legacies and the domestic labor of decluttering. Public monuments tend to be built by and for men, such that their legacy is secured in the material record through time, whereas the domestic, ephemeral nature of women’s consumption has sidelined

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it within the archaeological record. Domestic (dis)order is also morally ascribed to women. Not only does the majority of household labor fall to women, but this inequity extends to the labors surrounding death, including care for the elderly and dying, arranging funerals, and downsizing estate goods (e.g., Addington and Ekerdt 2012). Women and non-binary persons have further become a powerful force in what might be called the “new death movement,” which seeks to re-envision capitalist deathcare systems through a return to home-based, nature-based care (Westendorp and Gould 2021). The Melbourne minimalist community is comprised of a relatively even split of (cis) men and women. It is no accident, however, that in shifting through my ethnographic data, women’s stories leap out as powerful narratives for understanding material relations in the crucible of death.

Accumulation as Death Denial Katrina (36, female) is a marathon runner, mother of two young children, community organizer, and a committed, long-term minimalist. She is, however, careful to distinguish her lifestyle from its popular perception via social media, which she derides as “Pinterest Minimalism,” due to its focus on aesthetics. For this reason, when we first speak over Zoom, she admits to worrying that her house in the background might not look “minimalist enough” for my research. But Katrina tells me that her minimalism comes from something much deeper, a personal experience with trauma that has led her to “being more conscious” in her creation of “a meaningful life.” Some time ago, Katrina’s infant son died when he was only six days old, and she herself spent several weeks in the intensive care unit (ICU). At the time, Katrina had already encountered books on döstadning or death cleaning (Magnusson 2017) and watched the 2015 Netflix Minimalism documentary, but her personal brush with death was the catalyst to adopting minimalism herself. While in the ICU, she had a lot of time for “considering my own mortality,” and when she recovered, she decided to pursue a simple path: “feeling satisfied with living a life that matters.” In the end, those things that matter, for Katrina, are family and friends, not goods. When she does consume, she tries to opt for second hand: “I think about the life and death of objects also; stuff . . . it’s impermanent, but it can tie you down.” Encounters with mortality bring into sharp relief the finitude of life, and thus the ultimate transience, or triviality, of stuff. Put simply, where both human life and non-human stuff are proved ephemeral, acting upon their persistence, for example, via indefinite storage practices, appears to commit a falsehood. Stanch US minimalist Robert Wringham, guest blogging for The Order of the Good Death (2017), is explicit in his portrayal of minimalism as a practice of death acceptance. Eschewing the concept of “heirlooms,” he suggests that all his once-treasured possession will

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ultimately be “ditched unceremoniously” and any assumption that they will be valued by others is but hubris. The uncompromising spirit of Diogenes is strong in Wringham’s writing when he claims that: Acquisition is death denial. To acquire is to fortify yourself, expand yourself, make yourself unmovable, unwashawayable. To accumulate is to live as if you’re not going to die. (2017: 1)

Domestic excess is read as symptomatic of a broader pathology of “death denialism” that afflicts contemporary society. This denialism is the foundation of our contemporary system of deathcare, in which the dying and dead are sequestered away in institutions like hospitals and funeral homes and death is a taboo topic of discussion. Here, Ernst Becker’s work, The Denial of Death (1973), stands as the foundational text, uniting minimalist bloggers and members of the death positive movement. Becker describes civilization as mounting an elaborate symbolic defense to shield people from active knowledge of their mortality. As secularization deepens, society is left with impoverished symbolic resources to construct these illusions. Capitalist societies, Becker claims, thus turn to the accumulation of wealth, such that “the house, the car, the bank balance” become the “immortality symbols” of the contemporary age (1975: 85). Bereft of religious symbolic defenses against death, Becker suggests that “modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing” (1975: 284). Becker’s passing moral castigation of consumerism does not extend to wholesale critiques of consumer capitalism and its effects. But it does suggest that there are better and worse immortality illusions, and that material affluence is a particularly poor one to pursue. In seeking to dismantle such illusions and honestly confront death, the goals of modern minimalism and the death positivity movement are aligned, although they are not entirely consistent. For death positivity activists, a personal reckoning with the finitude of human life often means confronting and accepting the posthumous processes that affect the body, including decay. The death positive movement thus largely rejects preservationist technologies, including concrete-lined graves, oak caskets, and above all, embalming, which artificially extend the existence of the body through time. As Caitlin Doughty, 3 in a founding document for The Order of the Good Death (2011) proclaims, “If we work towards accepting, not denying, our decomposition, we can begin to see it as something beautiful. More than beautiful—ecstatic.” Although this embrace of decay does not generally extend so far as Diogenes’ methods of body disposal via carrion, natural burial groups do promote disposition methods that work with, or even hasten, the rapid decomposition of remains. At the same time, however, Doughty, one of the most prominent leaders in the death positivity movement, publicly admits to being staunchly anti-minimalist; in her own words, “It’s just me, I like these things, haters” (January 2020). In a 2020 video, she expresses strong admiration for minimalism but also argues for

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her own eclectic decorating style, inspired by “a cabinet of curiosity,” as an equal but divergent “journey to death acceptance.” Doughty claims that she not only values each and every object in her home, but she also fills her home with memento mori, objects like taxidermy stags, human skulls, and cemetery paraphernalia, which provoke a confrontation with death. She thus supports patterns of consumption that illuminate, rather than obscure, the reality of death. Just as confronting one’s mortality can generate feelings of anxiety or even terror, minimalist teachers warn that confronting the finitude of one’s stuff can easily generate existential feelings of dis-ease. Through sorting strategies and mental techniques, their texts, online courses, and in-person services guide people through the difficult practice of material divestment. Joshua Fields Millburn of The Minimalists counsels his followers that both minimalism and death acceptance are a process: “We needn’t  be afraid, though—just prepared” (n.d.), by, for example, creating an advanced care directive, writing a last will and testament, and registering as an organ donor. Organ donation is a particularly popular topic of debate within minimalist and death positive communities, resisted by some, but often celebrated as practical evidence of a grounded, materialist worldview that frames the self as a temporary assemblage of material goods. Abandoning accumulation brings one closer to death acceptance, but it can also create an apparent gap in the symbols used to make sense of the world, one that minimalist teachers are eager to fill. This is a crucial characteristic of modern minimalism, and what Meissner calls “minimizing in order to maximize” (2018: 190), whereby a poverty of material goods is said to produce immaterial wealth. This hierarchy of value follows a familiar pattern of anti-materialist critique, elevating “attachment or devotion to people” over “attachment or devotion to objects” (Miller 2001: 227). For example, US minimalism teacher Joshua Becker suggests that “removing the pursuit of physical possessions from our affections provides even more opportunity to secure true immortality symbols” (2014, original emphasis). For Becker, this “truer” symbolic structure is grounded in a relationship with Christ and his teachings. The pursuit of better immortality symbols, rather than a commitment to throw them off altogether, appears a more modest, achievable goal. For Katrina, the truer way of life found at the end of the minimalist rainbow is a state of simplicity and mental contentment. Adopting a minimalist mindset helps her to navigate the stresses that come with raising a six-year-old and a two-year-old, particularly during recent years of lockdowns and stresses on the family’s finances. Even though she attempts to stem the tide of new goods entering into her home, she, like many mothers in minimalist groups, finds “all of the stuff that comes along with family life” to be “exhausting.” Katrina describes how she finds herself turning to Minimalist blogs and spiritual practices like mindfulness, which often coalesce in interesting ways, in a quest for greater meaning in her life, meaning

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beyond the stuff: “I’ve experienced how quickly it all can end. So, I want to find a way to be content with what I have. The simplicity of it.” That being said, Katrina is conscious, in her own words, not to “inflict” her minimalism on her husband and kids, but instead to lead by example, showing how this way of life has brought her joy. This final comment is suggestive of a concern within with the movement, not only for how objects pass through one’s (limited) lifespan, but also how they circulate beyond that life, to kith and kin. By subtly influencing their social network, minimalists both evangelize their lifestyle, and restrict one pathway through which goods may enter their possession. Still, many minimalists have family members they have not been able to convince, and they thus live in fear of the inheritance awaiting them.

“Divest before You Die”: Stuff as Inter-Generational Burden Within modern minimalist imaginaries, the material world is not only animated, it is positively parasitic. Minimalism, as Sasha Newell describes of discourses of fetishes and hoarding, “grant[s] things an overpowering agency over the person who is supposed to master their “possessions.” (2014: 188). Things demand physical space (to store within the home), time (to clean and use), and psychic or emotional energies (to properly appreciate). Meissner refers to this as “the world of too much” (2018): a diagnosis of contemporary life that extends beyond material culture, to too much information, commitments, and jobs. Two contemporary vanguards of minimalism in the English-speaking world, Marie Kondo and Margareta Magnusson, can be distinguished by where they locate the emotional burden of this excess. While Kondo is motivated to the relieve oneself from this burden, Magnusson is concerned with relieving others. Thus, Kondo imagines excess domestic accumulation at the end of life as evidence of squandered potential happiness: “I can’t help thinking that the lives of the deceased would have been that much richer if the space occupied by that box had been free when the person was alive” (2010: 139). In contrast, Magnusson, in her 2017 work that introduced the world to Swedish death cleaning, describes excess accumulation as primarily a burden to one’s kin. Drawing on her own experiences of cleaning out her mother’s apartment, Magnusson’s work is a rallying cry for people to take on the task of decluttering pre-emptively, in preparation for their own aging and death. This requires an acknowledgement of the inconvenience that material excess will eventually cause for others: “Do not ever imagine that anyone will wish—or be able—to schedule time off to take care of what you didn’t bother to take care of yourself. No matter how much they love you, don’t leave this burden to them” (2017: 5).Although Magnusson is in the later years of her life, she recommends her techniques to all, in recognition of the unpredictability of death, which may suddenly leave families facing the task of decluttering (see also Gonobachama 2019).

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Certainly, when on the receiving end of an inheritance, the burdens imposed by stuff are keenly felt by those in the minimalist community. One person (a 21-year-old non-binary student), Zed, wryly introduced themselves to me at a meetup as an “ongoing survivor of somebody who didn’t death clean.” Many people at the meetup expressed trepidation at what would result when elderly family members died, given the current state of their homes. Emma (a 45-year-old female child protection officer), for example, describes her (now-divorced parents) as Dad: “a hoarder with a two-door garage full of stuff”4 and Mum: “living in a house all to herself still filled with three kids’ worth of crap.” Emma recently moved from interstate to Melbourne with only a suitcase of possessions. She currently lives in a pre-furnished apartment in an ongoing effort not to accumulate. Often, the reaction to clutter is visceral: my minimalist participants reported “shuddering” or “feeling ill” when they entered the family home. Newell describes a similar affective response to second-hand goods in one of his informants, a young woman named Chloe, who, when entering her parents’ heirloom-filled homes, “found her skin crawling with the discomforting presence of death” (2014: 195). However, unlike Chloe, my participants expressed no distaste for old things or heirlooms, per se. In fact, many deeply valued particular, beautiful heirlooms. It was the prospect of inheriting an undifferentiated hoard of stuff en masse that provoked fear. Zed’s parents’ complete lack of preparatory downsizing, for example, had left them with no clue as to the context or significance behind certain objects, or their intended recipients if treated as heirlooms. Instead, both the physical labor of disposal and the mental labor of deciding exactly what to keep and how to disperse goods fell to Zed. In the most dramatic examples, a distaste for clutter emerges in this moment of encountering one’s parents’ downsizing and death, as with Joshua Fields Millburn, who recounts the experience of visiting his mother in hospice. Millburn’s descriptions (2014) of his mother’s room are heavy with descriptions of stuff, including “small living quarters decorated with miscellanea, niceties strategically placed to make her feel at home: picture frames, artwork, and the like.” The arduous process of sorting through his mother’s apartment after her death, selling and donating and disposing of materials through different avenues, takes Milburn nearly two weeks. In the end, he only keeps a few small boxes of photographs, one of the few classes of sentimental objects that minimalists often retain (although some prefer a digitization strategy). As remains are overwhelmingly interpreted as a burdensome waste, and—as I describe below—only rarely and selectively become a family heirloom, material divestment well in advance of death is thus framed as a moral duty and altruistic act. This articulation of the act of minimizing reconfigures the material relations of obligation and care between the generations. Rather than depriving younger generations of wealth, minimalists present a modest inheritance as the ultimate gift of freedom to one’s children: “freedom from the burden

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of stuff” (Milburn 2014). Where one might traditionally expect to receive assistance from children in the task of downsizing (e.g., Addington and Edkert 2012), downsizing is instead framed as an act of care performed for one’s children. The same might be said of the pre-paid funeral plan. The task of disposing of one’s material remains well is thus cast as a personal, rather than collective responsibility. In her work on dying alone and domestic clean-up in contemporary Japan, Anne Allison (2018) analyzes how this rather neoliberal narrative, which demands total responsibility over the self, not only in life but also in death, also extends to human remains. For many people living and dying alone in Japan without family support networks, both the disposal of one’s body and the performance of ongoing ritual services can now be arranged “pre-humously,” by pre-purchasing a communal grave plot or eternal ritual services. Although the mandate is personal, decluttering is still deeply social. For those skilled in the techniques of minimalism, the death of a loved one can offer a unique opportunity to care for the dead and the bereaved through the act of decluttering. Such was the case of Stacey (39, female), a Canadian-Australian PhD student. Stacey lives in a one-room loft built on top of a car garage, located behind a family home in St Kilda. Having lived an exceeding mobile life since the earliest days of her childhood, including stints in communes, other people’s couches, and Buddhist retreats, Stacey is comfortable with the limits of material possessions that her twenty-one square metre 1LDK (living room, dining room, kitchen, and bedroom) provides. The space is somewhat chaotic, but functional, filled with secondhand furniture and sporting goods; Stacey’s spiritual home is the Pacific Northwest and she has a penchant for trail running and mountain biking. International travel bans in place to limit the spread of COVID-19 tragically impeded her plans to travel to the UK to visit her dying father, for the purpose of saying goodbye, but also for the purpose of decluttering his home. Stacey is relatively estranged from her father and his family (he remarried when she was in her twenties), but she described feeling strangely obligated to carry out the task of decluttering on behalf of the family. “I always imagined myself going over there and helping them to clean through all his old photos and documents and stuff. Like, this is something that I am good at, that I can offer.” Stacey’s skills in material divestment, honed through many years of lifestyle minimalism, were to be a gift to the family, relieving his now next-of-kin of an excess of goods. Stacey’s sense of responsibility is not unusual within studies of family dynamics around death. Death studies scholars highlight the important role that women, particularly eldest daughters, play in providing nonmedical care for the dying and bereaved (e.g., Rawlings et al. 2019; Olson 2018), just as women are often burdened with caring responsibilities for moving their aging parents (Addington and Edkdert 2012). Aislinn Addington and David J. Ekerdt (2012) find that tasks related to domestic downsizing and residential relocation generally reproduce the gendered

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division of household labor. By taking on these burdens, Stacey related that she hoped to ease some inter-personal tensions and to allow her stepfamily to “properly grieve,” unburdened by stuff. Ultimately, ongoing COVID-19 restrictions prevented Stacey from returning to the UK, and her father died in her absentia. She thus found herself in a state of material deprivation that she did not expect, grieving at a distance from both his body and his possessions.

The Hard Work of Sentimental Goods The mass of goods generated by a death might be vast, but not all possessions are equally valued, nor equally considered sources of burden and obligation. Minimalist literatures identify a clear category of goods, often called “sentimental items,” that are particularly invested with meaning, and thus mount particular psychological resistance to the process of decluttering. Such objects are defined by their inalienable status, being closely linked to the person of the dead, and as such, their exchange is defined by forces of ‘keeping’ rather than ‘giving’ (see Weiner 1992). In her study of the material ecosystem of the Japanese house, Inge Daniels (2010) describes this category as “troublesome things,” being both difficult to maintain and to dispose of, and analyzes their persistent material trace to persons, through embodiment (e.g., items of clothing), visual resemblance (e.g., ­photographs), or other iconic traces. The power of these objects is tempered by the fact that sentimentality is not universal or fixed, and sentimental items can quickly become lost in a hoard of goods. Zed, for example, finds it difficult to discern exactly which items their father most valued or wanted to retain, a problem that generates significant guilt at what they might be unintentionally abandoning. Objects are susceptible to losses or changes in value across a timeline of exchange between parties, perhaps especially between the living and the dead, and significant labor is required to fix their meaning (see Toulson 2013). Older generations might “devise strategies” aimed at ensuring (some of) their possessions persist as heirlooms and survive decluttering (Finch and Mason 2000: 152–4). For example, Aislinn Addington and David J. Ekerdt devise the Greek term homoctesis (meaning “sameness of possession”) to describe how older people attempt to achieve congruity between the once and future owners of an item (2012: 16). In particular, generations of women within the family are relied upon to protect value, perpetuating a norm of women as “family kin keepers,” with photographs being the most common category of gifted items retained by women in families (2012: 11). Within minimalist circles, Magnusson (2017) describes her relief and joy at discovering that her mother had labeled several items with the names of those to whom she intended to bequeath them. However, such strategies are not always successful, and there is always the possibility that descendants will not recognize, or actively reject claims to sentimental worth.

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This gap in value certainly appears to be the case where objects are transferred between “hoarding” and minimalist kin. Outside of minimalist circles, sentimental items have been described for their functional role in the emotional processing of grief. Margaret Gibson (2004) deploys D. W. Winnicott’s concept of the transitional object to show how by materializing and making sensible the absence of the dead, material culture can play a supportive role in mourning. However, many minimalists warn against sentimental items for this very reason. While mementoes can initially be alluring for their ability to enliven the memory of the dead, ultimately, minimalists suggest, they disrupt or delay healthy processes of grief by shielding people from a confrontation with mortality. Chris Shank, writing for Becoming Minimalist, describes how the objects he inherited from his brother, “filled my house” but “left me with a deep, profound sense of emptiness” (n.d.: 1). Shank warns that retaining or indefinitely storing objects, perhaps in an attempt to delay the decluttering process, can artificially prolong the grieving process. It also makes the process of discerning what is meaningful or worth keeping more difficult, as “after a while, it all just becomes stuff” (Shank n.d.: 1). In contrast, decluttering provides a clarifying force that helps people come to term with the reality of their loved one’s nonexistence. Special strategies might be required to resist the particular thrall posed by sentimental goods. Of all the categories of household goods, Marie Kondo suggests tackling these items last (2011: 133). Such is their emotional power that even her tried and tested method of holding an item and waiting to see if it “sparks joy” may be insufficient to motivate one toward disposal. Instead, she suggests that questions of utility and self-identity should be considered; a sentimental item that binds one to the past or evokes an imagined future, for example, should be rejected (2011: 134–35). Even Kondo’s methods are sometimes proved ineffective. In the fourth episode of her Netflix show Tidying Up with Marie Kondo (2019), entitled “Sparking Joy After a Loss,” Kondo works with a woman whose husband recently died, and who decides to abandon Kondo’s careful strategy for her domestic renewal, by skipping directly to her late husband’s goods, of which she decides to retain a large number of shirts, books, and other ephemera. Usually, when faced with such goods, Kondo like other minimalists affirms the perseverance of memory over the transience of stuff: “truly precious memories will never vanish even if you discard the objects associated with them” (2011: 134). This divorce of sentiment from materiality in the face of difficult decisions about retention or disposal sits uncomfortably with the fetishistic power minimalists usually award to stuff. The television episode in question represents one of the few moments in which participants “pushed back” against the proscribed formula of the KonMari method, and were ultimately proved successful. Many minimalists in the Melbourne community struggled to dispose of a particular collection of sentimental goods. For one, it was a set of china

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inherited from her grandmother. For another, it was a large record collection; the potential of uncovering lucrative “hidden treasures” prompted him to place it in storage rather than dump it. However, for the deepest minimalists, rather than struggling with disposal, the far greater difficulty arose from the “obligation to receive” (Mauss 1925) in attempting to refuse heirlooms from kin without causing offense. Clementine (31, female, lawyer), who describes herself as “probably the least sentimental person I know,” found navigating this relationship dynamic particularly hard. Some of her friends had stopped buying her greeting cards, because of her predilection to bin them immediately after reading. And for Clementine, the promise of a large material inheritance from kin loomed in her future. Clementine grew up in a middle-class household of hippies and intellectuals: The family fridge still has a magnet on it proudly proclaiming, “dull women have  immaculate houses.” And periodically, my mum would announce she was going to “clean out the kitchen cabinets,” but that never really happened. . .   It’s not a luxury living household. A lot of it is environmentally driven I think. Like, hanging on to old egg cartons for when the neighbors’ hens give eggs, or a plastic container that might be useful to cover seedlings.

Clementine did not become consciously aware of her commitment to a minimalist lifestyle until her father died, unexpectedly after a short experience with cancer, approximately ten years ago, and not 12 months after he helped her move into her own apartment. The funeral process prompted a sudden confrontation with the nature of memorial goods and the objects that people leave behind. She describes a gap in feeling between how she and others value her late father’s goods: I remember the funeral arranger coming to our house to meet us. She kept saying things that struck me as odd. Like —“is there any special outfit we’d like him to be buried in?” I think we toyed with the idea of some nice silk pajamas . . . but I mean, he’s dead. We’re just putting the clothes in the ground. All of his stuff, it’s just stuff . . .

Here, Clementine disavows the enchantment at work behind sentimental goods, and thus the special status awarded to her father’s possessions. Even the special treatment of the body and the erection of a permanent grave were decisions that Clementine could not really “make sense” of, although she understood their importance to others in her family. Her stance became a source of tension in ongoing debates with her widowed mother about how to handle the estate. Approaching seventy years old and now ten years after her spouse’s death, Clementine’s mother has not moved out of the family home or made any great progress toward decluttering her late husband’s goods. Clementine’s continual refusal to accept the various heirlooms regularly

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presented to her has become a sore point in the relationship: “I worry that my Mum takes it as if I don’t care about Dad . . . [but] I just don’t need his stuff.” Sentimental goods, then, can become hard work for minimalists, both when they are confronted with the task of how to dispose of them, or alternatively, when their valuations of stuff challenge the valuations of those around them.

Conclusion I opened this paper with the figure of Diogenes in order to draw attention to how practices of voluntary lifestyle minimalism, no matter how dramatic or performative, can constitute serious attempts to respond to an existential crisis around death and build meaningful life narratives. A confrontation with the transience of life and the inevitability of death, their own, and others, motivates both Diogenes and modern minimalists alike to reassess their relationship to the material world. Read against the harsh realities of human mortality, minimalists see vernacular strategies for managing domestic goods, including accumulation and storage, as farcical and, ultimately, futile. Domestic excess is just one symptom of a broader pathology of “death denialism” that pervades contemporary Western culture. Laqueur’s complaint with Diogenes is that he denies the sacredness of the human corpse by reducing it to the level of “just stuff.” But for minimalists, there is no such thing. Minimalists are accurately aware of the parasitic power that stuff can wield in people’s lives and so adopt strategies to guard themselves against it, against becoming “hoarders” and succumbing to the allure of the transient. Emotional divestment and disposal offer means to control material attachments. These strategies free up physical and mental space and time, which enables minimalists to develop what they see as more “meaningful” and sustaining life narratives. For those living as minimalists in the light of mortality, these strategies do not deny death, but rather move one closer to death acceptance. Minimalist divestment is a project of personal self-development, but one with deeply social motivations. As material remains are almost always interpreted by minimalists as a burden to kin rather than an heirloom, decluttering well in advance of one’s death becomes a person’s moral imperative. The idea of a material legacy is thus a complicated one for minimalists, particularly women, who are especially burdened by the obligations to both care for the dying, dead and bereaved, and to sort through material remains. This is not to say that minimalists entirely forgo the idea of legacy. Instead, they reinterpret material absence to be the true gift of freedom and kindness to those left behind. An inherence of absence unburdens kin of the temporal, financial, and emotional responsibilities imposed by stuff. Where confrontations with mortality lead to an awareness of the transience of life, perhaps the greatest family heirloom is an empty home.

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Hannah Gould is a cultural anthropologist working in the areas of death, religion, and material culture. Her research is focused on process of disposal and divestment, in regard to both the human dead and material objects. She currently holds a Melbourne Postdoctoral Fellowship for the project “Mobile Mortality: Transnational Futures of Deathcare in the Asia-Pacific.” Dr Gould’s first book “When Death Falls Apart” (2023) is published with The University of Chicago Press.

Notes 1. “Diogenes Syndrome” is the name sometimes given to a disorder also known as “Senior Squalor Syndrome,” characterized by hoarding, self-neglect, domestic squalor, and social withdrawal (Clark et al. 1975). However, this appellation is a misnomer: Diogenes did not hoard material possessions and actively sort out social company in the agora. 2. Diogenes used human remains to explicate his philosophy on more than one occasion. In one retelling of his famed meeting with Alexander the Great, Alexander found the philosopher looking attentively at a pile of human bones. Diogenes reportedly explained, “I am searching for the bones of your father but cannot distinguish them from those of a slave.” 3. Doughty is one of the most prominent public figures in the death positivity movement, as the star of the YouTube channel Ask a Mortician, author of several best-selling popular books, and founder of The Order of the Good Death. 4. The term “hoarder” is rather liberally applied within the minimalist community, at times to refer to anybody with large amounts of stuff (regardless of whether it is organized), but also to the psychological state of being enthralled by stuff.

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Nations, Courtney, Stacey Menzel Baker, and Eric Krszjzaniek. 2017. “Trying to Keep You: How Grief, Abjection, and Ritual Transform the Social Meanings of a Human Body”,  Consumption Markets & Culture 20: 5, 403–22. doi: 10.1080/10253866.2017.1367678. Newell, Sasha. 2014. “The Matter of the Unfetish: Hoarding and the Spirit of Possessions,” HAU 4(3): 185–213. Olson, Philip R. 2016. Knowing “Necro-Waste.” Social Epistemology 30(3): 326–45. ———. 2018. Domesticating Deathcare: The Women of the U.S. Natural Deathcare Movement. Journal of Medical Humanities 39(2): 195–215. Rawlings, Deb, Jennifer Tieman, Lauren Miller-Lewis, and Kate Swetenham. 2019. “What Role Do Death Doulas Play in End-of-Life Care? A Systematic Review.” Health Soc Care Community 27(3): e82–e94. Sahlins, Marshall. 1968. “Notes on the Original Affluent Society.” In Man the Hunter, eds. R. B. Lee and I. DeVore, 85–89. New York: Aldine Publishing Company. Shank, Chris. N.D. “Life after Loss: Memories of Our Loved Ones Don’t Live in Material Things.” https://minimalism.life/journal/life-after-loss. Smith, Robert J. 1974. Ancestor Worship in Contemporary Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Toulson, Ruth E. 2013. “The Meanings of Red Envelopes: Promises and Lies at a Singaporean Chinese Funeral.” Journal of Material Culture 18(2): 155–69. Weiner, Annette. 1992. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of KeepingWhile Giving. Berkeley: University of California Press. Westendorp, Mariske, and Hannah Gould. 2021. “Re-Feminizing Death: Gender, Spirituality and Death Care in the Anthropocene.” Religions 12(8): 667. Williams, Patrick. 2003. Gypsy World: The Silence of the Living and the Voices of the Dead. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wringham, Robert. 2017. “Death and Stuff.” The Order of the Good Death. 3 January 2017. Available from: http://www.orderofthegooddea​ th.com/death-and-stuff?fbclid=IwAR1FEcyctOyzQJQtbdXLtFGRj6xDd​ EFAWo8YYBue_U1JO5M5mltDj2V5W6I.

Part IV Holding on to Rubbish Trash and Transmutation

9 “It’s Not Waste, It’s Diamonds!” Recovery Practices and Public Waste Management in Garoua and Maroua (Cameroon)

• Émilie Guitard

In May 2012, the Cameroonian artist Pascale Marthine Tayou offered to travelers crossing the Salle des Pas Perdus in the Paris Saint-Lazare station to tie to a large net thousands of brightly colored biodegradable plastic bags.1 This monumental work, aimed at denouncing the absurdity of our modes of consumption, is in line with an African urban art that has been widely publicized since the founding exhibition “Africa Remix” in 2005 at the Centre Pompidou, based on “an aesthetic of recycling, DIY and waste recovery”2 and represented by artists such as the Senegalese Ousmane Sow, the Ghanaian El Anatsui, the Nigerian Dilomprizulike or the Beninese Romuald Hazoumé. This ability to work with discarded materials, set up as a symbol of African ingenuity in a precarious economic context, has also inspired a whole series of local and cooperation programs on the continent in the field of development, promoting the recovery and recycling of urban waste: electronic appliances, plastic materials (bags, bottles, packaging, etc.), or even the composting of organic residues.3 In the last few years, African recycling craftsmanship and its procession of emblematic trinkets (miniature animals or vehicles made of wire, lanterns made of condensed milk or Nescafé cans, woven baskets made of plastic fibers, furniture made of cut-up tires, etc.) have finally invaded the stalls of the merchants in the continent’s capitals and tourist sites, as well as the ethical, ethnic, and fairtrade shops in the cities of Europe and North America. Thus, a romantic figure of the African waste picker has been created in the Western collective imagination. He is often depicted as relentlessly

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scavenging the large municipal dumps, the heaps of rubbish and the dumpsters that dot the urban landscape in search of his daily sustenance. This resourceful African reclaimer would also have made a specialty of salvaging any object or scrap of material still good enough to be sold in bulk, so as to provide him and his family with a small income, as well as the material for his domestic material culture, from the walls and roof of his home to his kitchen utensils and his clothes.4 While vast and complex networks of recovery have indeed been established in most large African cities, often with the local municipal landfill as their epicenter, 5 this stereotypical image of the reuse of discarded objects and materials in Africa needs to be discussed and enriched by other case studies outside the continent’s megacities. Secondary cities, with populations of less than half a million, in which more than two-thirds of Africa’s urban population reside at the beginning of this millennium (Hilgers 2012: 29), may offer other patterns of waste handling and reuse, where recycling is not necessarily practiced as an informal livelihood activity, being in the public spaces or the domestic sphere. In the numerous waste disposal sites scattered until 2008 in the cities of Garoua and Maroua, capitals of the North and Extreme North regions of Cameroon with more than 200,000 inhabitants,6 there were very few waste pickers. Based on an ethnographic survey conducted in the two cities from 2007 to 2011 on the ways in which city dwellers and local authorities conceive of and manage waste (Guitard 2014), this contribution highlights how representations of discarded objects and substances, their deposit spaces and their individual and institutional management methods have jointly contributed to limiting accumulations and recovery practices in the public space. First, we will see that the small number of collectors working in public spaces in both cities is simply the result of the scarcity of recoverable waste, these undergoing a drastic sorting upstream, in the domestic sphere, where it then immediately undergoes a new cycle of use. In contrast, it also appears that the recovery of waste as a means of subsistence and the assiduous frequentation of deposit sites in the public space is strongly depreciated, as symptoms of deviance and marginality, or even of “madness.” Finally, I will to replace these domestic recycling practices and these local conceptions of the relationship with waste and its “places” in the broader framework of the evolution of collective and institutional waste management schemes in the two cities since their foundation. This will help us to understand how these public initiatives have, until recently, severely limited the possibility of basing people’s livelihoods on the manna of waste disposed of in the public space.

Intense Reclaiming in the Domestic Sphere The cities of Garoua and Maroua have been home to a range of craft production activities since their foundation in the early nineteenth century.

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Figure 9.1.  Blacksmiths’ workshop in Kollere. © Émilie Guitard, Garoua, 2006

In addition to tanning and dyeing, blacksmithing and jewelry are usually practiced by Kanuri and Hausa Muslim city-dwellers, descendants from the neighboring Borno Empire in present-day Nigeria.7 Blacksmiths produce agricultural and building tools, kitchen utensils, wheelbarrows, and canteens for the local market (Figure 1). Like for the production of aluminum pots known as “macocottes,” which have invaded African kitchens since the 1950s, using raw materials from “. . . recycling activities [recycling

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of car parts, but also aluminum carpentry, press plates, various types of piping, packaging, etc.], or predation on wooden panels” (Romainville, 2009: 79), one might expect to see blacksmiths at the heart of a local network for the reuse of iron and scrap metal, collected from urban waste disposal sites. But, in fact, according to a young craftsman of Garoua, “we use little of recovered iron, because people collect a lot, even if they are not specialists . . . Some come to sell us small pieces, which we use mainly for small items and certain elements of the canteens. It’s hard to find it, and it’s expensive” (Garoua, January 2007). Two main reasons for this scarcity are thus exposed: on the one hand, the difficulty of finding reusable materials in large quantities in waste disposal sites and, on the other hand, the intense recovery that everyone carries out in their homes or businesses, in order to reuse the recovered objects and materials directly or to sell them outside. Several transects carried out in 2007 on some large dumpsites in the city of Garoua8 also give us an idea of the nature of the waste deposited there: approximately 37 percent is biodegradable green waste, 38 percent is soiled, torn, pierced, or broken packaging and containers, compared to approximately 17 percent of miscellaneous material debris (iron, rubble, wood, etc.) and only 6.7 percent of objects that are definable but too degraded to be reused. The domestic aspect of recycling has too often been neglected in the African urban contexts, to the benefit of a focus on recycling channels in the public space, particularly from large municipal dumps. A few rare case studies,9 together with the example of the intensive sorting and recovery practices that take place within the compounds of Garoua and Maroua reveal, however, that this phase of separating reusable objects and materials from residues considered as being out of use that will be expelled from the compound, constitutes a non-negligible stage in the “social life of objects” (Appaduraï 1986) and their circulation between different owners/users. In the thirty or so compounds that I was able to visit assiduously in the two cities, each housewife, whatever her origin, age, religion, or level of education, carries out a meticulous sorting out of worn out or broken objects and materials, or is seen as deprived of a first use, and of residues of domestic activities. However, in the context of a particularly pared-down material culture, due to the precarious economic context but also to a certain Muslim ethic of sobriety, where certain prestigious objects, such as the collections of enameled iron saucepans passed down from mother to daughter as a wedding trousseau (Gosselain et al. 2009), are never thrown away, the list of waste and residues that are kept and then reused for other purposes, given away, or resold is quite brief.

Kitchen Scraps and Leftovers Firstly, we can mention kitchen scraps and meal leftovers, consisting mainly of tuber peelings (cassava, sweet potatoes, potatoes) or fruit (pineapple,

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mango, papaya, oranges, etc.), vegetable stems and leaves (Guinea sorrel, baobab or cassava leaves, etc.), chicken or mutton bones or, more rarely, beef bones, and the bran of cereals (sorghum, millet, rice, maize) ground into flour and then cooked into a ball of dough, forming the basis of the local diet. Most of these kitchen scraps can be given fresh or dried to the poultry and small livestock raised by most families, especially in the Muslim-Fulani neighborhoods,10 or sold by the cup in Christian neighborhoods to make alcohol called arki or odontol: We crush it, then leave it to soak in a barrel of water, it ferments, then we boil it, we collect the evaporation in a tube, and it makes alcohol. We sell this for 100 CFA francs [15 EUR cents] per small bottle [33 cl] and 200 CFA francs per large bottle [75 cl]. You can’t just do that with your waste, you have to go to people’s houses to buy the leftovers; you sell that for 50 F CFA a big cup, even 200 F CFA if food is expensive at that time. It can be any kind of leftovers, like rice, maize, cooked sweet potatoes, potato peelings, etc. (Marcelline and Josephine, Mafa young women, Garoua, September 2009)

Leftover food is also never thrown away, especially in Muslim circles because of a moral and religious injunction to not waste food, or else be struck down by poverty, or even madness, as a young Muslim city dweller from Garoua testifies: My neighbor, Hama Suley, found more than thirty doughnuts thrown in a bin near his house last week. He was not at all happy about this, so he asked me to collect them and give them to his animals. He added: “It is famine that targets the one who, instead of giving to the hungry, goes and throws in the garbage.” (Cherif, Kanuri, December 2009)

Fulfulde, the local lingua franca, has a well-developed vocabulary that distinguishes between different types of leftover food: bakke, the residue of a cereal ball stuck to the bottom of the pot, which can be eaten boiled with sugar, is distinguished from luttandi, the leftovers from the evening meal, which become ñiiri nBaalnDi when they are left overnight and are eaten for breakfast the next morning, a practice that was common in the rural areas but tending to be lost in the cities today. When the leftovers are not finished, they can be given to the needy (beggars, street children) or dried again for domestic animals.

Plastic and Glass Containers In addition to this conscientious recycling of kitchen and meal leftovers, plastic and glass containers represent a second category of objects discarded from their first use and systematically put aside in the domestic context, before being reused or resold. Plastic bottles of edible cottonseed oil are, despite the difficulty of removing the fat from them, carefully preserved: they are refilled with artisanal groundnut oil sold on neighborhood

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markets, or sold wholesale (100 CFA francs per bottle) to buyers who move from door to door and sell them, in turn, to small retail distributors of contraband fuel, zoua-zoua, brought from neighboring Nigeria. On the other hand, contrary to what has been observed in Senegal (Valentin 2010), bottled mineral water, because it is too expensive compared to water in bags or from the local pump, has not yet penetrated the households of Garoua and Maroua. This is why the few Tangui, Sahel Spring, or Aquabelle bottles in the home are instead kept to store water or other artisanal drinks such as the juice of Guinea sorrel flowers, ginger, or baobab fruits. Another type of plastic container that is frequently recovered is body milk bottles—which women use extensively—and which are also set aside for resale to passing buyers who, in turn, resell or reuse them to store homemade cosmetic or medicinal preparations. Local healers, marabouts, and other “tradipraticians”11 often use them, as well as small glass containers, mayonnaise jars, syrup bottles or vaccine vials, to store their lekki, plant, and bark-based decoctions. Similarly, housewives do not hesitate to carefully preserve glass containers to store their condiments, which is why they acquire a real value on the local markets. The same is true of the glass bottles of whisky-type alcohol used to sell roasted peanuts, or of beer and soda, which are consigned by the Brasseries du Cameroun and therefore systematically returned to the shop in exchange for a small sum of money (100 CFA francs) or a discount (the price of the bottle) on a new drink.

Broken Objects Also, because of the economic precariousness in which the majority of households in Garoua and Maroua live, used or broken items are not systematically removed from the compounds and disposed of in communal dumps. For example, used kitchen utensils, such as pots and pierced metal dishes, are frequently re-welded and then used to feed animals, or become a tassa salte, a domestic waste bin, until it is impossible to carry the waste out of the household without getting it on one’s feet.12 Electrical appliances, usually limited to a television set, a video recorder, a radio, sometimes a standing fan or a refrigerator and, more broadly, all large objects such as bicycles, motorbikes, or sewing machines, are always, when broken, kept carefully inside the house, in the most intimate rooms such as the living room or the bedroom, to prevent them from being stolen. Even when out of use, they retain their value, as they can be repaired by the many small repairers in the neighborhood. This explains why the inhabitants store them in a corner of the house until they can afford to repair them, at the risk of letting them gather dust and clutter up the space indefinitely. They can also be bought back by handymen who will dismantle them to recover the good parts that can be used to repair other broken items. In Garoua, various areas of the city are dedicated to the sale of these salvaged parts, whether they are engine and vehicle parts near the old Ribadou cinema,

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or a veritable bric-a-brac of debris of all kinds at the Yelwa “anti-crisis” market, piled up to the point of constituting the very structure of the stalls that offer them to repairers. Finally, as a last resort, it is possible to sell one’s waste by weight for its raw material, such as wood or iron, the former being used as fuel while the latter will be melted down to produce new objects: “I had an engine block at home and a guy came to take it away with his truck to sell it and he told me that it was selling for 25,000 CFA [38 euros] a ton”(Municipal agent, Garoua, January 2011). This is a source of supply for artisanal smiths and jewelers in both towns.

Clothing Lastly, clothing is one of the intimate objects that are rarely thrown away outside the home, in collective dumps. Firstly because, in a logic of mutual aid and family redistribution, they are frequently given to relatives, revealing, however, a hierarchy of people through the appreciation of the value of a good according to its degree of wear. Worn clothes are thus necessarily given to “the poorest” (Penene, Fulɓe housewife, Garoua, November 2010), to ‘old mothers’ (Suzanne, Lamé housewife, Garoua, October 2010), i.e., old women and, more broadly, elderly people who have no money, or “to the village” (Aline, Laka housewife, Garoua, September 2009; Jacqueline, Moundang housewife, Garoua, November 2009; Dudjo, Fulɓe housewife, Maroua, February 2011; Damdam, Mofu housewife, Maroua, February 2011), all of whom were identified as having little regard for the condition of the clothing they were offered, unlike city dwellers, young people, and people with a little more money. But, above all, it will always be relatives and never strangers, for fear that the latter will use these objects that have been close to the body, soaked in its moods, to harm their former owners through witchcraft practices (Guitard 2018). It is for the same reason that clothes that are too worn out are very rarely thrown away in public waste dumps, but rather burned or cut into small pieces and then disposed of in the household latrine, in order to avoid any risk of malicious recovery: I also burn old clothes and throw the ashes in the latrine, because otherwise someone can use the sweat on the clothes to harm you. For example, someone can take your dirty pants to make sure you don’t have children, that you don’t give birth. They can even eliminate you! (Colette, Moundang housewife, Garoua, December 2009)

These practices are to be compared with the drastic management of body waste in many African households where, in addition to the fear of being used for witchcraft, there is also the fear, particularly in Muslim environments, of contamination that is harmful to the purity necessary for prayer, but also, more broadly, to the physical integrity, or even the luck, of individuals.

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After this meticulous sorting, the remains that will eventually be disposed of outside the domestic sphere are collected in a bucket or a used dish, tassa, or gogong salte, hidden in a remote corner of the compound, out of sight. Described as nBuuwri, literally “sweepings,” and consisting mainly of dust and leaves swept up from the dirt or paved courtyard, but also of some kitchen and meal waste, these residues are largely biodegradable and represent barely 400 g per day and per person.13 Although it is thus difficult to find objects or materials that can be recovered, one can nevertheless observe the constantly increasing presence of plastic packaging, particularly drinking water bags and, above all, black and white bags, leeda, which are very little hoarded and reused (apart from as fuel to light the domestic fireplace) due to their abundance on local markets and their very poor quality (Guitard 2012c). The massive diffusion on these same markets of low-cost but low-quality Asian-made consumer goods, which are neither durable nor repairable, is also largely changing the content of the domestic waste of Garoua and Maroua city dwellers.

Picking Waste in Public Spaces: A Depreciated Activity “Look, I found a shirt. It’s good for me; I’ll mend it. The street [the dump] is a place that God made for the most destitute”: this is what the gateman of a compound says to a colleague from a neighboring house while rummaging through a rubbish bin in the middle of the night in the heart of Garoua.14 However, it is not insignificant that this dialogue takes place at night and between two individuals of similar social and economic status. In many cities around the world, contact with waste, especially when it is used to ensure one’s livelihood, is “frowned upon” and particularly depreciated.15 In Garoua and Maroua, while the daily dumping of waste from the compound on the nearest rubbish heap or dumpster is already seen as a shameful activity in itself, especially in Muslim-Fulani circles, the fact of collecting waste in these same spaces is marked with the seal of marginality and deviance, and even madness.

The Role of Children This is one of the reasons why both the disposal and the collection of waste outside the domestic sphere are most often assigned to children, who are at the bottom of the local social classification system. The youngest children, both girls and boys, are responsible for taking the tassa salte out of the compound every morning before going to school, to put it on the nearest rubbish heap or dumpster or, more recently, to give it to the door-to-door refuse collectors.16 But the children are also constantly accused of bringing in waste from outside the compound, taken from their favorite playground, the neighborhood dump, even though their mothers do their utmost to remove it from the domestic sphere: “The children play a lot on the trash

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heap, they bring things in, but we chase them away. Many of them have hurt themselves, with broken bottles or nails. We spend our time throwing things away, while the children bring them back” (Clémentine, Moundang housewife, and Tapita, Massa housewife, Garoua, October 2009). This sequence observed one morning on a large heap of rubbish in the heart of the Rumde Ajia neighborhood in Garoua also bears witness to this: 8h05. A little girl picks up pebbles at the bottom of the garbage heap and throws them at pigeons pecking at waste food to make them fly away. Then she climbs up the pile, picks up the plastic frame of a TV and comes down with it, shouting “Mi soodi télé! [“I bought a TV!”]. She puts down her junk and climbs back onto the pile, this time picking up an old pink heeled shoe, shouting “Mi soodi padde juulde! [I bought party shoes!]. Boubakary [my research assistant] asks her how much she bought them for and she answers “Boro! [1,000 F CFA!]. Then she runs back down from the pile and tries to put the shoe on the foot of a little boy leaning against the wall of the compound opposite, telling him that “you have to measure” [his shoe size]. The boy struggles, shouting: “The shoes of a brothel [prostitute], am I even going to wear these? (Garoua, December 2010)

Figure 9.2.  Christian Kingue Epanya: Le Petit Camion de Garoua [The Little Truck of Garoua]. Coll. “The Green Chameleon,” EDICEF, 2001 (with kind permission of the author).

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Figure 9.3.  Christian Kingue Epanya: Le Petit Camion de Garoua [The Little Truck of Garoua]. Coll. “The Green Chameleon,” EDICEF, 2001 (with kind permission of the author),

In fact, the children are the most inventive when it comes to creating things from recycled objects and materials: kites made from plastic bags, a Cameroonian flag made from a few scraps of fabric of the appropriate colors, small cars made from wire and scraps of cloth, slingshots made from rubber strips cut from old inner tubes, military costumes made from tomato concentrate sachets, etc. This profusion of original creations using waste materials contrasts with the scarcity of domestic objects made from recovered materials, contrary to what has been observed in other African urban contexts.17

Street Children Scavenging as a means of subsistence, as practiced by street children, does not enjoy the same benevolent and amused tolerance as these childish and playful scavenging practices, which are the cause of incessant torment for

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mothers, but which are, all in all, relatively accepted as long as they do not invade the private sphere. On the other hand, considered with contempt as little rascals, most of the time drugged with “solution” (melted glue normally used to repair inner tubes), the street children of Garoua and Maroua are constantly accused by the city dwellers of scattering, during their collections, the waste out of the dumpsters or domestic bins deposited along the road while waiting for the collection truck to pass by; they are also frequently accused of relieving themselves at the waste deposit sites. Some city dwellers, who are a little more benevolent towards them, sometimes call on them for a small sum of money to give them their waste to be disposed of outside their compound, or to clean up certain areas of the neighborhood invaded by rubbish. But the use of these street children for these degrading tasks, seen as a service granted to them, is often just as full of contempt: When Hysacam came, some people paid guys, little drunkards with the “solution” still in their mouths, who don’t smell anything anymore and aren’t bothered by the waste, to come and clean it up, so that if it was clean, people wouldn’t throw waste there anymore. (Boubakary, father of a Fulani family, January 2011)

Most of the scavengers we met at the waste disposal sites in the public spaces of Garoua and Maroua were, in fact, children or young adolescents, the vast majority of them boys, not necessarily all of them drug addicts or living in the street, but relying on their daily collection to ensure their subsistence or contribute to that of their families.18 Their recovery activity is truly akin to an “economy of bits and pieces”, since the fragments and debris they recover from the garbage heaps, and then from the dumpsters that replaced them, only reach a certain value when they are resold in bulk. These are essentially small pieces of scrap iron, wire, copper, or aluminum (sometimes extracted from old tires after they have been burnt), which are bought by the kilo (25 F CFA) and then melted down to make jewelry or small metal items. The collectors say that bones are appreciated by certain Nigerian traders who buy them (75 to 100 CFA francs per kilo) to make “breakable dishes” but also, more likely, feed for livestock.19 More broadly, anything that has escaped domestic sorting is a godsend for these small-scale scavengers, such as plastic bottles, glass containers, cotton from torn mattresses or pillows, flip-flops, and sandals that can still be repaired, clothes, food, etc., whether for resale in wholesale or retail, or for their own use.

The “Crazy” Ones However, even if city dwellers accuse these children subsisting on waste disposal sites of being homeless and drugged, or even of being petty criminals, they still recognize a certain normality in their salvaging activity, as

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the fate of those who have gone wrong for lack of parental supervision and other solutions for survival. However, the same cannot be said of adults who frequent the rubbish heaps and dumpsters too assiduously, particularly to collect waste. They are systematically labelled as yinnaaɓe, “crazy,” or at least suspected of certain deviances and mental deficiencies, from the waste pre-collectors in the neighborhoods and the collectors at the dumping sites, through the anthropologist and her assistants carrying out transects on rubbish heaps, to certain homeless individuals, often shaggy and disheveled, feeding on the rubbish dumps and behaving in an unusual way (talking to themselves, for example (Guitard 2012b). For example, an old marabout observing a young waste collector rummaging through a skip exclaims: Look at this young and muscular man, you can’t call him a normal man or a madman, he’s just weird. Instead of going to work in the field, he wastes his time collecting scraps of metal whose price is not even worth the cost of field work. (Reported by Cherif, Garoua, March 2010)

Beyond the unprofitable and degrading character of such an activity, which can make the person who practices it look a little “deranged,” there is also a widespread idea among the city dwellers of the two cities that frequenting rubbish dumps too often is a sign of possession by a ginnaaji, an invisible and versatile entity that particularly appreciates dirty places (such as latrines) and accumulations of waste. These ‘genies’ do not hesitate to possess anyone who visits these places without taking the necessary precautions—namely, “armoring” themselves with various maraboutic means and pronouncing a few verses both to appeal for divine protection and to warn the “genies” of intrusion into their living space. Those who spend their time hanging around on the piles or in the rubbish bins can only be brought back to the favorite place of the ginnawol who owns them, and who sometimes even pushes them to make real collections of fallen objects (sometimes thermos, sometimes pens, sometimes old newspapers, etc.). As for the housewives, who are most often responsible, after their children, for disposing of the waste at the nearest dump, they take great care to avoid going there at the times when the “genies” are most active, i.e., at midday, at 6 p.m. and during the night, and also to pronounce the appropriate Quranic verses before dumping their waste, for fear of being struck by paralysis or madness by one of these disturbed entities in its “home,” the trash heap or the dumpster. In this respect, the establishment of a private collection company in 2008 in the cities of northern Cameroon, the replacement of most of the large heaps of rubbish that had developed over the years throughout the urban space by dumpsters, then by a door-to-door collection service by truck, and, finally, the creation of a large municipal rubbish dump in each city were experienced as a great relief by the inhabitants of Garoua and

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Maroua. 20 However, the new public technical management system has not challenged the old representations of waste accumulations as the homes of “genies”: For the moment, there is nothing, but the djinns are clever, they wait to see where we will take their trash piles. Maybe they will follow them to the Gaschiga dump, that will be the refugee camp of the jinn. But they will no longer be with humans, they will live there together. (Young Kanuri man, Garoua, November 2008)

This new waste management system is, however, changing the perceptions and practices of waste collection in the public space, both by promoting them and by establishing a stricter framework, as the result of a wider process of taking over the collective management of waste in Garoua and Maroua by the public authorities.

Waste Management Policies Limiting Waste Recovery in Public Spaces When Waste Was an Emblem of Wealth Despite the long-standing existence of the cities of Garoua and Maroua in the North and Extreme North of Cameroon, it is only relatively recently that waste management in the urban public space has been perceived as a collective matter, the responsibility of the authorities. Indeed, in rural areas and at the origins of the two cities, founded in the early nineteenth century by Fulani conquerors on sites occupied by Chadian and Adamawa chieftaincies, each family had the practice of placing its waste in a large heap in front of or behind its compound, and regularly spreading it over the surrounding gardens and fields to fertilize the soil. In some local political systems, such as the Zumaya or Guiziga Bui Marva kingdoms of the Diamaré plain, established on the site of the future Maroua between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the chiefs even had their waste, but also that of their notables and subjects, stored in a large heap of rubbish in front of their compounds (Guitard 2017). This was a way of expressing their wealth in goods, but also “in men,” allies, vassals, and subjects, the seniority of the chieftaincy on this land and, finally, to domesticate the various occult “forces” that emerged from these accumulations of waste, in particular the spirits of the place that had come to take up residence there. In this particular case, the chief’s large heap of rubbish was regularly “reworked” to make it as large as possible and thus never used as fertilizer for the fields. Thus, in this context, the accumulation of refuse was thought of more as an emblem of the material wealth of the chiefdom, but also of its seniority and power, rather than as a source of recoverable and reusable material.

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Islam, the Fulani Ethic, and the Obscuring of Waste Despite the takeover of the region by Fulani and Muslim conquerors at the end of the eighteenth century, these concomitant practices of enriching the fields with organic waste from the home, but also of staging the dumps of the “great ones” as ostentatious symbols of wealth and power, continued in Garoua and Maroua in the nineteenth century, when the urban fabric was still fairly loose and the fields and gardens were relatively close to the houses. However, the introduction of a new model of urban life combining a strict Muslim ethic of cleanliness with the Fulani code of conduct, Pulaaku (De Bruijn and Breedveld 1996), which required everyone to show restraint and modesty in the expression of their natural needs, soon made the display of waste problematic. However, for a time, city dwellers had to deal with these two contradictory conceptions of waste, particularly with the local notabilities, who still created large dumps in front of their compounds, without openly accepting it: In the past, those who were rich were those who had at least ten sheep, ten goats, ten oxen or two horses. In the morning, their slaves would collect the excrement and make a jiddere [heap of rubbish] with it in front of the compound. So, when we saw this, we didn’t say anything, but we knew the guy was rich. (Notable of the Laamiiɗo21 of Maroua, March 2011)

However, the Muslim-Fulani elites quickly imposed a radically opposite model of waste management, namely concealment in a pit within the vast compounds, not only because it was unseemly to ‘see what the chief eats’ (district chief and notable of the Laamiiɗo of Garoua, December 2010), but also because it was feared that some of his belongings will be recovered and used in witchcraft manipulations in order to undermine his power. Household waste could still be used to enrich crops, but this was now done by the slaves of the large families or in the secrecy of the compounds: Even the Fulɓe could use the nBuuwri [domestic waste] for koonal [fertilizer], but rather when it was ash, and all this they did only among themselves. The big ones could send their slaves. Otherwise in public it was not possible. That’s why people kept it at home, to cultivate in their compounds, and also because they didn’t want anyone to see what they were eating. (Garoua district chief and notable, December 2010)

In this context of concealment of waste within the houses, and whereas the two cities did not have large industries, except for many craftsmen workshops, recovery practices of waste in the collective spaces did not have yet any reason to exist. However, as the population grew and the built-up fabric of both cities became denser at the turn of the twentieth century, only the large Muslim families in the first neighborhoods around the Laamiiɗo palace retained enough space in their large compounds to keep their waste inside. The vast majority of city dwellers, on the other hand, were forced

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to dispose of their waste outside their homes, in collectively shared spaces, as urban growth has also moved the fields away from the city center. Some neighborhood chiefs, under the authority of the Laamiiɗo, then impose on their subjects to deposit their refuse in piles in front of their chieftaincies, no longer in order to express the large number of men under their command, but rather to be able to control waste disposal in the public space. Thus, even if domestic waste was now evacuated in collective dumps, the strict control exercised over these dumps by the authorities still made it difficult to recover it.

The French Colonial Administration and the “Whites’ Rubbish Heap” From the twentieth century onwards, the takeover of the two cities as provincial capitals by the German colonial administration, and then by the French in 1918, did little to change the institutional pattern of waste management, which was largely left in the hands of the “traditional” authorities until Cameroon’s independence in 1960.22 On the other hand, the settlement of a few European families of administrators, traders, and industrialists between the 1950s and the end of the 1970s favored the development of several large dumps, which were quickly identified by the children of the cities as real gold mines. Two men, now in their forties, recall their own finds in the rubbish heaps of white neighborhoods in Garoua: When we were children, we used to go to the dumpsite of Nassarao, and to the dumpsite of Plateau too, to find things to play with. There used to be a lot of white people in these areas. So did we, and one day we found a bread knife around the Social Affairs, near a white residence, we fought with each other to get it, in the end I got it and I think it’s still with me! [laughs] One day I found a Polaroid camera at the dumpsite of Plateau, I didn’t know how much it was worth, so a grown-up gave me 5,000 CFA for it, it still worked! (Boubakary, Guidar, and Abdulkarim, Guiziga, Garoua, December 2010)

These testimonies attest to the first practices of recovering waste in public space. It is also worth noting that, from fertilizer to Polaroid cameras and bread knives, the composition of the Garoua and Maroua rubbish heaps reflects the evolution of urban consumption patterns, even if these objects, which came from the West, were still only accessible to a wealthy minority.

The Degradation of the Municipal Waste Collection and the “Dumpsterization” of Garoua and Maroua However, the economic crisis that hit Cameroon hard at the beginning of the 1980s signaled the closure of a number of businesses and industries in the cities of the north and, with it, the departure of most of the white

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entrepreneurs from Garoua and Maroua. The manna of the large dumps seemed to have dried up, in a context of generalized precariousness where everyone, as we have seen, now recovers at home the slightest scrap or residue that is still usable. Paradoxically, this phenomenon occurred at a time when, still under the effect of the crisis but also of the cities’ bad governance, the waste collection service provided by the municipalities since independence started to deteriorate, especially in Garoua, to the point where city dwellers’ waste invaded the streets. Numerous large piles of waste grew everywhere like “mushrooms,” on traffic routes, at crossroads, in front of shops, bars, restaurants, places of worship, near schools and hospitals, etc., where they could sometimes remain for several months or even years without being collected by the municipality. The latter seemed to be truly ‘overwhelmed’ and powerless in the face of this phenomenon of “littering,” which from this period onwards was common to many other cities on the continent. 23 In this context of invasion of public spaces by rubbish, the number of scavengers increased, scouring the Garoua and Maroua dumpsites in search of objects and materials to reuse or resell. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, some initiatives were also attempted by local authorities, such as the collection of organic waste by donkey carts to make compost, as part of a training and integration project for unemployed youth in the urban community of Garoua. The technical centers of the European Baptist Mission and the Union of Baptist Churches of Cameroon also proposed, among their training and reintegration projects for young people excluded from the school system, an activity of collecting and transforming leeda (plastic bags) into various articles (tiles, self-locking paving stones, chair leg tips, etc.). However, these various projects quickly collapsed due to a lack of funding and outlets for their recycled products.

The Deployment of Hysacam: Dumpsters and Municipal Dumpsites Finally, in August 2008, when city dwellers were desperate to see their cities rid of the heaps of rubbish that clogged them up and that put the population at constant risk of malaria, gastrointestinal diseases, and a cholera epidemic, a Cameroonian waste management company, Hysacam, 24 was mandated by the government to take over waste management in the cities of the North under contract with the municipalities. 25 Through the new technical collection systems it put in place, this company disrupted local waste management methods—both individual and institutional—as well as recovery practices. Hysacam first recruited a large contingent of local employees (about five hundred in each city), from administrative staff to refuse collectors and truck drivers (Figure 9.4). In a particularly depressed employment area, where many young graduates were out of work, the very good recruitment conditions offered by the contracting company26 led to

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Figure 9.4.  Hysacam door-to-door collection. © Émilie Guitard, Garoua, 2009

a very large number of applications (about 4,500 applications for 80 positions in Garoua in the first few weeks), despite the harshness of the work and the fact that it was still depreciated. The installation of this collection company in the cities of northern Cameroon contributed to the upgrading of waste collection work: equipped with brand new tools, dressed in bright orange and traveling in gleaming “Ville de Paris” trucks, Hysacam’s refuse collectors were truly perceived by city dwellers as the restorers of order and beauty in their cities and were often supported in their work on the public space by encouragement, small sums of money, food, water, and even by the cheers of the children welcoming the collection truck: “The children are our friends, they always shout: “Hysacam, Hysacam!” “(Mohammadou, Hysacam driver, Garoua, November 2011). Only certain populations, notably the Fulani urban elites of Garoua and Maroua, still consider working in contact with waste to be a stigmatizing activity and are therefore poorly represented in the company personnel: But for the Fulɓe it’s something else, it’s cemtuɗum [shameful], like being a porter at the market, a cart-pusher or a servant. When I say that I am from Fulbere [Fulani neighborhood], behind the Lamidat [Palace of the Laamiiɗo], and that I work at Hysacam, people don’t believe me. And some people in the neighborhood tell me that if I work with rubbish, then I’m rubbish too. Even, if I didn’t have to hustle, I would have done another job . . . A Fulɓe would rather beg than work with rubbish. (Mohammadou, Hysacam driver, Garoua, November 2011)

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In parallel with this massive recruitment to ensure waste collection in Garoua and Maroua, Hysacam also undertook, upon its arrival, to remove the various dumpsites scattered throughout the urban area. It first replaced most of them with dumpsters and repatriated the large volumes of waste collected to a new municipal landfill, created on the outskirts of each town. While the concentration of waste in dumpsters appeared to facilitate, and even increase, individual scavenging practices in the public space, these were widely opposed by Hysacam, which saw them as undermining the quality of its services. Reclaimers were accused of scattering waste out of the dumpsters during their search and some of them, again described as “crazy,” of damaging the equipment: Because most of the clients of our dumpsters are mentally ill, they go around, they spill, they spill. In Douala, we have a run-in with them, they set fire to our dumpsters, because for them it’s a game, they are experimenting with things . . . (Hysacam branch manager, Garoua, November 2008).

In fact, some people even went so far as to put themselves in danger, in contact with the new equipment introduced by the collection company, in order to reach “the waste that their madness dictates they take” (Cherif, Garoua, November 2008), as reported by a young city dweller who witnessed such an accident in Garoua: A madman saw Hysacam collectors throwing a television set into the BOM [refuse collection vehicle], so he decided to retrieve the item from the dump truck. Two of the agents prevented him, but despite their efforts, the madman managed to get into the skip, using force while the truck was crushing the rubbish. In the end, the madman ended up with a crushed foot, he was crying out in pain, he was pulled out by Hysacam agents and the population, especially people of the neighborhood. The man, aged about 60, had a broken foot and serious injuries. (Reported by Cherif, Garoua, April 2010)

At first, the collection company adopted the same attitude of mistrust towards the few reclaimers who appeared in the new municipal dumps, attracted by the concentration of discarded objects and waste from the whole city. In Garoua, Hysacam’s first branch manager categorically refused to allow them access to the site, especially when they were children, for fear of seeing them take the waste back to town, in the same way that mothers feared seeing their compounds soiled by the rubbish brought in from outside by their offspring: It’s not even a sorting, it’s a waste of time. We want people who can transform what we call waste into raw materials. But it should be clear: if they want bottles, they collect bottles, if they want scrap metal, they collect scrap metal, if they want plastic, they collect plastic, and those who want compost, they should take the other types of waste, like what comes from the market. But to say that you have to come and collect, everything will end up in the city. If the children

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come to collect it, we will have to do the same work again. We transported it to the Gaschiga site, and we’ll end up in town again because the children have come! (Hysacam branch manager, Garoua, November 2008)

But later, faced with the influx of people storming the dump, and arguing that “like all the dumps in the world, we will have reclaimers, even if we put up doors and four walls,” the second director of the Garoua branch proposed instead to “make the reclaimers safe, for example by giving them tetanus vaccines” (December 2010). A solution that didn’t seem to suit the regional delegate of the Ministry of the Environment, who was questioned by a research firm about Hysacam’s activities in Garoua as part of an environmental audit: For the dump, there is no security on the site, everyone goes where they want in this dump, when you go for a check you find a little child scavenging. There are guards, it’s true, one or two posted, but we don’t know if it’s not more the guardian of the container or the equipment. So people come in to search and nobody tells them anything, it’s not right. Not everyone reads, but you have to put up signs to inform people. And then the accesses are open on all sides . . . Because we know that what is waste for me is a resource for someone else. We have also seen mothers with their children on their backs coming to collect, the child cries and the mother takes the breast with her bare hand! (Garoua, December 2010)

There were, therefore, two institutional models for taking into account waste picking activities at collective waste disposal sites: prohibition or support. Thus, the recent deployment of the new waste collection and management system by Hysacam in Garoua and Maroua had particularity that, while it encouraged the development of waste collection outside the domestic sphere, it also introduced much tighter control by the public authorities. In fact, it was mainly Hysacam’s employees themselves who benefited the most from it, by reserving the objects and materials that could be recovered, particularly glass and plastic containers, as soon as the bins were collected and then deposited on the dump. This kind of comical scene could be then seen on the Garoua dump: 9 a.m.: arrival at the dump to empty the truck’s skip. At the entrance of the site, near the container, the guards and garbage collectors are unpacking a bundle of new underwear. Seeing us arrive, they hold up boxers and bras, laughing, to show them to Theophile, their boss. When the truck reaches them, they tell us they found them in a dumpster in town. (Garoua, December 2009)

In Yaoundé, the practice of collecting garbage during working hours, even though it was prohibited, fed a real market at the Nlongkcak roundabout, but also on the road leading to the dump.

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Conclusion In the course of 2009, Hysacam finally undertook to remove most of the dumpsters it had placed at the site of the old trash piles, replacing them with a door-to-door collection system, which was considered the prerogative of “modern” cities.27 From 6 a.m. onwards, lorries crisscrossed the neighborhoods along predefined routes, regularly honking their horns to warn residents of their approach. They then had to take out their household waste and hand it over to Hysacam garbage collectors, who dumped it into the truck’s skip and returned the container to them. In addition to the  restrictive, even coercive, nature of the system for users, 28 it also had  the particularity of completely dematerializing the collective deposit areas: the waste taken out of the compound is taken directly by the trucks to the municipal dumps. This disappearance of the rubbish heaps, and then of the dumpsters, could only hinder the work of reclaimers, who no longer had access to waste from the domestic sphere, except when the tassa salte of households were deposited along the road before the truck passes. In addition, their access to municipal waste disposal sites was challenged. With the end of the control of the collection company and, upstream, of the public authorities, over the waste of city dwellers, the time of the large informal waste recovery networks, with their multiple actors, such as those found in many African capitals, did not yet seem to have come to Garoua and Maroua. Their development depends in particular on the choices made in the future by the public authorities. The associative or institutional projects to revalue organic waste into compost or to recycle plastic bags have all collapsed to date, while the implementation of Hysacam’s proposals for composting and biogas collection on their landfill sites was still pending. Only the city dwellers continued to patiently sort, recover, set aside, reuse, and resell the many residues of their daily activities and the scraps of their domestic material culture in their compounds. Recycling as a subsistence activity in the public space in Garoua and Maroua is still certainly depreciated, and the adherence of both the public authorities and the local populations to the hygienic register of the perception and management of waste makes it primarily a nuisance to be eliminated. But, whatever the case, everyone keeps in mind that, in the end, “it’s not waste, it’s diamonds!”29 Emilie Guitard is a permanent researcher in Social Anthropology at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). She studies the relationship to nature in several cities in sub-Saharan Africa (Cameroon, Nigeria, Zimbabwe). During fieldwork, she combines ethnographic research, methods from ethnoscience and collaborations with artists to understand links between waste management and relations of power, local knowledge about urban biodiversity, the role of plants in defining urban

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identities and the place given to nature in city governance in the era of the “sustainable city.” More recently, she has also been developing a reflection on artistic productions featuring Africa, particularly urban, with a focus on the imaginaries of African cities in the future, as expressed in speculative fiction.

Notes This contribution was first published in an earlier version in French under the title “C’est pas le déchet, c’est le diamant !” Pratiques de récupération et gestion publique des déchets à Garoua et Maroua (Cameroun).” In C. Cirelli and B. Florin. 2015. Sociétés urbaines et déchets. Éclairages internationaux, 59–86. Tours: Presses Universitaires François Rabelais.  1. https://collabcubed.com/2013/02/19/pascale-marthine-tayou-plastic-bags/, consulted on 1 October 2022.   2. Press kit for the “Africa Remix” exhibition, Centre Pompidou, 25 May to 8 August 2005, p. 10.   3. See, for example, in Yaoundé, the CIPRE (Centre International de Promotion de la Récuperation): http://base.afrique-gouvernance.net/fr/corpus_dph/fiche-dph-281​ .html, consulted on October 1 2022, or the injunctions to develop recovery as a professional activity of the United Nations Economic and Social Council, 2009: https://sdgs.un.org/publications/africa-review-report-waste-management-main-repo​ rt-english-17295, consulted on 1 October 2022.   4. See, for instance, this photo report on scavengers of the Olusosun landfill in Lagos, Nigeria: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/world/global-waste/?tid=a​ _inl_manual&tidloc=5#lagos, consulted on October 1 2022.   5. See, for example: B. Florin 2011; S. Jaglin, L. Debout, and I. Salenson 2018; or R. Fredericks 2021.  6. https://africapolis.org/en/explore?country=Cameroon&poprange=1,2,3,4,5,6&year​ =2015, consulted on 24 October 2022.   7. For Maroua, see, for example, C. Seignobos and O. Iyebi-Mandjek 2004: 152; or F. Wassouni 2015.   8. Following the model of the botanical transect, I undertook, with the help of Simon Boubakary, who I thank again here, the stretching of a tape measure across the rubbish heap to define a corridor one meter wide along its axis and, finally, to note every 50 cm which type of rubbish was visible in the space thus delimited.   9. See F. Enten, 2003, 385–88 or, in rural areas, L. Douny, 2007. 10. This practice is also found in Senegal. See F. Enten, 2003: 387. 11. Healers who heal according to so-called “traditional” methods. 12. This frequent use of overworn containers to take waste out of the compound did not fail to cause problems when, in 2009, Hysacam imposed a door-to-door collection system for domestic waste in the two towns: while the garbage collectors complained that they were covered in rubbish because their bins were too widely pierced or collapsed under the weight of their contents, many city dwellers accused them of throwing their bins into the dump truck, along with the rubbish they contained. In fact, some Hysacam agents admit to having done this on some occasions, but with the aim of “educating” them to use stronger containers to dispose of their waste. 13. Personal estimate based on Hysacam’s collection tonnages and the number of inhabitants in each town, subject to doubt due to lack of precise figures on the exact number of inhabitants. In comparison, the average waste generation per person per day is currently 0.74kg (https://datatopics.worldbank.org/what-a-waste/trends_in_so​ lid_waste_management.html, consulted on 12 November 2022).

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14. Reported by Cherif, Garoua, March 2009. 15. See the various case studies in D. Corteel and S. Le Lay 2011; A. Jeanjean 2006; or S. Van der Geest 2002. 16. See also, in Ghana, S. Van der Geest 2009. 17. Discussion during the session “Waste and recycling in Saharan societies” of the seminar La deuxième vie des objets, led by E. Anstett and N. Ortar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris on 5 April 2012. 18. As they are particularly distrustful and shy, due to the precariousness of their situation, as well as the highly depreciatory way in which their activity is viewed, it was very difficult for us to talk to them. Further research is needed on this particular type of waste pickers in urban Africa. 19. Also one of the main resources, along with rags, of Parisian biffins in the nineteenth century. See S. Barles 2005: 34–52. 20. This goes hand in hand with the relief of no longer being subject to the harmful effects, from a health point of view this time, of the accumulation of waste in public spaces, with the relief of being able to move around easily in the city again, and finally, with the relief of seeing it regain its “better appearance.” 21. Fulani supreme political authority, literally “commander of the believers,” laamiiɗo juulɓe, see C. Seignobos and H. Tourneux 2002: 166. 22. Contrary to what was observed in many African colonial capitals. See O. Goerg 1997, or L. Fourchard 2001: 67–70. 23. See A.-S. Zoa 1995; J. Bouju and F. Ouattara 2002; E. Dorier-Apprill and C. de Miras 2002; G. Blundo 2009; or M. Mérino 2010. 24. https://www.hysacam-proprete.com, consulted on 21 November 2022. 25. In 2008, Hysacam signed a five-year renewable contract with the Cameroonian government. The state financed ninety-five percent of its work in Garoua and eighty percent in Maroua. The remaining shares were provided by the urban communities, which also signed a set of specifications with the private company. However, the service was free for users. 26. An open-ended contract, social security coverage, a regular salary of about 68,000 CFA francs for refuse collectors to 119,000 CFA francs for drivers, at a rate of 170 hours of work per month. 27. The ideology of modernity, particularly mobilized in waste management, is at work in many other cities of the South, albeit with very divergent results. In Cairo, for example, the “modernization” of the collection service resulted in the abandonment of door-to-door collection, replaced by collective dumpsters (Florin 2012: 74). 28. This is reminiscent of the waste collection system imposed in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century by the famous prefect Eugène Poubelle (Barles 2005: 166–170). 29. A Hysacam truck driver’s response to a young man who had seen me sitting in the cab of the truck and exclaimed: “These are the White people who take the waste with Hysacam to make money” (Garoua, November 2009).

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———. 2018. “Between Municipal Management and Sorcery Uses of Waste. Cameroonian Institutions Faced With “Sorcerers Covered with Refuse” (Garoua and Maroua).” Cahiers D’Etudes Africaines 58(3–4): 231–32. ———. 2014. “Le Grand Chef Doit Etre Comme Le Grand Tas D’ordures.” Gestion Des Déchets Et Relations De Pouvoir Dans Les Villes De Garoua Et Maroua (Cameroun). Ph.D Thesis In Anthropology. Nanterre: Université Paris Ouest Nanterre. ———. 2012a. “Le Chef Et Le Tas D’ordures: La Gestion Des Déchets Comme Arène Politique Et Attribut Du Pouvoir Au Cameroun.” Politique Africaine 127(3): 155–77. ———. 2012b. “Le Fou, Le Génie, Et Le Tas D’ordures: La Passion Des Déchets Comme Marqueur De La Déviance Mentale Dans Une Ville Moyenne Africaine (Garoua, Nord-Cameroun).” In Man and Health in the Lake Chad Basin, eds. E. Rothmaler, H. Tourneux, and R. Tchokothe, 91–108. Bayreuth: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. ———. 2012c. “Le Tas D’ordures Renferme Une Grande Connaissance, Un Grand Savoir: Connaissances Et Pratiques De Gestion Des Déchets En Milieu Urbain Africain (Garoua Et Maroua, Cameroun).” Proceedings Of The 1st Congress Of AFEA. Jaglin, Sylvy, Lise Debout, and Irène Salenson. 2018. Rebut Ou Ressource? Gestion Et Valorisation Des Déchets Dans Les Villes Du Sud. Agence Française De Développement, Paris. Accessed 21 October 2022 from https://www.Afd.Fr/Fr/Ressources/Du-Rebut-La-Ressource. Harpet, Cyril, and Brigitte Lelin. 2001. Vivre Sur La Décharge d’Antananarivo: Regards Anthropologiques. Paris: L’Harmattan. Hilgers, Mathieu. 2012. “Contribution À Une Anthropologie Des Villes Secondaires.” Cahiers D’études Africaines 1(205): 29–55. Jeanjean, Agnès. 2006. Basses Œuvres. Une Ethnologie du Travail dans les Egouts. Paris: CTHS. Kopytoff, Igor. 1986. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities In Cultural Perspective, ed. A. Appadurai, 64–91. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Liberski-Bagnoud, Danouta. 2002. Les Dieux Du Territoire: Penser Autrement La Généalogie. Paris: Maison Des Sciences De l’Homme. Mérino, Matthieu. 2010. Déchets Et Pouvoir Dans Les Villes Africaines, L’action Publique De Gestion Des Déchets À Nairobi De 1964 À 2002. Pessac: Maison Des Sciences De l’Homme d’Aquitaine. Poloni, Arlette. 1990. “Sociologie Et Hygiène. Des Pratiques De Propreté Dans Les Secteurs Périphériques d’Ouagadougou.” In Sociétés, Développement Et Santé, eds. D. Fassin and Y. Jaffré, 273–87. Paris: Ellipses/Aupelf-UREF. Romainville, Michel. 2009. “Les Routes Africaines De L’aluminium.” Techniques & Cultures 51(1): 74–97.

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Seignobos, Christian, and Olivier Iyebi-Mandjek. 2004. Atlas De La Province De l’Extrême-Nord Du Cameroun. Paris: IRD Éditions. Seignobos, Christian, and Henry Tourneux. 2002. Le Nord-Cameroun À Travers Ses Mots: Dictionnaire Des Termes Anciens Et Modernes. Paris: Karthala/IRD Éditions. Valentin, Manuel. 2010. “Plastic Bottles and Bags: Pratiques Et Impacts Des Modes De Consommation D’eau À Boire Au Sénégal.” Autrepart 55(3): 57–70. Van Der Geest, Sjaak. 2002. “The Night-Soil Collector: Bucket Latrines in Ghana.” Postcolonial Studies 5(2): 197–206. ———. 2009. “Children and Dirt in Kwahu, Ghana: A SocialAnthropological Perspective.” In Essays in Medical Anthropology. The Austrian Ethnomedical Society After Thirty Years, eds. R. Kutalek and A. Prinz, 179–90. Wien, Muenster: LIT Verlag. Wassouni, François. 2015. “L’innovation Dans Le Secteur De L’artisanat Africain: L’émergence Et Le Développement De L’artisanat Des Cornes De Bœufs A Maroua Dans L’extrême Nord Du Cameroun.” Marche Et Organisations 24(3): 145–17.

10 Where Would We Be Without Rubbish?

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Michael Thompson

Long ago, in the years when I was developing rubbish theory (Thompson 1979, 2017), I found myself teaching a course—it was in “urban sociology”—to students of architecture in what is now Portsmouth ­ University. At the end of the course, by way of an examination, I asked them to write a short essay, giving them a choice of six or seven titles. One title I always included (and which always proved more popular than any of the others) was “Compare Mole’s house in The Wind in the Willows with Le Corbusier’s machine for living.” The difference between these two dwellings, I will argue, sheds some useful light on the pathologies that frame this book: the Mole-like hoarders and the Corb-like declutterers.1

The Essential Tension When Mole (the hero of Kenneth Grahame’s much-loved story about the animals of the riverbank) returns to his subterranean home, he is so overcome by the emotion of it all that his friend, Rat, has to gently take command of the situation. 2 The Rat, looking round him, saw that they were in a sort of forecourt. A garden seat stood on one side of the door, and on the other, a roller . . . On the walls hung wire baskets with ferns in them, alternating with brackets carrying plaster statuary—Garibaldi, and the Infant Samuel, and Queen Victoria, and other heroes of modern Italy. Down one side of the forecourt ran a skittle-alley, with benches along it and little wooden tables marked with rings that hinted

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at beer mugs. In the middle was a small round pond containing goldfish and surrounded by a cockle-shell border. Out of the center of the pond rose a fanciful erection clothed in more cockle-shells and topped by a large silvered glass ball that reflected everything all wrong and had a very pleasing effect. (Grahame 1908)

This picturesque, not to say kitsch, scene would not have appealed to Le Corbusier. “Decoration,” he insisted, “is a sensorial elementary order . . . suited to simple races, peasants and savages” (Le Corbusier 1947). Nor, given he saw the cafés of Paris as “the fungus that eats up the pavement” would he have been enthused by Mole’s neither fully private nor fully public forecourt; indeed, he would have fingered Mole as what planners call “a non-conforming user.” Then, had he traversed it and stepped inside Mole’s house, he would have had much more to find fault with: the ad hoc way the beer cellar had been excavated off a passageway and the bunks carved out of the parlor wall. Then there were the pictures which, though they met with Rat’s approval (“Wherever did you pick up those prints? Make the place look so homelike they do”) would have fallen far short of the exacting standards set by the machine for living: “Just a few pictures, and good ones.” Nor is this cleavage due simply to the presence or absence of surface decoration and self-help. Mole’s dwelling is not so much designed as evolved and still evolving: a social and material process rather than a finite and concrete specification: “Mole, his bosom heaving with emotion, related . . . how this was planned and how that was thought out, and how this was got through a windfall from an aunt, and that was a wonderful find and a bargain, and this other thing was bought out of laborious savings and a certain amount of going without” (Grahame 1908). The machine for living, by contrast, arrives complete in every prescriptive detail. Far from the occupant modifying it, the idea is that it should modify its occupant: “a well mapped out scheme, constructed on a mass production basis, can give a feeling of calm, order, and neatness, and inevitably imposes discipline on the inhabitants” (Le Corbusier 1947). No chance here for bosoms heaving with emotion. Indeed, all traces of femininity are to be eliminated: “Men—intelligent, cold, and calm—are needed to build the house and lay out the town” (ibid). Poor old Mole! There is simply no place in this grand design for the future for his “old coach full of tuberculosis”: Corb’s verdict on the pre-modern house. My students all picked up on this contrast between Mole’s idiosyncratic abode and Corb’s glorious vision of where things have got to go, and in revealing ways, some of which I had not anticipated. Though I had not asked them to come down in favor of one or the other, they felt this was something that, as aspiring architects, they had to do. Their eagerness to make the transition from layman to professional evidently required them to emit a clear signal that they were moving in the right direction. In the early years, when the Modern Movement was still in full flood, there was

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really no problem: strike out strongly for Le Corbusier. Later on, however, with the advent of community architecture, of neo-vernacularism, of public participation, of the autonomous house, of Prince Charles’ “monstrous carbuncles” and of post-modernism (exuberantly championed by Charles Jenks), perhaps it was Mole they should be plumping for. And, in the transitional period, I found myself reading wondrously convoluted essays as my students found themselves driven to distraction by the refusal of their teachers to tell them which direction was the right one, with one of their number concluding that “though Mole’s house appears very attractive from a purely human point of view, I feel that, as an architect, I must side with Corbusier.” So here, between Mole and Corb, is the essential tension. Corb is bent on remaking the whole world by grand and conscious design; Mole, in his short-sighted way, just tinkers with his immediate surroundings to create “a very pleasing effect.” Since Corb’s immaculate global prescriptions and Mole’s unruly local bricolage are directly and irreducibly opposed to one another, you might expect to see one of them emerge as the clear winner, but the curious thing is that you do not. Neither side, we must conclude, is ever entirely successful in imposing its vision of the future. The future, rather, is some “resultant” of the contradictory forces that each brings to bear, as best it can, on its physical surroundings. In other words, to think of this struggle between contending visions of the future in terms of winning and losing—imposing and capitulating—is as nonsensical as saying that the lions of Serengeti have won when they’ve eaten the last wildebeest in the park. No, like predators and grazing animals in the natural environment, Corbs and Moles go on, and on, and on, existing in the built environment. Nor do they just co-exist in that environment; they constitute a dynamical system. Even as the single grand design is being realized, the Moles are busy beneath it, rearranging it into a million individually pleasing effects. My argument will be that our built environment is nothing more nor less than the by-product of this dynamical system. It certainly has a design, but it certainly does not have a designer—an insight that, I believe, has some far-reaching implications. However, before we can move on to these “far-reaching implications,” we will need a cautionary tale; otherwise, we may fail to ask the crucial question: is this essential two-fold scheme—the hoarding Mole versus the decluttering Corb—sufficient? The answer, as we will see, is that it is not: the plurality needs to be bumped up from two to four (or, rather “four-plus-one”).3

A Cautionary Tale (and an Advance Warning) Rubbish theory, (somewhat surprisingly perhaps) has its origin in the world of art, not Academia, thanks to my involvement in the early conceptual art movement: Art and Language. Its members, being intent on emphasizing

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the art concept, were radically critical of the then-current dominance of the art object; so radically critical, in fact, that we found ourselves in the forefront of the protests across British art schools that led to some of them (notably Guildford and Hornsey) being closed down, with the more activist in our ranks finding themselves on employment blacklists (all because, initially, of their request that students be able to move freely between the then very separate realms of painting and sculpture). The group’s output, unsurprisingly, was not easily taken possession of, with much of it coming in the form of “language as art,” which was then exhibited in our somewhat pretentious journal: Art-Language. More than four decades later, in 2016, I was surprised and delighted to come across an exhibition at the Tate Britain Gallery: “Conceptual Art in Britain: 1964–1979.” And even more surprised and delighted to find one of my ArtLanguage articles, complete with its rubbish theory diagrams, on display as an artwork. The theory, I realized, had gone through its own transformations: from transient to rubbish and then from rubbish to durable (and I will explain these in a moment). When I got home, I rummaged in an old filing cabinet and, in a folder marked “Hull Art Notes” (Hull College of Art being where several of us had fetched up), discovered two issues of the once-worthless Art-Language. All of which suggests that it is not a good idea to place too much faith in the declutterers; you may be throwing away the next Mona Lisa. In framing this chapter in terms of architecture and art I realize I am exposing myself to a major objection: “All very interesting, but is it anthropology?” The head of the anthropology department at University College London was strongly of the opinion it was not, and he did everything he could to prevent me from pursuing my doctorate. Indeed, it was only thanks to a loophole in the regulations, and an explosive showdown between him and my supervisor, Mary Douglas, that I, and my thesis topic, were not thrown out. My fieldwork as a carpenter in a small building firm that was merrily transforming rat-infested slums into glorious heritage—a process now called “gentrification”—was evidently not what anthropologists were expected to do, and this was rendered even worse by my site being just a mile or so up the road rather than thousands of miles away on some Pacific island. Nor was that the end of it. The centrality of dynamical systems— that ecological parallel between Corbs and Moles, on the one hand, and lions and wildebeest, on the other—were suspiciously “scientific,” as too was the then-novel mathematics—catastrophe theory—that I had had to equip myself with. Unsurprisingly, I soon found myself working in an institute for applied systems analysis, and that is where I have remained: still an anthropologist, but a funny looking one. So if the rest of the chapter appears a bit odd—jumping from architecture to art to engineering, for instance, and from households to cities to global-scale material flows—that is the reason. Looking on the bright side, it does massively expand the territory and usefulness of anthropology

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in today’s world: perhaps the prime example being in relation to climate change, with its profoundly altered flows of carbon dioxide, water, energy, and so on (see Rayner and Malone 1998; Douglas et al. 2003; Verweij et al. 2006; Verweij et al. 2022).

Flows of Ancestors: Flows of Possessable Objects The Tiv—an anthropologically renowned people in West Africa4 —are organized in terms of a vast family tree: a segmentary lineage system.5 Descent is traced through the male line and their distribution in space— Tivland, as it is called—maps onto this genealogical scheme. The result is that segments—those descended from, say, two brothers x generations back—will always be next to one another on the ground. This means that if there is a dispute between two Tiv, each can mobilize his or her segment—first generation, second generation, and so on—until they reach the point where they have mobilized the segments that are descended from two brothers. So they have no need of leaders (chiefs, headmen, etc); indeed, leaders would mess up this mobilization process: they are what is called an acephalous society (a “tribe without rulers”).6 But surely, it will be objected, a genealogical scheme that encompasses four million people will soon become hopelessly unwieldy. On top of that, the requirement that it makes sense of all the Tiv—not just in time but in space as well—will surely render it unworkable after just a few generations. Well, neither of these debilitating consequences has arrived. Though new generations are being added all the time, the genealogy has remained at just 16 or so generations, and today’s Tiv, despite all the territorial and demographic upheavals they have undergone, still manage to live next to their closest kin, and their segments still remain numerically balanced. This means that some compression must be happening: some generations, somewhere, must be being lost from the family tree as new ones are being added. And some of those ancestors who have not been lost must be rearranged, otherwise the spatial distribution of the Tiv would drift out of line with their temporal distribution. Both of these essential adjustments require amnesia. Some ancestors have to be forgotten entirely and some relationships have to become sufficiently blurred, thereby enabling people to become convinced that two brothers, say, are really father and son. Such compression and rearrangement, however, are simply not possible at the two extremes of the genealogy. Tiv himself and his sons and their sons are fixed in myth (and in the regional divisions of Tivland) and, at the other extreme, people know who their fathers, grandfathers and greatgrandfathers are or were (“Every man,” they say, “has three fathers”). This means that duration reaches back three or so generations from the present, while eternity reaches forward three or so generations from Tiv himself: the father of them all. So, the forgetting—the black hole of oblivion—must be somewhere in between: somewhere in the eight or so middle generations.

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Only in that range are compression and rearrangement possible and, even then, only through the exercise of impressive political skills. As their ethnographers have long stressed: “politics among the Tiv is conducted in the idiom of kinship.” So identity—being a Tiv and staying a Tiv—would simply not be possible without this amnesia. That amnesia, moreover, requires this threefold structuring: eternity (to keep the founding fathers anchored just 16 generations back), duration (to allow for not being able to pull the wool over people’s eyes about their immediate ancestors), and oblivion (to enable the compression and rearrangement that will keep the whole segmentary lineage show on the road). Not that the Tiv’s is the only way of doing this. The Sherpas of Nepal, for instance, go to considerable lengths not to mention the names of the dead, and this means that the “curtain of amnesia” is brought forward much closer to the present, thereby making it impossible for them to anchor rights to land and other property in the weight of history (Thompson 1982). Sometimes, as with the introduction of state-imposed records of births, deaths and marriages, in eighteenth century Austria, the curtain is pushed back, resulting in a reduction of the compression and rearrangement the population had previously enjoyed. But, though the boundary lines may shift, there will always be some structuring. In other words, duration (our common-sense understanding of time) has always to be framed by something—some combination of eternity and oblivion—that is not itself duration.7 And, if that is the general rule, then it is unlikely that we “moderns” are exempt (as is suggested, in relation to quantum mechanics and super string theory, in Thompson 2022).

Transience, Rubbish, and Durability Though kinship and genealogy are by no means irrelevant in modern societies, it is the social life of things—paintings, furniture, houses, and, indeed, everything that comes under the rubrics of “material culture” and “natural resources”—that is most revealing of the time/space structure by which we struggle to maintain and transform our lives with one another. “That’s a nice car you have there” someone may say to us, and we reply modestly, “Yes but it’s second hand, you know.” But we could not give that modest reply if someone said “That’s a nice Rembrandt you have there,” nor could we give it if the car in question was a “vintage” car: a Bugatti, say. The explanation, of course, is that possessable objects can fall into one or other of two cultural categories: the Transient (in which items steadily decline in value and have finite expected life-spans) and the Durable (in which items steadily increase in value and have infinite expected life-spans). But most objects—the Bugatti, for instance—start off in the Transient category and are only later transferred to Durability.8 This then raises the question of how this transfer is possible, given the mutual incompatibility

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Figure 10.1.  Cultural categories of objects and the possible transfers (the solid arrows) between them (from Thompson, 1979, p. 10)

of the criteria that define the two categories. The answer is that the direct transfer is not possible, but that there is a third, covert category— Rubbish—and that this provides the crucial pathway. A Transient object, decreasing in value with time and use, eventually sinks into Rubbish—a timeless and valueless limbo.9 In an ideal world it would then disappear in a small cloud of dust, but often this does not happen, and it lingers on, unnoticed and unloved, until perhaps one day it is discovered by some creative and upwardly mobile individual and successfully transferred to the Durable category. This is how something second-hand becomes an antique and how, as has happened with many a run-down inner-city district, a rat-infested slum becomes part of Our Glorious Heritage (see Figure 10.1). There is, clearly, a structure here that exactly matches the structure that enables the Tiv and their segmentary lineage system to keep on going. Durability (“A thing of beauty is a joy forever”) equates to eternity, Transience (“Here today, gone tomorrow”) is measured out in duration, and Rubbish (“Out of sight, out of mind”) matches oblivion. But, though these transfers relate to the social life of things, they are also intricately connected to the social life of people: creativity and upward mobility going with the transition from Rubbish to Durability and, in the other direction, social marginality and fatalistic resignation going with the decline from Transience into Rubbish. Those who ride the downward flow, therefore, are not at all the same as those who ride the upward one. And it is by these sorts of transfers, together with these sorts of changes of riders, that our class-based societies are able to continually realign status and power, and thereby perpetuate themselves. So these transfers—from Transient through Rubbish to Durable—do not happen of their own accord (any more than the Tivs’ compressions

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and rearrangements happen of their own accord). Rather, those transfers require the interactions of the requisite variety of what Durkheim called social beings. • There are the “crashers-through”: those creative and upwardly mobile characters who effect the transfers to Durability. • There are the “high priests” (like those literary critics who strive to define what shall be admitted to “the canon”: keeping the sauce bottle labels separate from the Shakespeare sonnets), who try to prevent these transfers. • There are the “levelers”—revolutionaries who, by flooding the Durable category (“debauching the currency,” as Lenin put it), are able to diminish both status and power—who are intent on getting more and more of what they are after: equality (see Reno 2017). • And there are the “losers-out” (those, like ourselves when we see in an antique shop window something we recently threw away) who, despite all their efforts, keep finding themselves at the bottom of the pile. These four, a little more formally set out, are the upholders of the four distinct forms of social solidarity (or ways of organizing) that are at the heart of the theory of plural rationality (also called cultural theory): individualism, hierarchy, egalitarianism, and fatalism, respectively.10 Corb, referring back to our architecture students and their essays, is clearly an upholder of hierarchy (and an avid declutterer) but Moles, we can now see, come in three different species, each hoarding in its distinctive way. However, as Peter York has recently pointed out (York 2022), they will likely not see that as hoarding. Hoarding, rather, is what the hierarchical declutterers see them as doing. A growing group of us, though, really like lots of things and want to hang onto them, or at least give them to people we know: recycling for real. We think high-profile simplicity is the supermarket spirituality of the rich. Some of us think our upcycled furniture and car boot finds talk to each other when put together. And [as with Mole and Rat and those “very pleasing effects”] they give us something to talk about, observations on the history of taste—how did those plates end up in a charity shop? (which means, of course, that you have to have found them yourself).

In other words, the declutterers are treating all these “non-conforming” households as an undifferentiated blob. So, as Peter York is suggesting, I need to show how this is not the case.

The Four-Plus-One Household Consumption Styles A study of 220 British households (Dake and Thompson 1999) confirms that those basic consumption units fall into the four-plus-one styles that are

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predicted by the theory of plural rationality. This is in contrast to rational choice theory (which sees them as all the same: rational utility maximizers) and to post-modernism (which sees them as incomparably different): a plague on both your houses, you might say (Verweij et al. 2006). It further shows that each style is quite thick on the ground and that they all work their way through into markedly different “purchasing preferences”: shopping baskets with systematically different contents. Moreover, since manufacturers soon learn not to produce things that people do not want (or cannot be persuaded to want), these purchasing preferences quickly work their way through into markedly different material flows within the economy (and the ecosystem) as a whole. And changes in these purchasing preferences quickly work their way through into changes in these material flows. In other words, what is coming into a household will vary with its consumption style, and so too will what is subsequently retained and discarded. So, the material flows—their contents, not just their volumes—will vary according to a household’s style, and so too will the definition of what counts as clutter (as is stressed in endnote 1). Moreover, these styles (as with Mole and Corb, but with the plurality bumped up from two to four-plusone) constitute a dynamical system (as is evident from their continued, but far from balanced, co-existence). And that dynamical system, as we will see, is then reproduced, fractal-wise, as we move to the city that contains those households, and then to the planet that contains those cities. • Individualistic householders are fashion conscious, like to look successful, prefer a tidy garden, and do not join clubs (in the manner of Groucho Marx, who would not join any club that would have him as a member). They do not go in for vegetarianism, biodegradable products, or informality, nor do they allot specific chores within the household or go out of their way to avoid “fascist vegetables” and the  like: the products as we coyly put it (we were doing this research for the AngloDutch multinational Unilever), of “oppressive institutions” (this was in the 1990s, around the time when many people were boycotting produce from apartheid South Africa and similar “odious regimes”; the particularities of these styles will of course vary over time—these ones are already displaying a sort of period charm—but we can expect the principles that underlie these particularities to remain the same). • Hierarchical householders are status-sensitive: different wines at their dinner parties for the ladies and the gentlemen, for instance, with one household going so far as to buy Huntley and Palmer biscuits for its human members and DOB (dealer own brand) for the dog. They use traditional ingredients, have their own places at table, are sticklers for punctuality, and wash their clothes on “wash-day” having first sorted them out according to color and fabric. They do not boycott certain products, nor do they find that work often runs late, nor do they go in

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for takeaway meals. They are not prepared to put up with old furniture (apart from antiques), nor are they comfortable with a house that is untidy. • Egalitarian households are about as opposed to both individualistic and hierarchical ones as it is possible for them to get. Communality, together with unprocessed foods and biodegradable products (which, moreover, should be made by institutions that are not oppressive) is what they look for: an informal, joining, vegetarian sort of life, in a pleasantly scruffy house filled with furniture that is not new (indeed, often recycled) and surrounded by a garden that (whilst often productive) is far from tidy. Unlike their individualistic and hierarchical counterparts, they are not “brand-loyal,” nor are they fashion-conscious, nor do they wash their clothes on the same day each week, or sort them out into separate piles before they put them into the washing machine (such households, in consequence, are quite easily spotted: the “Pinky-Greys,” as they are now dubbed within Unilever). • Fatalistic householders make few long-term plans, find it difficult to save money, and are much addicted to takeaway meals. They do not have regular routines or allotted household tasks, nor their own places at the table. Indeed, their takeaway meals are likely to be eaten off their knees, in front of that quintessentially fatalistic piece of technology: the television (Putnam 1995; Schmutzer 1994). The keeping of KFC plates that is mentioned by Peter York would typify this style. • Autonomous householders (the “plus-one”), unsurprisingly, given the way they strive to distance themselves from all four of the consumptive positions that the other households dig themselves into, are less easily pinned down. This is because their style—conviviality without ­coercion—includes elements from all the others and yet manages to remain detached. They embrace novelty, as does the individualistic householder, but do not seek to emulate him/her (that is, the competitive component is missing); there is something timeless, rather than the hierarchical traditional, about the unchanging elements in their consumption (the Dalai Lama’s famous letter, as he was fleeing the Chinese invasion of Tibet, was addressed to “tsampa-eaters everywhere,” tsampa being the parched barley staple of the region). And, though they are certainly in favor of naturalness (the celebrated Tibetan hermit Milarepa ended up living on boiled nettles), they manage to avoid the sort of moral righteousness that comes so easily to their egalitarian counterparts (hermits may be holy, but they’re not holier-than-thou). This style, moreover (and perhaps surprisingly, given its Buddhist affinities), is, like the other four, quite common in contemporary Britain.

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Finally, the Far-Reaching Implications There is a sort of orthodoxy nowadays that sees the material flows that we are generating as excessive and environmentally unsustainable.11 Carbon dioxide from fossil fuels, sand, and gravel for construction work, mangoes being flown into Europe from Honduras, domestic waste demanding more and more landfill sites, pig slurry (rich in nitrogen and phosphorous) causing algae blooms in the North Sea . . . on and on. Greed, thoughtlessness, a capitalist system out of control, the triumph of competition over cooperation, the inequitable relationship between the nations of the North and those of the South, and anthropomorphism—our domination of nature when what is needed is a self-effacing recognition that we are but one component within an intricately connected and inherently fragile ecosystem—are prominent among the reasons that are advanced for the material flows—the stuff that we are pushing around (and being pushed around by)—being the way they are. Societal metabolism—the way in which societies organize their exchange of matter and energy with their natural environment—is the umbrella concept for those who study these material flows (for example, Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 1993, 1998; Schmidt-Bleek 1994; Ayres and Simonis 1994; Brunner and Rechberger 2003; Beck et al. 2013). Since they are subject to conservation principles—neither matter nor energy being created or destroyed—these exchanges are typically expressed in terms of stocks and flows. And the aim is to build up a detailed picture of just what is going where as a result of our social involvement with our physical world. Sometimes the depletion of natural resources is the focus (for example, Meadows et al. 1972); more recently, the filling-up of available “sinks” (oceans, landfills . . . the atmosphere) has come to the fore (for example, Meadows et al. 1992). Taken together, these approaches to (or overshootings of) nature’s limits have now been framed in terms of a gross imbalance between that portion of the earth’s “primary product” that is appropriated by us humans and what is left over for the rest of creation (e.g., Vitousek et al. 1986; Wright 1999). And this framing has now been further generalized in terms of a number of “planetary boundaries”: dangerous climate change, loss of biodiversity, gross distortions of the nitrogen and phosphorous cycles, and so on (e.g., Rockström et al. 2009; Lynas 2011; Raworth 2017). This orthodox framing of the problem, clearly, is being done from a moral position—indeed, the whole discourse takes the form of a sermon about our profligacy and what it is doing to our relationships with one another and with nature—and those who adopt that moral position, equally clearly, will be having some effect on the material flows. But, and this is the key to those far-reaching implications, there are other moral positions and other ways of framing the problem (see, for instance, the critique of the planetary boundaries’ framing by Nordhaus et al. 2012). And it is this plurality of moral positions, and their modes of interaction,

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that are actually determining the material flows (those flows being, as it were, the resultant of the diverse forces that are being exerted by those who are gathered at each of the moral positions). This means that, if you are interested in the material flows, and in finding ways of altering those material flows, you will get nowhere until you have a map of those moral positions (Beck et al. 2013).

Mapping the Moral Positions Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the provision of housing in London was almost totally in the hands of the planners: far-sighted experts who were convinced that, for the common good, the development of the built environment should be brought under control and firmly steered in the desired direction. One of their main concerns, therefore, was the renewal of the war-torn and worn-out fabric of the inner city. One of their number, Harold P. Clunn, put it like this: London . . . is marching on to a destiny which will make it the grandest city in the whole world . . . London must be allowed to grow upwards and the straggling villas and small houses of Highbury, Barnsbury, Stoke Newington, Hackney, Maida Vale, and St John’s Wood must give way to new blocks of flats. (Clunn, n.d.: 26–27)

In material terms, Clunn—a declutterer if ever there was one—is talking about a good half of London’s fabric: all that part, beyond the old cities of London and Westminster, that was built by the Georgians and the Victorians. It is roughly the equivalent, in Vienna, of demolishing and re-building everything between the Ringstrasse and the Gürtel. In New York, it would not be far short of the whole of Manhattan, together with outlying places such as Brooklyn Heights. Much of this vast swathe of London did indeed give way to new blocks of flats and, if the planners had had it all their own way, and if enough money had been made available to them, their algorithms for determining just when a section of the built environment had become “optimally demolishable” (their terminology) would have ensured that every urban acre underwent its “comprehensive redevelopment” (again their terminology). Fortunately, a creative and motley alliance of owner-occupiers and grassroots activists (the Victorian Society, for instance, and the association that sprang up to fight the demolition of Islington’s Packington Square), who saw these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses as sadly neglected heritage, not rat-infested slums (the official perception, as voiced by the then housing minister, Richard Crossman), were able, through their myriad and often uncoordinated efforts, to derail the planners’ singular and unrelenting vision of the New Jerusalem.12 It was this anarchic and innovative bunch—all Moles, of course, but of more than one species—who, in effect, privatized the despised communal burden, re-valued it (just one of

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those “straggling villas and small houses” could now set you back several millions of pounds), and put it into the healthy and highly liveable state in which we now see it. This re-valuing of the built environment is something that now continues apace in almost every European and North American city (and even in less occidental places, such as Kathmandu), but it would never have happened if control had remained in the hands of the planners. If today’s material flows are indeed unsustainable, just think what they would be like if the planners had had their way! And, since it is those “anarchic and innovative privatizers”—the villains of the piece in the conventional orthodoxy about the unsustainability of our material flows—who we have to thank for averting that horrendous future, we should pause to examine how they did it. They were the ones who put a stop to the total physical renewal of the city every 50 years or so. It was their undermining of the planners’ “vision of the future” that resulted in all the “social learning” that we are the beneficiaries of today. In other words, if they have managed to move things so far in the material flow-lessening direction that is seen as so desirable by those who espouse the conventional orthodoxy, then we should seek to build on those achievements if we wish to go even further: all the way to the point where we are living in cities that are “walking on air” (Beck 2011, 2014a). This realization has some important consequences. • Those parts of London’s inner suburbs that were comprehensively redeveloped resulted in massive material flows. The bricks and mortar from those optimally demolished buildings were all carted away to be dumped in landfills or used as hardcore, and all the timber—flooring, joists, staircases, rafters, doors, etc.—was burnt on-site. Many of the replacements—high-rise systems-built tower blocks, in particular—have proved disastrous, structurally, socially, or both, and have had to be demolished long before their planned 60-year life has elapsed (indeed, one of them—Ronan Point, in the Borough of Newham—demolished itself, less than a year into its allotted span). • These colossal flows dwindle to a trickle in the case of those parts that have been revalued. The bricks, the mortar, the timber, the slates, and the cast-iron balconies are still in place; they have not flowed anywhere. Of course, there has been work, and there will have to be much more if those houses are to stay in existence forever, which is the present intention. • But the flows that are generated by the careful and continuous repair of a renewable resource (which is what this swathe of London has now become) are altogether different from those that are generated by comprehensive redevelopment. Now, when a part of a building is demolished, every brick is saved, even half-bricks (which form what look like “headers” in the modern cavity wall construction method, in which the outer brick skin is tied, using alloy links, to an inner blockwork skin).

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•

•

•

•

Even more so with fireplaces, handrails, cast-iron fitments, door furniture, and so on, all of which are profitably re-cycled by way of small local businesses that specialize in what is called architectural salvage. The building work itself is much more skilled, and it is labor-intensive (not material-intensive and machine-intensive, as is comprehensive re-development). It is also much more local and small-scale: good builders being passed on, by word-of-mouth, from house to house, often without even a change of street. Along with the growth of architectural salvage, there has been an astonishing re-birth of skills that had virtually disappeared by the 1960s: ornamental plastering, bespoke kitchen-making, traditional joinery, scagliola, stained glass, the laying of tessellated floors . . . on and on. There is nothing that originally went into these houses that is not now being produced or done. And, to help people actually do it all, there is now a whole communication industry—from museum curators and academics to glossy magazines (like Period Living and Traditional Homes), coffee-table books, and television programs—all merrily coining it in and spreading the word. Nor would it be right to see all this as “retro” or neo-Luddite. New technologies—timber-treatments, damp-proofing, forced ventilation, “Velux” roof windows, the afore-mentioned cavity wall construction methods, and so on—are key ingredients in this process that has been set in train by re-valuation. This inner swathe of London, moreover, probably contains the highest proportion of “home-workers” anywhere in Britain (especially now that the re-valuing of former warehouses and factories has provided all those “work-live” units). Indeed, these homes/workplaces fairly hum with the latest information technology. For instance, the eighteenth century silk-weavers’ houses in Spitalfields (the until recently run-down district immediately adjoining the City of London) have become the electronic cottages of the 21st century, providing an impressive response to one of the great challenges of the new millennium: designing for selective slowness. Until recently, getting anything to go faster was automatically better, but, with the transition to the “post-industrial city,” this is no longer the case, and these houses and their inhabitants now combine very high-speed and high-volume technologies of information with impressively sloweddown material flows (the “slow food movement,” for instance, and a very low level of car-ownership). Far from having “turned their backs on the future” or “pulled the plug on progress” (which has been the prevailing perception; see Katz 1996), these dwellings-cum-inhabitants are the future.

So, the good news is that we used to be committed to physically turning over our built environment every fifty years or so, and now we are not.

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And it is the market and egalitarian actors—the owner-occupiers and the grassroots activists—that we have to thank for that, not the hierarchical actors. Re-valuation, we should note, is altogether different from re-cycling. In re-cycling, the building itself disappears and its physical components are then re-used in the construction of a new building (or more likely, buildings). Re-valuation, however, is something that happens in our heads, and the building itself stays in place. The only change, to begin with, is in our attitude to the building. But, once we see it as sadly neglected Glorious Heritage, rather than awful rat-infested slum, our behavior towards it changes, and that (as we have just seen) leads to all sorts of changes in the material flows associated with the city of which it is part. So, we now have the map of moral positions: the hierarchical institutions (Mr Clunn and his ilk) with their “New Jerusalem,” the egalitarian institutions (the proponents of that limits respecting orthodoxy) with their insistence that we need “a whole new relationship with nature,” and the individualist institutions (the market-oriented owner-occupiers) with their noses atwitch at the prospect of re-valuation. Individualistic actors, being (in Mary Douglas’s felicitous term) “pragmatic materialists,” might seem to be the odd ones out here, but there is a moral position around which those who believe in a life of bidding and bargaining are gathered. This is the Adam Smithian argument that the pursuit of self-interest pays off only when it adds to the welfare of the totality: “the hidden hand.” With this map (to which the fatalist institutions will be added in the next section), we can now resist the almost overwhelming urge to pronounce just one of these positions right and the others wrong.

Plurality and Clumsiness About half a century after the de-railing of Mr Clunn’s vision of the future, Arsenal Football Club decided they really would have to do something about their Highbury stadium. It only held 30,000 spectators, yet they needed double that. Also, the pitch was slightly under-sized, and this detracted from their status as one of the premier clubs in the world. Thus, it was that Arsenal (I will call it the market—i.e., individualist—actor) sidled up to Islington Borough Council (I will call it the hierarchical actor) with the suggestion that the council give the go-ahead—“outline planning permission”—for Arsenal to acquire, and demolish, the two streets of houses immediately adjacent to its stadium, thereby enabling it to expand its capacity to 60,000, along with a full-sized pitch. Most of social science (especially in relation to public policy and urban governance) assumes that that is it: if it is not the market, it is the hierarchy, and vice versa (as, for instance, with financial sector firms and financial regulators, or Margaret Thatcher’s attempt to create an “enterprise culture” by laying into the unions, the professions and other bastions of privilege

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and restrictive practices).13 But it is not! Within less than twenty-four hours of Arsenal’s approach to Islington Council becoming public knowledge, a third actor emerged: the Highbury Community Association. Its members were implacably opposed to the solution Arsenal was proposing: the only solution, Arsenal insisted, playing what it thought was its trump card, if the club was to remain in the borough. So, this third actor—I will call it the egalitarian actor (its arguments being largely couched in terms of the unfair treatment of residents, small local businesses, the unemployed, and so on)—really put the cat among the pigeons. An enormous controversy blew up, a petition with thousands of signatures was delivered to Islington Town Hall, and there was a vigorous television debate (chaired by the former government minister, Ann Widdecombe). It soon became clear, trump card or not, that there was no way Arsenal was going to get permission to expand on its Highbury site. Various alternatives were then proposed—one of which was to relocate to a vast regeneration project, just a couple of miles away, around King’s Cross and St Pancras stations—but none proved to be feasible. So, it began to look as though Arsenal had indeed been right, and that the club, to the dismay of both the council and its loyal supporters, would indeed have to move right out of the borough: all the way out to near the M25 orbital motorway. But then two commercial property surveyors, who also happened to be fanatical Arsenal supporters, got out their maps. To everyone’s surprise (including theirs), they found a triangular piece of rather low-rent and under-used land, bounded on two sides by busy railway lines, that would comfortably take a 60,000-seat stadium. Even more amazingly, as well as being already owned by the council, it was less than half-a-mile away from the old stadium and its hallowed (but under-sized) turf. Cutting a long story short, in August 2006—just four years later, on-time and onbudget—Arsenal moved into its new stadium: onto this near-ideal site, the very existence of which had remained entirely unnoticed until the three-cornered battle—the market actor, the hierarchical actor and the egalitarian actor—had been joined. So, this is a nice example of what is now called (with tongue in cheek) a clumsy solution: a solution that, in contrast to the familiar elegant solutions, emerges only in those situations where each of these three kinds of actor is (a) able to make itself heard (accessibility) and (b) then responsive to, rather than dismissive of, the others (responsiveness). Things, we can now see, started off over-elegant (just Arsenal and Islington Council); they only became clumsified when the third actor—the Highbury Community Association—managed to force its way in. Moreover, in a clumsy solution—and this is the counter-intuitive bit— each actor ends up with more of what it wants (and less of what it does not want) than it would have got if it had somehow managed to achieve “hegemony” and impose its distinctive (and elegant) solution.

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• Arsenal (the market actor) has got its state-of-the-art stadium (and a handsome price for its old stadium, which has now been re-developed, mostly for housing). • Islington Council (the hierarchical actor) has kept the club in the borough (and extracted a colossal “planning gain”: thousands of new houses, a futuristic waste-transfer and re-cycling centre, some badly needed public open space and so on). • The Highbury Community Association (the egalitarian actor) has saved the streets and houses around the old stadium and forced the council to ensure that those businesses displaced by the new stadium were re-located within the borough, and without any loss of jobs. Of course, they are still critical, especially over the failure to build a new tube station within the stadium (the Piccadilly Line passes directly beneath it) but they do have the satisfaction of knowing that the new stadium is the greenest in the world (for a more detailed account, see Thompson 2008, Ch. 1). • Even the disregarded fatalist actors—the “cannon fodder” supporters who find their way on foot, stopping off at their favored pubs and chip shops—have done quite well. Reaching the new stadium is still feasible, whilst they could never have made it to an out-of-the-borough venue. So, my argument, in a nutshell, is that we need to ensure that every decision—every essay at coping with change—mimics what happened with Arsenal’s new stadium. In that case, of course, the clumsy solution came about by accident: the rude intrusion of the initially excluded egalitarian actor turning out to be so constructive. The challenge is to get it to happen, every time, by design. But why, it might be objected, if it is as easy as this, do we not see clumsy solutions all over the place? The answer is that the two necessary conditions—accessibility and responsiveness—are not easily achieved. Indeed, the four precepts of policy analysis—(a) insist on a single agreed definition of the problem, (b) clearly distinguish between facts and values, (c) set up a “single metric” (pounds, lives saved, etc.) so as to be able to compare and evaluate options, and (d) optimize around the best option—together ensure the silencing of all but one actor. So, if we want to find our way to clumsy solutions, we will have to insert the words “do not” in each of those precepts. And that, outrageous though it may appear, is what I am proposing.14 So those “far-reaching implications” boil down to something very different from the way the design process is usually handled. How, rather than struggling to decide which elegant solution is the right one and then rejecting the rest, do we somehow or other draw on the experience and wisdom that is inherent in them all? In other words, we are back with those architecture students and their essays: back with the all-too-common situation in which just one voice—in their case, of course, it was the hierarchical

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and decluttering Corb voice urging architects to “rid their minds of all dead concepts”—drowning out the others: those of the poor old Moles.

Bring On the Clutter The design of clumsy solutions, unsurprisingly, turns out to be most easily achieved in situations where a long-dominant elegant solution, for some reason or other, has hit the buffers. For architecture’s Modern Movement, for instance, this happened, literally with a bang, when, in the US, Pruitt Eigo—a prize-winning housing project in St Louis that had become u ­ ninhabitable—was blown up. In the UK, something similar happened when one quarter of the system-built tower-block, Ronan Point, demolished itself (unfortunately, unlike Pruitt Eigo, with some loss of life). Almost overnight, architects found themselves knee-deep in dead concepts (post-modernism—as defined by architect Charles Jenks rather than Derrida, Leotard et al.—prominent among them) that had miraculously sprung back to life. Usually, however, clumsy solutions need some coaxing, and there are now many case studies of how this has been done. I can mention the ones in the book Clumsy Solutions for a Complex World (Verweij and Thompson 2011) and in Aid, Technology and Development: The Lessons from Nepal (Gyawali et al. 2017). But perhaps the prime example is the participatory process by which the landslide risks faced by the Italian town of Nocere Inferiore, thanks to its proximity to Mount Vesuvius, were successfully mitigated (Scolobig et al. 2015). All these, of course, involve engineers or architects (or both) and what soon becomes evident is that these professions always operate on a contested terrain. Though their practitioners may refuse to recognize it, there are different, and contending, schools of architectural and engineering thought. In the UK, for instance, “starchitects” like Norman Foster and Richard Rogers are very much of the individualist school; Richard MacCormack a leading light in the egalitarian school. And many of their hierarchical school counterparts, having suffered the indignity of seeing some of their buildings demolished within their lifetime, have found themselves shifted across into the fatalist school.

Clutter at Its Most Defiling Very recently, as luck would have it, I have zeroed-in (together with two engineering colleagues) on these contending schools of engineering thought, thereby bringing into sharp focus what is perhaps the ultimate exercise in decluttering: getting human waste safely out of the household and then out of the city by putting it into the water cycle: something that is increasingly being seen as not such a good idea after all (Thompson et al. 2011; Beck et al. 2021). Extricating ourselves from that “technological lock-in”—getting

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away from two centuries-worth of elegance and across to clumsiness—is a truly massive challenge (see Crutzen et al. 2007). So, I will conclude by running through these four schools, thereby suggesting how these massive and unfortunate material flows might be more beneficially re-engineered: an undertaking that, we feel, is best described as engineering anthropology (Thompson and Beck 2017).15 • The Hierarchical School. Nature should be modified so that it holds a mirror up to an orderly society. A cordon sanitaire—water and wastewater infrastructure—must be placed around the city, thereby lessening its potential to pollute, and hence defile. Owners and operators of this infrastructure must therefore be policed so as to make sure that they comply with water supply standards (thereby maintaining public health) and wastewater discharge standards (thereby providing protection for a vulnerable nature). Offenders will be duly punished. Anything recovered from treating polluted wastewater and returned to households will likewise be supervised and regulated. “Waste” most certainly does not “equal food”; engineering and technology are to be aimed squarely at “eliminating” pollutants from municipal sewage. Physics, chemistry, and biology are to be focused, laser-like and in a reductionist manner, thereby preventing pollutants from entering the water environment and instead directing their onward flow to the air (for nitrogen) and to the earth (for phosphorous). A place for everything, in other words, and everything in its place. This requires the continuous intervention of experts—engineers—and is best achieved through installations that are carefully planned, complex, capital-intensive, centralized and large-scale. The archetypal technology of this school is the activated sludge process, with “activated” distinguishing it from what otherwise happens naturally but insufficiently quickly. Entire wastewater systems in the developed world, it is fair to say, are designed with this process at their heart. • The Egalitarian School. The mirror here works the other way. Our social arrangements should reflect the marvelous workings of nature. Nature, rather than being forced into line with an ordered society, should be brought ever more deeply and thoroughly into the city. Its infrastructure should be greened wherever possible, which means that it will have to be decentralized, simple, “empowering” and small-scale: something that engineers of the hierarchical persuasion will have difficulty in even recognizing as engineering (indeed, in the early days of the ecological engineering, its practitioners were dismissed as being “no better than beavers”). Egalitarian engineers emphasize the “balance” among the plants and creatures that “cohere” perfectly to form the “wholeness” of ecosystems. This kind of science is the opposite of reductionist, and far from laser-like. In concerning itself with the workings of this irreducible whole, it epitomizes what nature has taken millennia to perfect: “waste

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equals food.” The fluxes of materials emitted post-consumption by one species are the pre-consumption resources of another. The constructed wetland is the iconic technology of these engineers. Our human “waste,” in that wetland, goes into supporting the “right” kinds of biomasses— fish, dragonflies, reeds and so on—in the right places, instead of the “wrong” biomasses—algae in lakes and coastal waters and so on—in the wrong places. Egalitarian engineers, unlike the proponents of the other schools, further urge that, once the wetland is constructed, there should be no more intervention. Moreover, these ecologically engineered and “nature-based” systems should do what they do without any inputs of man-generated energy or chemicals to speed things up. Nature should be left to do what nature does best: turn waste into food, albeit rather slowly. • The Individualist School is little concerned with order or with defilement, seeing dirt (pollution) as matter in the wrong place at the wrong time. Which dirt, if seen anew and differently, can be rediscovered as the Rembrandt print in the junkshop window . . . the ruby in the dust. More prosaically, whenever that potentially profitable and beneficial resource is richest, so be it. For nitrogen and for phosphorous—both valuable fertilizers—this happens to be the urine we all generate in the most intimate spaces of our homes. The urine separating toilet (UST) therefore has the potential to massively transform the material flows: all the way from the household to the city to the planet. Individualistic engineers, in contrast to their hierarchical and egalitarian counterparts, are agnostic in respect to the scale of their technologies. What is essential for them is that the products of their recovery processes have a market in which to be sold, and that they can be brought to the market cost-effectively. This, of course, entails their being granted permission by those hierarchical institutions—trading standards agencies, for instance, and waste designation authorities—that police those flows. Exuberant trial-anderror, with the resulting technical solutions then being put in market competition with one another, individualistic engineers firmly believe, will ensure we quickly find our way along the best possible path. Since there are both economies and diseconomies of scale out there, the most profitable option (the one with the lowest “unit cost”) will be located somewhere between the extremes of “big is best” and “small is beautiful.” Whoever comes closest to that appropriate scale will profit handsomely, with Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” then ensuring that everyone else also benefits. Individualistic engineers are, likewise, agnostic on the science—reductionist or holistic—that is needed. What matters is that it enables the profitable recovery of resources: phosphorous from sewage in Slough, to mention a topical success, rather than from the mines in Morocco. And if all this requires the continuous intervention of engineers to assist nature in doing this—more quickly and more profitably than would otherwise be the case—so be it.

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• The Fatalist School. Such a school, it might seem, is a non-starter. After all, anyone who was convinced that the world operates with neither rhyme nor reason would surely have no incentive to enter the profession. However, a qualified and practicing engineer could become fatalized, and such people do exist. Such an engineer, unlike those in the other schools, where each of whom learns in his or her distinctive way, has no capacity for learning. Innovation, therefore, can happen only by accident, but it is innovation nevertheless, and so not to be sniffed at: the deadbeat chemist, for instance, who was stirring his beaker with his thermometer (something you should never do) only for it to break, thereby revealing that mercury was the catalyst for a reaction with immense commercial implications. Though it would appear that the fatalist engineer can have no constructive position on the challenge of achieving a circular urban economy, the theory suggests otherwise. This is evident, from all those “development tombs” (as the locals call them) that are littered across the landscape of Nepal: the Hattisunda Barrage, for instance, that was completed at great expense, only for the river to dramatically change its course (that being what Himalayan rivers do, once they reach the plains; see Thompson et al. 2019). In situations such as this, hitherto confident hierarchical engineers end up repeatedly striving to manipulate the empirical and operational data to prove that their originally flawed designs had not been flawed. The valuable lesson here (as we observed in the 2017 afterword to Rubbish Theory) is that time and money spent on trying to do things that cannot be done is time and money wasted: an instance being the vain attempts to control the mercury pollution in the sediment on the bottom of the Great Lakes. This was the unanticipated consequence of the now discontinued practice of spraying the upstream forests with insecticides. The now agreed solution is to avoid any disturbance of the sediment and to hope that it eventually gets covered over. (Verweij 2000) In fact, there is another positive in recognizing and lending an ear to the fatalistic engineers, but it only becomes apparent when we consider them in relation to the overall scheme of contending schools. This is because the four schools, far from just being there, constitute a dynamical system: a dynamical system of people and stuff, ultimately global in its extent, in which each can be seen as paving the way for its successor. The two hundred or so years of hierarchical “hegemony” that has ended up locking most of the developed world into putting human waste into the water cycle is no more the end of the technological road than the “climax community” (all those mutually symbiotic species arranged in their intricately nested niches) is the end of the ecological road. Rather, systems such as these—they are known as epigenetic landscapes—go in cycles, albeit fairly erratic ones.16 In consequence, these social ­entities— wastes, rubbish, fatalized humans—equate to nature’s compost: that

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which, following total system collapse, becomes the wellspring of renewal, regeneration, reorganization, and revaluation: creative destruction, as Joseph Schumpeter put it.17 So the fatalistic position, far from being redundant, is absolutely vital; without it the whole ever-cycling and evolving show would grind to a halt. It corresponds to what has customarily been designated as the waste in wastewater and which today still slips into that disregarded material category: rubbish. Where would we be without it? Michael Thompson studied anthropology (BSc University College London, BLitt Oxford, Ph.D University College London) after eight years in the British Army, while also following a career as a Himalayan mountaineer  (Annapurna South Face 1970, Everest Southwest Face 1975). His early research on how something second-hand becomes an antique, or a rat-infested slum part of Our Glorious Heritage, diverted him into teaching at the Slade School of Fine Art, London and at Portsmouth University’s School of Architecture, and from there to the international Institute for Applied Systems Analysis: an East-West think-tank in Austria. There, he worked on energy futures, on risk perception, on environment and development in the Himalayan region and, more recently, on financial risk and on cities as forces for good in the environment.

Notes   1. However, there are some problems with this framing in that all households, since they have to cope with material throughputs, have to engage in de-cluttering; it is usually called “housekeeping.” So it is really only when they fail in that coping task that we can speak of hoarders and declutterers. But, that said, households do not all cope in the same way; there are different “household consumption styles” (see Dake and Thompson 1999) and, to complicate things still further, what counts as clutter is defined differently in those stylistically different households. In its addressing and resolving of these problems, this chapter inevitably takes the discussion in a direction that may appear somewhat strange. This is because the essential tension, as we will see, turns out to be rooted in a plurality—“four-plus-one”—rather than in just the Corb/Mole duality.   2. I first presented this argument in 1986, at a conference—The Design of the Future— that was organized by Lucius Burckhardt and took place in the now-legendary Ballhaus in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district (Thompson 1987). It draws heavily, of course, on my Rubbish Theory (Thompson 1979, 2017), and was subsequently set out, in English, and expanded so as to take in Cultural Theory (Thompson et al. 1990), in a volume that came out of a 2001 conference—Thinking Utopia—held by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Essen and the Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum in Hagen (Thompson 2005).  3. As was first proposed by Mary Douglas in her book Natural Symbols (Douglas 1970). Indeed, this requisite variety is actually inherent in rubbish theory (Thompson 2003a; Thompson 2017, new introduction).   4. This section—Flows of Ancestors; Flows of Possessable Objects—draws, in part, on a rather ambitious paper (too ambitious some may feel) that pushes the rubbish theory argument pretty well all the way to a ToE (Theory of Everything). That such

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a pushing is possible is, I feel, interesting and challenging, but it is not really required for the purposes of this book (Thompson 2003a).   5. The Tiv are explained in more detail (and with supporting references to their ethnographers) in Thompson (1979, 2017).   6. The most famous of which are the Nuer of southern Sudan, who were first described by Evans-Pritchard (1940). Their lineage system functions in much the same way as the Tiv’s, but has only eleven or so generations.   7. This section draws on an early version of the first half of the 2003a paper that appeared in Lab: Jahrbuch (2001–2002) Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln (Thomas Hensel, Hans Ulrich Reck and Siegfried Zielinski, eds. Köln: Walter König). It has recently been republished (Thompson 2022). I am indebted to Siegfried Zielinski for pointing out to me that rubbish theory is saying something interesting about time.  8. The vast majority, of course, never make the transfer; they are thrown away, scrapped, recycled, or whatever around the time their value has declined more or less to zero. Bugatti-owners face a different problem, thanks to their penchant for racing their increasingly valuable vehicles. They have resolved this slide towards extinction by admitting Ferrari-owners to their exclusive club: a Tiv-like rearrangement that is justified by the argument that Ferraris are the Bugattis “de nos jours.”  9. Properly speaking, a cultural category cannot be covert. It is when disregarded objects, for some reason or other, force their attention on us (when we step in them perhaps) that we rid ourselves of that defilement by consigning them to the category Rubbish (see Thompson 1994). 10. For an overview of this theory, and of its development, see the introductory chapter in Six and Mars (2008). The theory in fact, is little more complicated than this, in that it predicts “four-plus-one” rather than just four forms of solidarity. This is because the “four,” all being coercive in their different ways, enable one more: a somewhat socially detached way of life—it is called autonomy—that can be rendered viable by its upholders deliberately distancing themselves from all four of the “primary” ones. Such hermit-like actors inevitably steer clear of the “contested terrain” that is inherent in Figure 1. But, as is explained in the next section, they do show up at the level of the household. 11. This and the next two sections draw on a number of sources: Rubbish Theory itself, of course, but also a chapter (in German) in the proceedings from a conference— “Aspects of Rubbish: From the Stone Age to the Yellow Sack” —at the Landesmuseum für Natur und Mensch, Oldenburg, Germany (Thompson 2003b). Both of these were subsequently drawn on in a paper for the UK Government’s Foresight Future of Cities Project (Thompson and Beck 2014). 12. The Sack of Bath—And After (Fergusson and Mowl 1989) chronicles what was perhaps the most spectacular instance of this sort of derailment. 13. Margaret Thatcher’s “crusade” was analyzed, almost while it was underway, in a volume explicitly focused on “Themes in the Work of Mary Douglas” (Hargreaves Heap and Ross 1992). 14. For a more reasoned justification for this proposal, with an explanation for why it is now being seen as less outrageous, see the concluding chapter of Verweij and Thompson (2011). 15. These outlines of the four schools of engineering draw on Beck et al. (2019). A similar line of argument runs through a paper titled “Pouring money down the drain: can we break the habit by re-conceiving wastes as resources?” (Beck et al. 2018). 16. Epigenetic landscapes—dynamical systems in which “stability is destabilizing”— were first identified by the biologist Conrad Hal Waddington (Waddington 1957). Their subsequent mapping across into ecology, anthropology, economics, finance and engineering has been happening in various places, but is perhaps best assembled

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in Thompson (2017), where the validity of this “stretched” use of the notion is also discussed in relation to dynamical systems theory/differential topology. 17. As well as Schumpeter himself (1989), I should mention Douglas (1996), Holling (1986), and Thompson (2002). The inclusion of humans in this “compost equation” is perhaps best illustrated by reference to the ceremonial, and competitive, exchange of pigs in the highlands of New Guinea: The Enga te and Hagen moka, where those who find themselves marginalized are called “rubbish men” in pigin (the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea). This exchange system (it is explained in Thompson 1979) is an early instance in anthropology of an epigenetic landscape. An even earlier instance is the famous alternation between gumsa and gumlao among the Kachin in highland Burma that was described by Edmund Leach and which, in the absence of any understanding of those sorts of dynamical systems, has always remained something of an oddity (Leach 1954). For a discussion of this “oddity,” and of how it can be rendered less strange, see Thompson et al. 1990: 122–3).

References Arthur, Brian W. 1989. “Competing Technologies, Increasing Returns, and Lock-in by Historical Events: The Dynamics of Allocation under Increasing Returns.” Economic Journal 99: 116–31. Ayres, Robert U., and Udo E. Simonis. 1994. Industrial Metabolism: Restructuring for Sustainable Development. Tokyo: United Nations University Press. Beck, Michael Bruce. 2011. Cities as Forces for Good in the Environment: Sustainability in the Water Sector. Athens: Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, University of Georgia. ———. 2014. “Sustainability and Smartness: A Tale of Two Slogans.” Sustainability of Water Quality and Ecology (1–2): 86–89. Beck, Michael Bruce, Rodrigo Villarroel Walker, and Michael Thompson. 2013. “Smarter Urban Metabolism: Earth Systems Re-Engineering.” Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers—Engineering Sustainability 166(ES5): 229–241. Beck, Michael Bruce, Michael Thompson, Dipak Gyawali, Simon Langan, and JoAnne Linnerooth-Bayer. 2018. “Viewpoint: Pouring Money down the Drain: Can We Break the Habit by Reconceiving Wastes as Resources?” Water Alternatives 11(2): 260–83. Beck, Michael Bruce, Dipak Gyawali, and Michael Thompson. 2019. “Societal Drivers of Food and Water Systems 2: Applying Plural Rationality to Some Wicked Problems.” In The Oxford Handbook of Food, Water and Society, eds. T. Allan, B. Bromwich, T. Colman, and M. Keulertz. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brunner, Paul H., and Helmut Rechberger. 2003 Practical Handbook of Material Flow Analysis. Boca Raton, Florida: Lewis. Clunn, Harold P. n.d. The Face of London. London: Spring Books. Crutzen, P., Michael Bruce Beck, and Michael Thompson. 2007. “Turning Cities into Forces for Good in the Environment.” Options (newsletter of

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the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria), Winter: 8. Dake, Karl, and Michael Thompson. 1999. “Making Ends Meet: In the Household and on the Planet.” GeoJournal 47: 417–24. Douglas, Mary. 1970. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. London: Cresset Press. ———. 1996. Thought Styles. London: Sage. Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan. 1940. The Nuer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fergusson, Adam, and Tim Mowl. 1989. The Sack of Bath-And After. Salisbury: Michael Russell. Fischer-Kowalski, Marina, and Helmut Haberl. 1993. “Metabolism and Colonisation: Modes of Production and the Physical Exchange between Societies and Nature.” Innovation in Social Science Research 6(4): 415–42. ———. 1998. “Sustainable Development: Socio-Economic Metabolism and Colonization of Nature.” International Social Science Journal 158: 573–87. Grahame, Kenneth. 1908. The Wind in the Willows. London: Methuen. Gyawali, Dipak, Michael Thompson, and Marco Verweij, eds. 2017. Aid, Technology and Development: The Lessons from Nepal. London: Earthscan-Routledge. Hargreaves Heap, Shaun, and Angus Ross, eds. 1992. Understanding the Enterprise Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Holling, Crawford S. 1986. “The Resilience of Terrestrial Ecosystems: Local Surprise and Global Change.” In Sustainable Development of the Biosphere, eds. W. C. Clark and R. E. Munn, 292–320. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Katz, Jon. 1996. “Pulling the Plug on Progress.” The Observer (London), 14 April. Leach, Edmund R. 1954. Political Systems of Highland Burma. Boston: Beacon Press. Le Corbusier. 1947. Towards a New Architecture. London: Architectural Press. Lynas, Mark. 2011. The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans. London: Fourth Estate. Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III. 1972. The Limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books. Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows, and Jørgen Randers. 1992. Beyond the Limits. London: Earthscan. Nordhaus, Ted, Michael Schellenberger, and Linus Blanquist. 2012. The Planetary Boundaries Hypothesis: A Review of the Evidence. Oakland, CA: The Breakthrough Institute.

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Putman, Robert D. 1995. “Tuning in, Turning out: The Strange Disappearance of Social Capital in America.” Political Science and Politics: 664–83. Raworth, Kate. 2017. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist. London: Random House. Reno, Joshua O. 2017. “Foreword.” In Rubbish Theory: The Creation and  Destruction of Value, by Michael Thompson, p. vi–xiii. London: Pluto Press. Rockström, Johan, Will Steffen, Kevin Noone, Åsa Persson, F. Stuart Chapin III, Eric F. Lambin, Timothy M. Lenton, Marten Scheffer, Carl Folke, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Björn Nykvist, Cynthia A. de Wit, Terry Hughes, Sander van der Leeuw, Henning Rodhe, Sverker Sörlin, Peter K. Snyder, Robert Costanza, Uno Svedin, Malin Falkenmark, Louise Karlberg, Robert W. Corell, Victoria J. Fabry, James Hansen, Brian Walker, Diana Liverman, Katherine Richardson, Paul Crutzen, and Jonathan A. Foley. 2009. “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity.” Nature 461: 472–75. Schmidt-Bleek, Friedrich. 1994. Wieviel Umwelt braucht der Mensch; MIPS—Das Mass für ökologisches Wirtschaften. Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag. Schmutzer, Manfred E.A. 1994. Ingenium und Individuum. New York: Springer-Verlag. Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1939. Business Cycles (2 vols.). Philadelphia, PA: Porcupine Press. Scolobig, Anna, Michael Thompson, and JoAnne Linnerooth-Bayer. 2015. “Compromise Not Consensus: Designing a Participatory Process for Landslide Risk Mitigation.” Natural Hazards, 81(SJ): 545–68. Six, Perri, and Gerald Mars, eds. 2008. The Institutional Dynamics of Culture (2 vols.). Farnham: Ashgate. Thompson, Michael. 2022. “Oblivion, Eternity and Tick-Tock.” In Kunste und Apparate, eds. H.U. Reck and S. Zielinsky. Köln: Herbert von Halem Verlag. ———. 2017a [1979] . Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press (New and expanded edn., 2017, London: Pluto Press). ———. 2017b. “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round: Innovation Cycles in Technological Evolution.” In Ecologies of Innovation: KIOES Opinions 6, ed. V. Winiwarter, 9–19. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences. ———. 2008. Organising and Disorganising. Axminster: Triarchy Press. ———. 2005. “Visions of the Future.” In Thinking Utopia: Steps into Other Worlds, eds. J. Rüsen, M. Fehr, and T. Rieger, 32–52. Oxford: Berghahn Books. ———. 2003a. “Time’s Square: Deriving Cultural Theory from Rubbish Theory.” Innovation, 16(4): 319–30.

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———. 2003b. “Stoffströme und moralische Standpunkte.” In Müll: Facetten von der Steinzeit bis zum Gelbensack, eds. M. Fansa and S. Wolfram. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern. ———. 2002. “Man and Nature as a Single but Complex System.” In Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change, ed. T. Munn, 384–93. Chichester: John Wiley. ———. 1994. “Blood, Sweat and Tears.” Waste Management and Research 12: 199–205. ———. 1982. “The Problem of the Centre: An Autonomous Cosmology.” In Essays in the Sociology of Perception, ed. M. Douglas. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1987. “Welche Gesellschaftsklassen sind potent genug, anderen ihre Zukunft aufzuoktroyeren? Und wie geht das vor sich?” In Design der Zukunft, ed. Lucius Burckhardt. Cologne: DuMont. Thompson, M., and Michael Bruce Beck. 2017. “Not So Much the Water as What’s in It: Engineering Anthropology for Beginners.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 25(3): 335–45. ———. 2014. “Coping with Change: Urban Resilience, Sustainability, Adaptability and Path Dependence.” [Online] UK Government Office for Science Foresight Future of Cities Project. Available at www.gov.uk/government​ / publications/future-of-cities-copingwith-change. Thompson, M., Michael Bruce Beck, and Dipak Gyawali. 2019. “Societal Drivers of Food and Water Systems 1: the Approach by Way of Material Flows, Household Consumption Styles and Contending Schools of Engineering Thought.” In Oxford Handbook of Food, Water and Society, eds. T. Allan, B. Bromwich, T. Colman, and M. Keulertz. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thompson, Michael, Richard Ellis, and Aaron Wildavsky. 1990. Cultural Theory. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Verweij, Marco, and Michael Thompson, eds. 2011. Clumsy Solutions for a Complex World (revised ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Vitousek, Peter M., Paul R. Ehrlich, Anne H. Ehrlich, and Pamela Matson. 1986. “Human Appropriation of the Products of Photosynthesis.” BioScience 36(6): 368–73. Waddington, Conrad Hal. 1957. The Strategy of the Genes. New York: Allen & Unwin. Wright, David Hamilton. 1990. “Human Impacts on Energy Flows through Natural Ecosystems, and Implications for Species Endangerment.” Ambio 19(4): 189–94. York, Peter. 2022. “Now is Not the Time for Minimalism—Even If You Can Afford It.” The Guardian, 12 September, London.

Afterword

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The Shape of Things to Come

Daniel Miller

What makes for a good edited volume in anthropology? More specifically, what makes this particular book an exemplary case of an edited volume? There are two main components. The first is the depth and range of insights that contribute to understanding the particular topic of that collection. But the second is the degree to which that also results in a validation of the discipline of anthropology itself. With respect to an edited collection, usually the individual papers will achieve this through relatively parochial ethnographic examples, while the introduction strives to transcend that parochialism in order to create more generalizable and applicable insights that can be taken either as theory or as modes of enquiry that a potential reader could then use to facilitate their own investigations. I would start, therefore, on a note of praise for a volume in which both of these accomplishments are very evident. Two examples may suffice. The first is the way the introduction employs a classic debate in anthropology between Annette Weiner and Marilyn Strathern. Weiner (1976) had taken one of the key observations from first-wave feminism and applied this to a foundational disciplinary study of the Trobriand Islands. She drew our attention to the everyday activities of life, including the complex exchanges that dominated women’s worlds, but which had often remained in the shadow, while men’s exchanges drew the eye of Malinowski since they were in the full public gaze. Following which, Strathern (1986) excavated still deeper into an examination of the fundamental logics of attachability and detachability that produced gender itself, as well as so many other

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structural divisions that constitute cultural values and practices. A third contribution, this time by Weiner (1992), then focused on the importance of inalienable objects within the kind of Melanesian exchanges that had been analyzed by Strathern. Newell is very clear on why and how these profound contributions to the anthropology of Melanesia can also apply to the topics of this book, thereby enhancing both the particular insights of the individual papers and anthropology as a discipline. Another attractive and immediately plausible contribution of the introduction is the welcome emphasis on the inadvertent and unintended impact of human agency. A fine example of this point comes from Inge Daniel’s work on The Japanese House (2010: 157–176), which discussed how the phenomenon of clutter in the Japanese house is best understood as an unintended side effect of the particular qualities of Japan as a gift society, where the origins of objects as gifts gave them something of this inalienable quality. Once again, this points us to the qualities of anthropology as a whole. The reason there can be so many examples of unintended consequences is that anthropologists (and generally it is only anthropologists who do this) employ the holistic contextualization of ethnography so that we are not just studying clutter or hoarding. We would know if there was something else that has been observed in the fields of religion, kinship, or economic life that turns out to be the primary cause of the phenomenon we are currently investigating, which are its secondary consequence. Precisely because Newell has achieved this in his introduction, I will forebear from attempting any further review of the papers within this volume. Instead, I want to attempt a different kind of conclusion to this enterprise. Some examples of very recent changes in these topics of hoarding, divestment, and the relationship between material culture and kinship, which are perhaps pointers to the future. The trajectories and trends that are likely to become increasingly prominent in future discussions of these topics.

Triumphant Divestment The same holistic sensibility that facilitates our observation of inadvertent consequences may also assist us in following the directions of change. As an example, consider the extraordinary and relatively rapid transformations that have taken place in relation to the topics of this volume when observed from a small town on the east coast of Ireland that I call by the pseudonym Cuan. An excellent recent book called We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole (2021) gives a clear account of the changes in Ireland that took place during the lives of people now in their fifties to eighties, which is roughly the demographic I was studying. He recounts how during these people’s lifetime, Ireland grew from one of the poorest, largely agrarian, countries of Europe to become today one of its most affluent. This included the rise of a typical mass consumption society in which

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status was increasingly located in the quality and quantity of one’s possessions. An important element of such status was the shift from emulating the colonial power of Britain to the shiny new consumer paradise represented by the US. What is astonishing is the degree to which my own ethnography, which took place from 2017 to 2019, revealed something utterly different. I found that today there is really only one significant marker of status that dominates this small town and that is an individual’s conspicuous commitment to environmentalism. My funding was for a project to study ageing and smartphones. With regard to the latter, a problem has been that young people have a facility with new technologies such as smartphones that give them authority. This in turn challenges the traditional pattern of respect for older people’s greater experience. For many older people, it still feels a bit unnatural for young people to know so much more and be considered so much better skilled than older people, who were once seen as a more likely source of wisdom. We might have expected that this new and overwhelming emphasis upon environmentalism would also favor the young since with figureheads such as Greta Thunberg, the argument is that the young have more of a stake in the future and therefore face more of a threat from climate change. But I discovered that in many ways it was older people who had found ways to outcompete the young in this tournament of value around environmentalism. One reason is that retired people have much more time to be involved in environmental projects than the young, whether it is organic allotments, repairing rather than throwing away goods, or finding energy efficiencies. But another key component was their greater ability to conspicuously divest themselves of goods; to tell everyone how they only really needed a couple of pairs of good shoes or how much they were now taking to charity shops, or how they were moving to more energy-efficient homes. Their children often had young families, which meant that they simply could not avoid the constant accumulation of still more material culture. As a result, conspicuous de-cluttering was now a primary means for re-asserting authority and respect for older people at a time when this was being challenged by the way new technology has become associated with the young (Garvey and Miller 2021: 171–5). All of this has arisen in stark contrast to issues around traditions of hoarding and accumulation recorded in this volume, where we traditionally tend to associate these practices with older people, imposing a difficult legacy for their descendants when they die. Though with the silver lining brought about by the gradual dispersal of the effects of the deceased is often key to the way we separate from those we have loved (Miller and Parrott 2007). Based on such earlier studies, I was certainly not expecting to find older people as the vanguard of de-cluttering, or that this had become a means for increasing their status relative to the young. These observations do, however, add to the evidence within this volume for the sometimes-profound consequences of these practices of de-cluttering. It is

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surely likely that this radical change, as described here, will become much more common across many other regions as environmentalism is an issue whose importance is likely to considerably increase in the near future. Mostly, we would obviously welcome such a transition given the immediacy of climate change issues. It is, however, not an unalloyed blessing. Just as the emphasis was once on conspicuous consumption, the evidence from Cuan was that the status advantages of such actions had created a focus upon equally conspicuous anti-consumption. The problem is that this can result in an emphasis on actions, such as reusable plastic bags and other environmentalist changes that are important for signaling our new virtues. While paying rather less attention to key changes in production and resource extraction, etc., that generally make far more difference when it comes to the ultimate goal of reducing climate change. This is because those activities remain largely out of sight and unavailable for everyday status competition.

Material Culture and the In-Betweens The central theme of this book consists of an examination of kinship and of our relationship to material culture with an emphasis on the ways the latter contributes to the former. In an edited collection on the topic of materiality (Miller 2005), I argued that anthropologists do not find it hard to return to what might be called their Durkheimian roots, which is the tendency to reduce whatever they are studying to its manifestation of social relations. Figures such as Mary Douglas can be seen, in retrospect, as undertaking fascinating studies of our relationship to food and goods, but then using semiotic and structural analysis to show how these were superstructural emanations of some deeper logic, which would always be found in social relations such as kinship. I made the argument that material culture studies will only reach full maturity when it no longer privileges the social in such a manner and instead becomes at least as concerned with how studying stuff helped us to see what generates those social relations rather than merely reflecting them. An argument that parallels the previously mentioned excavation by Strathern (1986) of fundamental underlying divisions, but also Bourdieu’s (1976) emphasis on how people are socialized into cultural values through a habitus best exemplified by the structural patterns found in the order of things. All these points find fruition in this book’s introduction, which exemplifies such contemporary material culture studies by never reducing material culture to a mere reflection of social relations. It is most excised by the ways in which material culture can contribute to kin-making. The first two chapters of this volume that follow the introduction are studies of people’s relationship to food. Food has an obviously particular position in our consideration of the relationship between people and things, because they are things that are intended to be digested and thereby to

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constitute people. Such examples of in-between genres of stuff that are not simply either persons or things can be helpful in complicating any simple reduction of things to their symbolic rendition of people. This has perhaps gained new traction by the growing interest in a philosophical movement known as post-humanism (e.g., Braidotti 2013), which seeks to deflect from our historical tendency to see the world primarily through the lens of our own humanity and extend anthropological empathy to viewing the world from other non-human perspectives. Incidentally, this was also a primary aim of the Classical Roman poet Lucretius (2007) in his extraordinary work The Nature of Things. Returning to my study of Cuan, I am currently writing about pet dogs and smartphones and the reasons why I do not think they represent any kind of post-humanism. Both pet dogs and smartphones in their different ways have established an intense intimacy with persons that, as with the case with food, no longer seem to be simply a separated world of things that might reflect society. The relationship to pet dogs has become intense. The local vet in Cuan supplies a pool for post-operative rehabilitation but also acupuncture and psychologists for pets. People will spend an evening watching to see if their pet dog is comfortable with a potential dog sitter before they commit, in much the same way I used to check out potential babysitters for my children. I will argue, however, that this is more an extension of anthropomorphism than anything we could call a posthumanist perspective (see also Charles 2016; Haraway 2016). In short, we are doing this because we increasingly think of dogs as human-like, rather than because we are trying to reduce a human-centered perspective on the world with a post-human sensibility. Why are pet dogs juxtaposed with a discussion of smartphones? Smartphones are an unprecedented form of technology with respect to the degree to which we are able to transform them after purchase, deleting and adding apps, settings, content, and so forth. As a result, they have an extraordinary ability to reflect the interests and personality of their specific owner. A consummate professional can turn their smartphone into a complex life manual that automates the paying of bills and the organization of life, which may be the primary place where their self-conception as a consummate professional is expressed (Miller et al. 2021: 135–56). It is not just food that is ingested to become a component part of a person; the consumption of a smartphone is also now the fuel that generates the development of that individual. All of this contributes to this book’s objective of helping us see this more complex engagement, not so much of things and persons, but a gradation that often includes elements of both.

Relationships and the Transportal Home On further inspection, the parallels between the smartphone and the discussions within this volume become far more extensive. The papers in this

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volume are concerned with things that are tangible, whose presence can make a visual cluttering within the traditional home. But there is another example of much the same process that is developing alongside, within the already vast and extraordinarily extensive world of the digital. Is this world also subject to hoarding, de-cluttering, and the processes studied within this volume? In the book The Global Smartphone (Miller et al. 2021), we argue that smartphones are not really either SMART—the feedback loop is still only a minor element in how the smartphone works; and nor are they phones—using the device for making phone calls is now a very minor element in their deployment. If the smartphone is not smart or a phone, what is it? We argue that the best way of appreciating smartphones is through viewing them as what we call The Transportal Home, which is a place within which we now live. The smartphone is an auxiliary to the bricks and mortar home as the other home from where we enjoy entertainments, do our work, go shopping, or socialize with friends by portaling direct to their transportal homes. This was not just our observation; people we worked with made many analogies between the smartphone and the domestic. An individual in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, noted that “they will never let that person into their home again.” However, they were referring to their smartphone. Many people talked about keeping their smartphone tidy in much the same way as they would describe tidying their physical homes by periodically giving their smartphones a proper clean out, removing surplus, and de-cluttering contacts or photographs. There are people who hoard within the Transportal Home. They can never bring themselves to delete an app, a contact, a photograph, or a download; they would rather buy a new phone with greater storage. However, as noted above, smartphones have an unprecedented ability to manifest the character of their owners. There are also many versions of the minimalist phone. Take, for example, the gruff descendent of fisherman in my field site in Ireland, who hates all the frippery and wants his smartphone to have only what is strictly necessary. When his daughter leaves Australia, he removes Skype as it becomes superfluous. Suddenly, there is a whole new world in which the insights and discussions of this volume could equally well be applied. This is another place of accumulation, hoarding, and de-cluttering. Two related points have been made about the smartphone. The first is that they help facilitate the ambiguity between persons and things, and the second is that they can be best understood as another kind of home, which thus makes the relationship between topics such as kin making or dissolving even more pertinent. People who clean out personal contacts tend to clean out apps, while there are others who do neither. Within the smartphone, both people and things seem equally the subject of accumulation, or separation into discrete categories or the development of new normative practices and new nomenclatures. For example, Pype (2022) has recently discussed how the terminology of kinship and the terminology of

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digital relationships that equally involve issues of trust or mutuality come into alignment within the nomenclatures used by people in Kinshasa. All this brings us back the earlier point about material culture studies no longer being something reducible to its reflection of social relations but rather a mutual and equal player in terms of our wider understanding of cultural processes. But how does all this apply not just to the consideration of the digital world but also as retrospective insight into the non-digital world discussed by the various papers within this volume? If the study of smartphones suggests that there is now little difference between issues of clutter and divestment being applied to persons as to things, is this something that only developed thanks to the smartphone or does it reveal the degree to which this was always the case? When I and Horst began our study of the impact of cell phones upon poverty in Jamaica, we started from Smith’s (1988) observations of how Jamaicans can often name several hundred kin (the overall mean was 284). Smith observed how the birth of a baby was used to add a whole additional set of kin that came from the paternal line, even if the actual baby-father had nothing much to do with the baby thereafter. We used this observation to examine the lists of relationships that could now be viewed quite directly as the contact list on a person’s cell phone (Horst and Miller 2005). Sometimes the very thing that constitutes conspicuous clutter in an Irish home are the hundreds of family photographs that dominate every room, including the toilet. These photographs provide a useful bridge between thinking about the quantity of social relations revealed in a contact list with those revealed by a material presence within the home as they are both visual manifestations of the extent of our kin and other social relations. By contrast, I have conducted research more recently on English society, where, in a study of people with a terminal diagnosis, I found that most people had remarkably few kin connections and would usually have stories of their siblings or other kin with whom they had not spoken to for twenty years. The hospice workers amongst whom I carried out research talked of funerals that almost no-one attended, even though this was in a rural setting (Miller 2017). Such scenarios would be something unimaginable in the Irish town of Cuan, for example. The introduction to this volume cites Marcoux (2001), who showed how every time people moved house, they exploited this event to update their relationship to possessions as symbols of their personal biography. Similarly, people have traditionally used big social events such as weddings and funerals for the same purpose. Yes, someone was invited to the wedding of one’s first child, but having not been in touch since then, there is no reason to invite them to the wedding of the second child. All of this can come together to make the argument that many of the insights and discussions within this volume could be applied as much to our relations to persons as to things. We have always hoarded and de-cluttered social relationships as well as things.

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At the same time, it seems clear that the acknowledgment of the ways in which social relationships could also be accumulated as a set of possessions comparable to the possession of material objects became rather clearer thanks to the rise of social media. Suddenly, there was visual evidence for the way young people were clearly competing over the number of ‘friends’ they could accumulate on Facebook, while academics might assert status from the number of their followers on Twitter. Quantity of followers can and does give someone the ambition to be an influencer on Instagram or TikTok. On social media, the idea that people might hoard or conspicuously display their accumulation of human relationships on a par with their accumulation of consumer goods has become both more evident and more disquieting. Not surprisingly, these practices have received moral approbation in as much as they seem to reduce people to quantity, a quality previously associated with the amount of material possessions. But this discussion started with a reminder of the way quantities of kin were accumulated historically in Jamaica, where such prodigious expansions of kin have never been seen as evidence that quantity is necessarily problematic in itself. Once again, these arguments highlight what seems to be the direction of travel in the way we will experience and consider such issues in the future. Thanks to the rise of digital technologies, it will surely become increasingly difficult to separate out issues of hoarding and divestment of both physical things and digital things from the way in which we enact much the same processes on social relations. All of this should positively facilitate the primary concern of Newell with the way our processes of accumulation and divestment of things are actually common processes that also pertain to core social relations such as kinship. But then, as he points out, these questions regarding issues of separation and duality as aspects of both persons and things are inseparably related in Melanesia. Anthropology is probably the only discipline that might argue that the rise of the digital makes our affinity with people in Melanesia much more apparent, but it does.

Acknowledgements The research in Cuan was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 740472). Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at University College London. He has written and edited 42 books, including Material Culture and Mass Consumption (1987), A Theory of Shopping (1998), The Comfort of Things (2008), Stuff (2010), Tales from Facebook (2011), Digital Anthropology (ed. with Heather Horst 2012), How the World Changed Social Media (2016 with eight others), The Comfort of People (2017), The Global Smartphone (2021 with ten others), and Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland (with Pauline Garvey 2021). He was also the director of the Why

Afterword 263

We Post Project (2012-2017) and the ASSA project—Smartphones and Smart Ageing (2017–2022). He tweets at @DannyAnth.

References Bourdieu, Pierre. 1976. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Charles, Nickie. 2016. “Post-Human Families? Dog-Human Relations in the Domestic Sphere.” Sociological Research Online 21(3), https://jour​ nals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.5153/sro.3975. Daniels, Inge. 2010. The Japanese House. Oxford: Berg. Garvey, Pauline, and Daniel Miller. 2021. Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland. London: UCL Press. Haraway, Donna. 2016. “The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness.” In Manifestly Haraway, 91–198. University of Minnesota Press. Horst, Heather, and Daniel Miller. 2005. “The Kinship to Link-up.” Current Anthropology 46(5): 755–78. Lucretius. 2007. The Nature of Things. London: Penguin Classics. Marcoux, Jean-Sebastien. 2001. “The ‘Casser Maison’ Ritual: Constructing the Self by Emptying the Home.” Journal of Material Culture 6(2): 213–35. Miller, Daniel, ed. 2005. Materiality. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press. ———. 2017. The Comfort of People. Cambridge: Polity Press. Miller, Daniel, and Fiona Parrott. 2007. “Loss and Material Culture in South London.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Association 15: 502–10. Miller, Daniel, Patrick Awondo, Marília Duque, Pauline Garvey, Laura Haapio-Kirk, Charlotte Hawkins, Alfonso Otaegui, Laila Abed Rabho, Maya de Vries, Shireen Walton, and Xinyuan Wang. 2021. The Global Smartphone: Beyond a Youth Technology. London: UCL Press. O’Toole, Fintan. 2021. We Don’t Know Ourselves. London: Head of Zeus. Pype Katrien. 2022 (October). “On Digital Avoidance: Updating a Classic Social Practice in an Era of (Over)Sharing: Ethnographic Notes from Kinshasa.” https://easaonline.org/networks/media/eseminars. Smith, Raymond T. 1988. Kinship and Class in the West Indies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1986. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia, Berkeley: University of California Press. Weiner, Annette. 1976. Women of Value, Men of Renown. University of Texas Press. ———. 1992. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While Giving. Berkeley: University of California Press.

• Index

A abandonment 42, 190, 194, 224 Abidjan 8, 13, 15, 17, 28n6 absence 10, 20, 60, 64, 96, 120, 130, 136, 185–7, 194–5, 197, 229, 251 abundance 5, 21, 46, 165 acceptance 7, 45, 89, 189, 213, 216 access 10, 12, 60, 63, 86, 93, 120, 132, 146–8, 158, 220, 222 accommodation 37, 40, 44, 50–1, 84, 105, 110, 111, 116, 126–7 accumulation 4, 7, 10, 12, 14, 25, 31, 97, 118, 130, 133, 135, 204, 214–5 ACoH. See Adult Children of Hoarders acquisition. See commodities activism 57, 184, 189, 231, 239, 242 Actor Network Theory 133, 139 Addington, Aislin 180, 185, 188, 193–4, 198 ADHD. See mental disorders adoption 92, 125, 170–1, 173, 174 of minimalism, 188, 190, 197 of a moral position, 238 Adult Children of Hoarders 17, 100, 102–4, 106–7, 109, 115 aesthetic 5, 9, 20, 22, 24, 28, 38, 63, 72, 80, 87, 94, 124, 128, 143, 155, 171, 186–8, 203 affect 4, 17–8, 22, 52, 61, 65, 78, 80, 85, 94–5, 102, 104, 107,

108, 136, 146–7, 151, 159n11, 163–4, 169–71, 173, 176–8, 184, 189–90, 192 affluence. See wealth affordance 17, 95 Africa 27, 31, 73, 96, 203–4, 222–4, 236 African 7–8, 27, 73, 93, 96, 114, 203–6, 209, 212, 222, 224 Afro-Atlantic 30, 97 afterimage 100, 114 afterlife 134, 136, 184 age 12, 48, 93, 102, 111, 127, 131, 137, 149–50, 161, 168, 172, 182, 185, 189, 198, 206, 250, 252, 257, 262–3 agency 16, 18, 24, 26, 31, 55, 73, 97, 101, 104, 115–6, 123, 138, 145, 154, 164, 176–7, 179–80, 191, 256 agriculture 11, 22, 36–41, 43, 45–7, 50, 52–3, 55, 58–9, 62, 64, 67, 72, 205 agroindustry 50 cultivation 37, 41, 47, 52–3, 58–60, 62, 66, 149 agrobiodiversity 37, 46–8 Algeria 97, 105, 115 algorithms 239 alienation 4, 7, 20, 96, 101, 109–11, 113, 117 alive 5, 78, 116, 170, 176–7, 191

Index 265

Amazonia 32, 37, 41, 54, 166 American. See North American American Indian 90–3 Anatsui 203 ancestors 125, 128, 146, 158, 184, 232–3, 249 Andean 10, 36–9, 50–1, 53–5 Angé, Olivia 11, 23, 36, 40, 49, 50, 61 animacy 16, 28, 97, 136 animals 7, 10, 15, 35, 38, 43, 53, 63, 73, 87, 97, 101, 113, 115, 134, 168, 180, 203, 207–8, 228, 230 dogs 45, 259, 263 elephant 99, 107 livestock 57, 63, 207, 213 pets 168, 259 rabbits 168 raccoons 111 ánimu. See spirit Annapurna 249 anthropology 131, 231, 246, 250n16, 251n17, 262 of death 185 engineering anthropology 246 of houses 59, 148 Japanese 125 of kinship 59 of materiality 3, 16, 59 of Melanesia, 256 anthropomorphism 259 anxiety 2, 79, 108, 139, 141, 190 Appadurai, Arjun 149, 181, 206, 224, 226 appearance 4, 7, 10, 20, 64, 87, 134, 148, 150, 224 Appelgren, Staffan 176, 179 architecture 9, 30, 64, 93–4, 97, 105, 115, 127, 187, 228, 230–1, 235, 244, 249, 252 archive 22, 50, 92, 101, 114, 117, 141 Arctic 49, 52 Argentina 4, 17, 20, 54–5, 145, 147–8, 157–62 Argentinean 41, 43, 52, 54 Arsenal 242–4 artist 99, 114, 117, 122, 203, 222 aspiration 5, 66, 229 assemblages 133, 139 Athenian 183

attachment 6, 12–4, 102, 169–70, 190, 197 Australia 21, 184–5, 260 Australian 164 Austria 233, 249, 252 Austrian 227, 253 authority 130, 217, 224, 257 ayllu. See community B Bachelard, Gaston 100, 104, 114–5, 131, 137 bags. See container banks 23, 36–7, 46–50, 52–3, 65, 104–5, 189 Barcelona 161–2 basement. See house baskets. See container bathroom. See house Becker, Ernst 189 Becker, Joshua 190 bedroom 8, 13, 18, 62, 69, 89, 91, 105–7, 109, 193, 208 Belgian 27, 96 belongings. See possessions Bénin 203, 225 Bennet, Jane 73, 97, 104, 115, 176–7, 180 Benjamin, Walter 130 Blanco Esmoris 2, 17, 19–20, 145, 147 blood 3, 40, 99, 125, 173, 254 body 11–4, 16, 21, 24, 26, 38–43, 45–6, 50–1, 78, 95, 107, 133, 135, 147, 149–51, 154, 166, 183, 189, 193–4, 196, 209 body politic, 9, 26 as container, 9, 16, 21 Bohlin, Anna 176–7, 179–80 Bolivian 41 bonds 17, 78–9, 103, 146–7, 150–1, 157 with objects 17, 78, 146, 157, 176. See also attachment boundaries 16–7, 27, 100, 123, 125, 128, 135, 233, 238, 252 Bourdieu, Pierre 6, 69, 77, 97, 160, 258, 263 boxes. See container bric-a-brac. See clutter

266

bricolage 230 British 64, 99, 114n1, 134, 185, 231, 235, 237, 241, 249, 257. See also United Kingom broken 12–3, 63, 104, 147, 172, 206, 208, 211, 220 Brush, Stephen 37–8, 47, 54, 188 Brussels 94 Buddhism 158, 184, 187, 193, 198, 237 Buenos Aires VI, 145–7, 154, 158, 160–2 buyer 20, 150, 170–3, 176, 179, 187, 196 C cabinet. See container California 134, 165 Cameroon 1, 4, 9, 26, 29, 203–4, 212, 214–5, 217–9, 222–3, 224–5, 260 Canada 102 capitalism 1–2, 4–7, 14, 17, 22, 25–6, 28, 37, 61, 66, 94, 188–9, 238 care 11, 19–21, 26, 44, 47, 50, 52, 60–1, 63, 67, 68, 71, 84–7, 89, 101–2, 110, 114, 121, 134, 147–8, 171, 176, 183–6, 188, 190–3, 197, 207–8, 214, 240, 246 deathcare 188–9, 198, 200 cars. See vehicles Carsten, Janet 2–3, 14, 16, 36, 39, 57, 100, 104–5, 131, 149, 152, 154, 159n8, 163, 168, 170, 194, 207, 210, 233–5, 249, 250n9 cash. See money Castle, Terry 132, 137, 169 categories 10, 13, 16, 19–20, 92, 95, 123, 130, 134, 136, 152, 195, 233, 234, 260 cellar. See house Chad 172, 215, 226 cheap 4, 8, 62, 96, 124, 126 chieftancy 1, 12, 26, 215–7, 232 childhood 18, 85–8, 95, 100–1, 104–5, 107, 109, 111, 113–4, 151, 193 children 6, 12–3, 17, 19–20, 24–5, 40–1, 43, 49, 58, 63, 66–8, 78, 82–4, 86, 89, 91–2, 100, 102–4,

Index

108, 116, 124–5, 129, 150, 152–6, 159, 168, 188, 191–3, 207, 209–14, 217, 219–21, 227, 257, 259 street children 207, 212–13 China 7–8, 50, 169, 174, 195, 200, 237 Christianity 207 circulation 1–2, 23, 25, 28, 60, 78, 108, 120, 149, 156, 159, 176, 179, 206 cities 9, 53, 57, 59, 78, 103, 105, 111, 114, 124, 126, 130, 140, 203–4, 206–10, 213–20, 222–4, 231, 236, 239–42, 245–7, 249–51, 254 class 14, 20, 58–9, 78, 95, 125–6, 131, 145, 147–8, 157, 158n4, 159n8, 161, 166, 183–184, 234 middle-class 2, 13, 17, 20, 78, 84, 95–6, 125, 129, 145–8, 156, 158n1, 158n4, 159n8, 184, 196 upper-class 58, 131 wealthy 58, 60, 62, 64, 70–2, 78, 217 working-class 7, 164, 187 cleaning. See housekeeping cleanliness 67, 154–6, 216 closet. See storage clothing 7, 13–4, 38, 62, 83, 93, 104–5, 113, 146, 152–5, 164–5, 169, 172, 194, 196, 204, 209, 213, 236–7 clutter 1–2, 4–5, 9–10, 13–4, 16–7, 19–22, 26–31, 41, 48, 77, 79–82, 89, 92–4, 96–7, 103, 108, 118, 123, 134, 163, 165–9, 176, 181–2, 187, 192, 199, 208, 236, 245, 249, 256, 261 accumulation of, 5, 14 digital 22 collection 2–6, 14, 21, 26, 48, 73, 89, 91–2, 104, 109–10, 114, 117, 133–4, 149, 161, 174, 178, 181, 195–6, 199, 206, 210, 213–5, 217–24, 255, 258 college 6, 27, 78, 86, 91, 231, 249, 262 colonial 50, 64, 93, 97, 105, 115, 126, 217, 224–25, 252, 257

Index 267

postcolonial 64, 114, 138, 227 commodities 4–5, 7, 9–11, 20, 25, 54, 58, 64, 71, 96–7, 103, 117, 136, 149, 166, 169, 176–7, 180, 224, 226 acquisition 5, 20–1, 148, 159, 189 goods 1, 4, 8–9, 16, 22, 58, 86, 104, 110, 146, 149, 152, 159, 163–70, 172–74, 176–78, 180, 183–84, 186, 188, 190–97, 210, 215, 257–8, 262 purchase 64, 148, 166, 173, 177, 259 selling 28, 53, 69, 111, 146, 150, 163–4, 166–8, 176–7, 180, 192, 209 communal 39–40, 47, 105, 184, 193, 208, 239 community 9, 11, 27m 36–40, 42, 46–7, 49, 52–4, 66, 69, 71, 102, 71, 73, 93, 97, 101–2, 155, 164, 182, 184–6, 188, 190, 192, 195, 198, 200, 218, 224, 230, 243–4, 248 ayllu 37, 39, 43, 46, 51–2 compost 22, 24–5, 27, 46, 51, 184, 203, 218, 220, 222, 248, 251 compulsion. See mental disorder concealment 17, 23, 31, 51–2, 68, 70, 79–80, 93–4, 97, 118, 121–3, 128–9, 131, 135, 167, 196, 210, 216, 242 secret 25, 71, 93, 103, 180 confinement 146, 154–6, 158 conservation 35, 37, 40, 46–9, 52–4, 73, 238 consumer 4, 6–9, 20, 22, 24, 36, 58, 96, 116, 159, 163, 165–6, 169–70, 178–82, 186, 189, 199, 210, 257, 262 consumption of commodities 38 of food 36–46, 50 and death 185, 190 and recycling 247 and wealth 10–1 conspicuous 258 domestic 4, 58–9, 62, 72, 147, 235–7, 249n1

and gender 187 and kinship 103 mass 133, 165–6, 203, 256 middle-class 148–9, 158n7 and minimalism 20, 187 urban 217 containers bags 7, 14, 42, 44, 48, 69, 83, 85, 104, 109, 130, 203, 208, 210, 212, 218, 222, 226, 258 baskets 26, 48–9, 203, 228, 236 boxes 14, 82–4, 89, 104, 108, 110, 112, 133, 153, 192 cartons 196 containers of kinship 4, 9, 14–8, 25, 28n5, 36, 50, 77, 80, 86, 93–5, 125, 129, 169 container habitus 88 jars 49, 128, 208 and organization 165 packaging 7, 203, 206, 210 plastic 6, 45, 196, 207–13, 221 pots 38, 40, 205, 208 repository 82, 163 roi-pot 9 shipping 7 smartphone 21 storage 12, 51, 87 of waste 112, 204, 213–4, 218, 220–2, 223n12 containment 1, 9, 79, 120, 123 fullness 99, 113 stuffing 17, 77, 79, 81, 83, 85, 87, 89, 91, 93, 95–7, 153 cooking 11, 36, 38, 45, 53, 58, 63, 105, 152–3, 207 cost. See money Côte d’Ivoire 7–8, 13–4, 27, 96 couples 1, 43, 81, 85, 93, 127–8, 169, 173–4, 177, 243, 257 cremation. See funeral critical placeship 145, 157 crops. See agriculture cultivation See agriculture Cuzco 35–7, 42, 53, 55 Cwerner, Saulo and Alan Metcalfe 16, 21, 29, 80, 97 cyclical 48, 50

268

D daughters. See kinship Daniels, Inge 128, 194 de Beauvoir, Simone 18–9, 28 de la Cadena, Marisol 37, 43, 50, 54 death 10, 13, 17, 20–4, 43, 79, 86, 94, 113, 125, 183–5, 187–99. See also funerals mortality VI, 183–5, 187–91, 193, 195, 197–9 undead 10, 13, 22 Debary, Octave 165, 176–7, 180 debris. See clutter decay. See rot decoration 129, 131, 148, 151, 155, 190, 229 Descartes, Rene 16, 120, 132–3 descendants. See kinship design 19, 28–9, 97, 153, 229–30, 244–5, 248–9, 254 detachment 153–4 digital 21–2, 27, 54, 96, 102, 117, 147, 151, 158, 166, 190, 254, 260–3 computer 47 hard-drive 171 Instagram 151, 155, 158, 262 Netflix 186, 188, 195 Pinterest 188 smartphones 21, 58, 257, 259–63 websites ii, 53, 102, 151–2, 186 WhatsApp 146, 158 YouTube 53, 151, 198–9 Diogenes 134, 137, 183–4, 186, 189, 197–9 dirt 18, 90, 166, 180, 209–10, 214, 227, 247 discard 17, 20, 69, 85, 89, 109, 111, 145–7, 149, 152, 156–7, 171, 195, 211, 220, 223, 231, 257 disconnection 157 disorder 16–7, 22, 106, 108, 119–20, 122–3, 133. See also mental disorders, hoarding disorder mess 17, 24, 134, 150, 232 display 5–6, 11–3, 25, 36, 41, 51, 87, 103, 166, 169, 216, 231, 262 disposal 130, 166, 189, 192–3, 195–7, 204, 206, 210, 213, 217, 221 dispossession. See possessions

Index

distribution 16, 23, 46, 85, 208, 232 divestment 9, 20, 184, 187, 190, 192–3, 197–8, 256, 261–2 dividual 21–2, 27, 86, 96 divorce 4, 125, 195 Dogon 225 dogs. See animals Douglas, Mary 100, 116, 159, 161, 163, 166–67, 180, 231–2, 249–52, 254, 258 downsizing 6, 167, 185, 188, 192–3, 198 dump. See waste dumpsite. See waste dumpsters. See container durable 25–6, 92, 113, 125, 146, 210, 224–5, 231, 233–5 Durkheim, Emile 235, 258 dwelling. See house E eating 36, 39, 45, 53, 86, 105, 166, 184, 216 ecological 1, 41, 46, 48, 52, 60–1, 69, 72, 97, 115, 141, 231, 246, 248, 250–1 Economics 73, 180, 182, 250, 253 economy 6–7, 23, 37, 53, 59, 61, 73, 117, 123, 181, 199, 213, 236, 248 Ekerdt, David 169, 175, 180, 188, 193–4, 198 elderly 8, 12–3, 134, 185, 188, 192, 209 elephant. See animals embodiment 127, 131, 158, 172, 194 engineering 50, 231, 245–6, 250–1, 254 England 4 entanglement 21, 24, 37, 42, 49, 85, 137 environmental 7, 21–2, 28, 73, 97, 119, 121–2, 124, 128, 131, 134, 150, 152, 166, 187, 221, 230, 239–41, 246, 249, 251, 254, 257 environmentalism 257–8 Euro-American. See North Atlantic Europe 5, 127, 176, 185, 203, 238, 256

Index 269

European 7, 52, 102, 105, 124, 140, 217–8, 240, 262 Evans-Pritchard, Edward 3, 29, 250, 252 excess 1–2, 4, 6, 19, 21, 23, 29, 51, 61, 63, 71, 78, 83, 92, 138, 163, 165–7, 178, 183, 189, 191, 193, 197 exchange 11–2, 23, 26, 36, 41, 55, 70, 94, 102, 108, 146, 162, 164–5, 169–71, 174–8, 180–1, 194, 208, 238, 251–2 traders 12, 59–61, 70–1, 213, 217 exposure 123, 225 exterior 26, 90, 120, 126, 132, 135. See also interior, container, house F family 2, 4–6, 11, 17–8, 20, 23–7, 33, 35, 40–8, 51, 53, 57, 63, 67, 69, 77, 79, 81–8, 90–6, 102–9, 114–7. See also children husband 19, 25, 87, 91, 155, 191, 195 wife 13, 42, 57, 62–3, 65, 67–8, 82, 125, 171 farmers 7, 11, 54, 57–61, 64, 66, 68, 70–2 fashion 17, 20, 28, 36, 64, 119, 158, 236 fatalist 242, 244–5, 248 fear 14, 93, 191–2, 209, 214, 220 feeding 42, 44–5, 54, 65, 208, 213–4 female. See gender financial. See money Florida 73, 251 freedom 1, 107, 126–7, 186, 192, 197 food 6, 12, 13, 25, 35–7, 39–40, 42–6, 50, 52, 53n7, 85, 105, 108, 166, 183, 206–7, 210–1, 213, 219, 237, 241, 246–7, 258–9 onions 11, 21, 42, 56–73 tubers 11–2, 35–8, 40–50, 52–3 turkey 77, 171 wheat 42, 57–8, 60, 62, 64–6, 73 yams 11–2, 25, 31, 36, 41, 51, 55, 70 Fulani 213, 215–6, 219, 224 funeral 184–5, 189, 193, 196, 200

furniture 6, 62, 82, 84–5, 87, 89, 94, 99, 104, 145, 148, 154, 165, 169–70, 193, 203, 233, 235, 237, 241 G garage 81–2, 86, 163, 165–6, 170, 192–3 garage sale 20, 163–79 garbage. See waste gender 3, 30, 32, 55, 59, 98, 117, 131, 136, 139, 151, 187, 198, 200, 255, 263 female 41–2, 86, 130, 137, 140, 172, 174, 188, 192–3, 196 feminism 255 genderqueer 102 housewife 39, 136n5, 206, 209, 211 lady 39, 122, 171 male 39, 125, 128, 168, 232 men 11, 19, 25–6, 36, 66, 69, 70, 131, 162, 187–8, 215, 217, 251n17 women and class 25–6, 146, 156 and consumption 187 and critical placeship 145–7 and deathcare 193 and exchange 255 and garage sales 165 and labor 60, 67, 69, 85, 149, 155, 188 and housekeeping 19, 20, 131, 148, 163, 196–7 and material kinship 85, 109, 194 and privacy 57 and recycling 208–9 and space 11, 44, 46, 58, 62 and household tension, 68 who “cannot tidy up” 17, 122 genealogy 41–2, 158, 175–6, 232–3 generational 6, 13, 87, 89, 185, 191 generations 16, 39, 46, 52, 57, 63, 79, 84, 88–9, 95, 108–9, 125, 151, 180, 185, 192, 194, 232–3, 250 genetic 2, 10, 37, 47–9, 119, 134, 138, 141, 158 Ghana 203, 223, 227

270

ghosts 16, 24, 132, 163, 177–8, 180, 256 gifts 16, 95, 180, 256 global 2, 6, 180–1 glorious 229, 231, 234, 242, 249 Goldfarb, Kathryn 3, 22, 29 Gould, Hannah 2, 19–21, 166, 184, 186–8 government. See state Graeber, David 51–2, 54, 138 Guitard, Emilie 1, 10, 14, 23–6, 204, 209, 210, 214–5 Gygi, Fabio 14, 16–7, 130, 178 H Hallam, Elizabeth 181, 185, 199 happiness 11, 109, 128, 153, 159, 171, 173, 175, 179, 186, 191, 207 Haraway, Donna 22, 27, 29, 42, 54, 133, 138, 259, 263 Harman, Graham 120, 138 health 10, 24, 39, 56, 114, 134–5, 141, 155, 185, 195, 200, 224, 226, 240, 246 well-being 10, 43, 178 heaps 1, 12, 24–7, 29, 35, 40–2, 44, 62–3, 70, 204, 210–1, 213–8, 222–3, 225, 250, 252 heirlooms 2, 5, 9, 16, 18, 79, 81, 84, 89, 94–5, 103–4, 116, 169, 173, 178, 185, 188, 192, 194, 196 heirloom 3, 6, 51, 169, 176, 192, 197 Hendry, Joy 128, 136, 138 heritage 84, 92, 179, 234, 239, 242, 249 Herring, Scott 2, 25, 28–9 Herrmann, Gretchen 20, 22, 86, 91 164–6, 168–9, 177 heteronormative 27 heterotopia 31, 94, 97 hidden. See concealment hoarders 9–10, 12, 17, 22–5, 29, 31, 48, 79, 97, 100, 102–3, 119–20, 130, 135–6, 139, 177, 197, 228, 249 hoarding 1–2, 4–5, 10, 16–8, 21, 23–4, 26–8, 30–2, 53, 60, 71–2, 78–80, 91, 96, 97, 99–103, 106, 108–10, 112,

Index

114, 117, 119–21, 123, 126–7, 129–36, 163, 191, 195, 198, 230, 235, 256–7, 260, 262 food-hoarding 141 Hodder 2, 7, 21, 29 home. See also architecture, family, house, storage accumulation 10–2, 125 childhood home 100–8, 111 decoration 9, 63, 65, 131, 155, 190, 229, 241 circulation in/out 16, 186 empty 198 funeral 184 of genies 215 good home 20, 170–2, 175–6, 178 Japanese 124–9 and kinship 3–5, 17, 80, 82, 84, 95, 169 and memory 105 multi-species home 15, 40–4, 59, 63, 113 as museum 89–93 organization 2, 4, 102, 146–8, 151–2, 156–7 pandemic 156 and recycling 204–10, 218 and sales 164–5 shame of disorder 120, 166 size 1, 6, 65, 90, 124 smartphone as home 260 spaces of 89, 93, 94–6, 99, 107, 163, 167–8, 191, 247 tiny homes 1, 6, 82, 114 transportal 259–60 trapped 150–1 Western 130 homeless 213–4 hope 27, 63, 135, 147, 248 Horst, Heather 137, 261–3 hospitality 23, 42–3, 86, 129, 153, 164 hosting. See hospitality house architecture of 9, 16, 93 bathroom 62, 66, 105, 126, 145, 150 bedroom 8, 13, 18, 62, 69, 89, 91, 105–7, 109, 193, 208 cellar 122, 229 as container 4, 16, 17, 94

Index 271

dining room 6, 79, 87, 105, 155, 173, 174, 193 dwelling 4, 62–3, 65, 77, 80, 116, 124, 126, 128–31, 139, 154, 159, 229 house-hoard 100, 113 kitchen 35, 42, 44, 46, 62, 84, 87, 91, 105, 127–8, 148, 150, 152, 168, 174, 193, 196, 204–8, 210 longhouse 28 parlor 229 residence 37, 79, 95, 148, 164, 215, 217 shelter 66, 92, 131 household maintenance 19, 38, 64, 95, 124 housekeeping 6, 21, 58, 62–3, 67, 82, 101, 111, 122, 147–8, 153, 155–7, 166–8, 187–8, 191, 196, 199, 230 meticulous 20, 206, 210 purge 2, 14, 82, 153 tidying 18, 28, 38, 122, 139, 145, 150, 152, 155, 157, 186, 195, 199, 260 housewife. See gender Hua 25 Hugh-Jones, Stephen 3, 14, 16, 28, 131, 137, 154, 160 Hume, David 132 husband. See family hygiene. See cleanliness I images 113–5, 132, 141 imagination 5, 100, 104, 131–2, 152, 170, 178, 203 immaterial 21, 130, 149, 186, 190 inalienability 16, 18, 25, 78, 95–6, 98, 101, 108–11, 114–8, 149, 162, 194, 200, 256, 263 indecision 119 India 4, 11, 56–8, 60–2, 64, 66, 72–4 Indian 11, 71, 90, 92 individualism 64, 235 influencers 94, 151, 262 informal 126, 128, 134, 164, 172, 204, 222, 237

infrastructure 59–60, 62, 64, 71–2, 124, 126–7, 131, 225, 246 inhabitable 80, 82, 84, 148 inheritance 18, 21, 85, 101, 103, 109–11, 114, 124, 184–5, 191–2, 196, 199 intentionality 43, 61, 130 interior 16, 64, 87, 93, 120, 123, 128–33, 135, 137, 140 interspecies 36, 41–2, 44, 49, 53, 61, 73 intimacy 4, 36, 55, 58, 77, 79, 85–6, 93, 95, 118, 120, 131, 137, 141, 178–9, 259 invisible 9, 11–2, 68, 80, 94, 123, 129, 168, 214, 247 Ireland II, 256, 260, 262–3 Islam 216 Islington 243 Italian 245 Ithaca 164, 175 J Jamaica 261–2 Japan v, 2, 4, 16–7, 31, 109, 117, 119–20, 123–7, 130, 135–41, 184, 187, 193, 198, 200, 256 Japanese 2, 93, 101, 120, 122–30, 135–137, 139–41, 151, 159, 187, 194, 198–9, 256, 263 junk 3, 7, 13, 31, 94, 97, 155, 168, 211 K Kabyle 77 Kathmandu 240 keeping 4, 19, 23, 26, 69, 72, 81, 91, 108–9, 111, 114, 130, 147, 151, 168, 176–7, 194–5, 235, 237, 260 keeping alive 170, 176–7 keeping-while-giving 108, 149, 162 Kilroy-Marac, Katie 6, 17–8, 20, 25, 69, 102, 148–9, 163, 166, 168, 171, 186 kindred spirit 163, 170–1, 173–4, 176, 178–9 Kinshasa 12–3, 31, 261, 263

272

kinship daughters 63, 81–2, 84–5, 94, 110, 146, 172, 177, 206, 260 descendants 89, 125, 194, 205, 257 lineages 11, 67, 131, 175, 187, 232–4, 250 marriage 19, 63, 65–6, 87, 90, 103, 116, 125, 146, 168, 206, 233, 261 relatedness V, 3–4, 22, 26, 28, 36, 40, 49–52, 54, 77, 79–81, 95–6, 110, 116 relatives 78, 130, 151, 155, 170, 209 siblings 19, 36, 109, 174, 261 brothers 19, 67, 85, 135, 139, 232 sisters 25, 84, 104. 146, 153 sons 57, 91, 146, 153 kingship, sacred 1, 9, 26, 215–7 kin-things 9, 18–9, 79, 86, 94, 96, 170 kitsch 229 Kondo, Marie 2, 6, 20, 28, 91, 150, 152–4, 156, 159, 186–7, 191, 195, 199 Kopytoff, Igor 2, 94, 97, 132, 134–5, 149, 152, 170, 175, 181, 195, 226 Kwakiutl 16 L labor 3, 11, 17–9, 21, 26, 38–40, 51, 56, 58–60, 62, 64–5, 67–8, 72, 80, 82, 85, 109, 127, 131, 159, 172, 187–8, 192, 194 land 47, 56, 59–60, 63–4, 67, 101, 108, 124, 148, 215, 233, 243 landfill 10, 166, 182, 204, 220, 222–3, 238, 240 Laqueur, Thomas 183 larder 35, 42–4, 46–7, 50–1, 53 Le Corbusier 228–30, 235–6, 245, 249, 252 Lebra, Sugiyama 125, 129, 141 legacy 21, 173–4, 185, 187, 197, 257 Lepselter, Susan 24, 30, 163, 181 liminal 9, 94, 126, 129 lineage 125 London 9, 30–2, 55, 73, 97, 114, 116–8, 136–41, 160–1, 180,

Index

198–9, 231, 239–41, 249, 251–4, 262–3 Lucretius 259, 263 lugaridad 145 M madness 204, 207, 210, 214, 220 magic 25, 30, 94, 117, 181 sorcery 27, 96, 225 witchcraft 14, 209, 216 Magnusson, Margareta 186–8, 191, 194, 199 maintenance 19, 21, 38, 45, 47, 64, 66, 79, 95, 124 Makovicky, Nicolette 4, 16, 30, 169 Malaysian 28, 36 Malinowski 12, 25, 30, 41, 255 Marcoux, Jean-Sebastian 173, 181, 261, 263 marginality 5, 204, 210, 234, 251 markets 4, 7, 9, 11, 23, 25, 35, 38, 42, 45–6, 53, 57–61, 64, 69–71, 79, 90–1, 94, 124, 159, 176–7, 179–80, 200, 205, 208–10, 219–21, 242–4, 247 marriage 19, 63, 65–6, 87, 90, 103, 146, 206, 233, 261. See also kinship Marx, Groucho 236 material kinship 18, 22, 25, 26, 78, 92, 95–6, 103–4, 110, 113. See also kin-things materiality 2–3, 16, 22, 57, 59, 95, 100, 103, 111, 120, 154, 156, 195, 258 materialization 3–4, 15, 29, 61, 65, 77, 80–1, 86, 117, 133, 161, 185, 195 Matthan, Tanya 11, 13, 42 Mauss, Marcel 3, 30, 101, 117, 170, 181, 196 McKinnon, Susan 3, 29–30, 77, 97, 103, 116–7 media ii, 13, 16, 20, 22, 30, 49, 79, 95, 102, 114, 117, 130, 133, 135, 159–62, 181, 185–6, 188, 263 Meissner, Mariam 186, 190–1, 199 Melanesian 11–2, 23, 32, 36, 41, 51, 78, 98, 117, 256, 262–3

Index 273

Melbourne 185, 188, 192, 195, 198 memory 85–6, 99, 107, 113, 121, 169, 172, 177, 196 men. See gender mental clutter, 168 mental disorders 1–2, 10, 16, 29, 114, 119–20, 128, 134–5, 151, 214, 220 ADHD 134 compulsive 2, 133, 135, 138–9, 141, 156 obsessive-compulsive disorder 134, 139, 141 pathological 127, 135, 228 syndrome 129, 134, 137, 141, 198 psychological 16, 87, 132, 134–5, 138, 158, 164, 167, 170, 178, 180, 194, 198 mental space 164, 167, 197 mental well-being 178, 186–7, 190 mess. See disorder Messies 134–5, 138, 142 metaphor 9, 11, 22, 27–8, 120, 128, 132–3, 135, 150, 159, 167, 171 middle-class. See class migration 74, 151 Millburn, Joshua Fields 190, 192–3 Miller, Daniel 2, 14, 16, 21, 31, 41, 54, 103, 117, 131, 137, 140, 148–9, 158–9, 162, 184, 190, 199, 255–63 mind 16, 21, 24, 39, 66, 93, 120–1, 132–33, 135, 139, 149–50, 168, 222, 234, 245 mindfulness 151, 156, 158, 162, 190 minimalism 1, 6, 9–10, 18, 20, 28, 166, 185–93, 195–200 mobility 1, 16, 20, 58, 66–7, 111, 147, 151, 234 modernity 9, 12, 27, 96, 123, 127, 137, 139, 159, 224 molarity 31 mold 23, 41, 44, 63, 104, 113, 157 mole 228–30, 235–6, 249 money 23, 31, 38, 60, 65, 71, 84, 97, 111, 152, 169, 172, 208–9, 213, 219, 224, 237, 239, 248, 250–1 cash 60–1, 65–6, 72, 141, 165, 169–70

CFA 207–9, 211, 213, 217, 224 cost 21, 65–6, 86, 112, 165, 214, 247 euros 209 financial 70, 102, 111, 165, 186–187, 197, 242, 249 livelihood 29, 37, 45, 55, 204, 210 price 59, 61, 63–5, 67–9, 71, 86, 103, 110, 115–6, 124, 169, 173, 180, 182, 208, 214, 244 priceless 94 profit 7, 11, 24, 59–61, 70–1, 181, 247 rupees 60, 65, 67, 73 monstrous 133, 230 monumental 27, 96, 187, 203 morality 11, 21, 71, 167, 188, 199 Morocco 7, 247 Mosko, Mark 12, 31, 41, 55 mother mountains 7, 49, 54, 104, 163, 167 mourning 87, 184–5, 195 multispecies 15, 27, 54, 63 multitude 5, 62, 101, 104 museum II, VII, 27, 47, 82, 89–92, 94, 96, 99, 114, 241 N narrative 30, 122, 159, 170, 179, 181, 188, 197 national 7, 23, 49–50, 52, 58–9, 133, 141, 146–7, 151, 157–8, 184, 200, 222–3, 238, 251 natural 72, 184, 189, 200, 216, 230, 233, 238, 249, 251–4 nature 7, 11, 29, 47, 54, 63, 102, 123, 128, 136, 138, 150, 164–5, 186–7, 196, 206, 222, 238, 242, 246–7, 252–4, 259, 263 neighborhoods 9, 87, 124, 151, 207–8, 210, 211 213–4, 216–7, 219–20, 222 neighbors 69–70, 90, 107, 130, 196 neoliberal 5, 17, 48, 95, 193 Nepal 185, 233, 245, 248 networks 20, 70, 96, 101, 133, 173, 181, 191, 193, 204, 206, 222, 263 Newell, Sasha 22, 36, 41, 45, 51, 58, 159n13, 170–1, 177, 187, 190, 192, 256, 262

274

Niger 224–5 Nigeria 202, 205, 208, 213, 222–3 North American 5, 77–9, 90, 93, 95, 134, 149, 159n10, 163–7, 169–70, 173, 176, 178, 187, 240 North Atlantic 3, 5, 27–8, 63, 117, 120, 168 North Carolina 78, 84, 87, 134 Nuer 28–9, 252 O O’Toole, Finian 256, 263 obligations 3, 16, 72, 81, 84, 126, 176, 192, 194, 196–7 obsessive-compulsive. See mental disorders onions. See food ontological 55, 184, 186 order 2, 5, 7, 9–10, 19, 22, 26, 29, 62, 73, 80, 82, 97, 101, 108, 110, 117, 121, 127, 129, 146, 148–9, 151–4, 156–7, 159, 161, 166, 168, 171, 178, 181, 188–90, 197–200, 206, 209, 216–7, 219–20, 229, 247, 255, 258 organic 22, 24, 45, 47, 77, 184, 203, 216, 218, 222, 257 organizers 1, 5–6, 30, 79, 100, 102, 108, 117, 146, 165, 171, 180–1, 188 outside 4, 12, 16–7, 19–21, 23, 48, 53, 63, 68, 79–80, 86, 94, 119, 127, 129, 132, 136, 145, 148, 165, 184, 195, 204, 206, 209–10, 213, 217, 220–1 overwhelming 100, 107–9, 134, 165, 178, 218, 242, 257 owners 13, 20, 40, 42, 86, 91, 108, 133, 163–4, 175–8, 194, 206, 209, 246, 260 P packaging. See container pandemic 28, 146–7, 154, 156–8, 166, 185 Papa Huatay 42, 46, 49 parasitic 18, 21, 191, 197

Index

parents 6, 13, 25, 40, 43, 63, 66, 68, 82–4, 86–7, 89, 92, 94, 103–5, 107, 115–6, 124–6, 151, 192–3, 199 Paris 54, 137, 140, 203, 219, 223–6, 229 passage 91, 113, 168, 175–6, 180, 225, 229 past 2, 7, 9, 13, 20, 22–3, 32, 37–8, 47, 52, 58–9, 65, 80–2, 84, 86, 93, 95, 100, 150, 152, 168, 170, 174–6, 185, 195, 216 path 60, 65, 72, 104, 146, 188, 247, 254 paths 22, 100, 104–5, 111, 140, 166, 181 patterns 12, 58, 88, 115, 141, 168, 190, 204, 217, 258 Peebles, Gustav 23–4, 65 perfection 19, 150, 171, 173, 180, 246 performance 24, 42–3, 49, 52, 67, 70, 81, 136, 149, 183, 193 personhood 3, 15, 26, 28, 32, 54, 69, 79, 97, 104, 133 Peru 4, 35, 49, 50, 52–3, 55 pets. See animals philosophy 159, 162, 183, 198 photos 13, 87, 103–4, 193 pickers 204, 224 piles. See heaps plastic 6–7, 13, 24, 45, 48, 126, 196, 203, 207–8, 210–3, 218, 220–2, 226, 258 play 13, 49, 120, 145, 165, 193, 195, 210, 217 policy 23, 59, 242, 244 political 9, 26, 39, 48, 51–2, 57, 71, 73, 97, 115, 123, 130, 181, 183, 215, 224, 233, 252–3 poor. See wealth possessions 1–7, 10, 13–4, 16–7, 19, 21, 23–4, 27, 31, 66, 78–9, 82–4, 86–7, 90–1, 93, 96–8, 102, 108–10, 115–6, 118, 129, 133, 137, 140, 146, 153–4, 156, 159, 162–3, 165–71, 173–82, 186, 190–4, 196, 198, 200, 216, 257, 261–3

Index 275

cherished 4, 18, 116, 125, 169, 171–2, 178, 180, 186 dispossession 4, 148, 178, 182 toys 87, 104, 109, 113, 165, 176 unwanted 5–6, 48, 93, 111, 136 valuables 6, 16, 21, 23, 26, 51–2, 63–4, 79–80, 92, 115, 151, 186, 247–8, 250 worthless 10, 80, 94 postcolonial. See colonial posthuman 10, 22, 27, 263 potatoes v, 10–1, 21, 35–55, 58, 66, 73–4, 206–7 pots. See container poverty. See wealth practitioners 134, 166, 245–6 presence 10, 17–9, 62, 80, 90, 93, 121–2, 128, 135, 152, 155, 192, 210, 229, 260–1 preserve 9, 17–9, 93, 114, 208 price. See money priceless. See money privacy 16–7, 57, 115, 120, 127–9, 140, 153 production 4, 23, 37, 40, 50–2, 56, 58–62, 65, 67, 72, 108, 127, 204–5, 229, 252, 258 professional organizer 1, 6, 30, 100, 102, 108, 117, 165, 171, 180–1, 223, 229, 259 profit. See money property 20, 79, 101, 131, 133, 147, 150, 180, 187, 233, 243 proprietors. See owners provenance 57, 79, 174–5, 178 psychiatry 2, 29, 31, 114, 132–6, 139, 141–2 psychoanalysis 104, 132, 134 psychological. See mental public space 7, 12, 17, 20, 49, 51, 80, 95, 129, 132, 206, 213, 215, 217–20, 222, 224, 244, 255 purchase. See commodities purge. See housekeeping Pype, Katrien 12–3, 22, 31, 260, 263 Q Quechua 35, 37, 39–43, 47, 53–4

R rationality 9, 78, 80, 85, 235–6, 251 reality 14, 64, 120, 123, 132, 169, 187, 190, 195 recipients 163, 171, 178, 192 reciprocity 108, 141, 162, 178 recognition 23–4, 92, 122–3, 135, 159, 173, 179, 191, 238 reconnection 154, 156–7, 159 recycling 7, 14, 22, 165, 203–7, 212, 218, 222–3, 225, 235, 237, 250 relatedness. See kinship relational 2, 16–7, 22, 28, 36–7, 97, 107, 109–10, 113–4, 120, 125, 128–9 relatives. See kinship religion ii, 30–1, 114, 127, 161, 189, 198, 206–7, 256 spirituality 148–9, 159, 166, 200, 235 Reno, Joshua 10, 31, 177–8, 182, 235, 253 rental 67, 71, 87, 125–6, 167 repair 9, 90, 154, 157, 208, 213, 240 replacement 6, 25, 85, 87, 91, 95, 132, 147, 162, 213–4, 220, 224 repository. See container reproduction biological 40, 115n8, 126 social 37, 56–7, 65, 68, 72, 82, 149, 163 vegetal 41, 42, 46 residence. See house reuse 22, 166, 179, 181, 204, 206, 208, 218, 222 rich. See wealth riddance 4, 10 roi-pot. See container rot 3, 11, 22–6, 36, 40–1, 45, 51, 60–1, 63, 65, 69–71, 93 decay 18, 23, 36, 50, 104, 113, 189 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 140 ruin 114 S sacred 25–6, 29, 49, 94, 115, 178, 183, 197, 225 Sahlins, Marshall 14, 31, 36, 55, 178, 182, 186, 200

276

sales garage 20, 163–79 of house 152 onions 57, 59–62, 64, 67, 69 second-hand 13, 208, 213 yard 4, 20, 22, 86, 89 Schrodinger, Erwin 129 Schumpeter, Joseph 249, 251, 253 Schuster, Caroline 3, 22, 29 science 10, 28, 157, 222, 231 scraps 206, 212, 222 kitchen 206 metal 214 second-hand 7, 9, 109, 124, 176–7, 179, 192, 234, 247, 249 yard sale 89 (see also garage sales) secret. See concealment seeds 12, 24–5, 40–2, 46–9, 52–3, 60–2 self-help 1–2, 20, 134, 186, 229 sellers 20, 86, 163–4, 166–71, 173–5, 178 selling. See commodities semiotic 22, 81, 97, 258 Senegal 114, 203, 208, 223 senses 17, 121, 140, 153–4 sentimental 4, 6, 12, 14, 18, 20, 87–8, 113, 153, 192, 194–7 shopping 5, 102, 163, 165, 169, 189, 236, 260, 262 simplicity 166–7, 187, 190–1, 235 Smail, Daniel Lord 2, 10, 14, 28, 32 smartphones. See digital sociology 30, 116–7, 131, 161, 254 sorcery. See magic sorting soul 54, 132, 140, 154, 185. See also spirit South 1, 3–4, 6–7, 13, 58, 173, 199, 224, 236, 238, 249, 263 sovereignty 5, 41, 48, 73 Spanish 19, 35, 38–9, 44, 47, 53, 146 spirit 16, 24, 28, 31, 35, 41–3, 49, 53–5, 97, 117, 132, 149, 162–3, 170–1, 173–4, 176–9, 182, 184, 189, 200, 215 ánimu 42–3, 48–9, 54 spirituality. See religion Stack, Carol 96–7, 182

Index

state 18, 38, 46, 50, 57, 59, 64, 69, 71–2, 79, 84, 111, 113–4, 121–2, 126–7, 131, 158, 184, 186, 190, 192, 194, 198, 224, 240 government 56–7, 59, 71, 158, 218, 224, 243, 254 Steketee, Gail 119, 134, 138–9, 141 stocks storage and agriculture 10–1, 36–46, 58 cabinet 30, 181, 190, 196, 231 chests 93, 99 closet 13, 30, 83, 107, 165, 169, 181 and clutter 4, 15 of collections, 149, 196 concealed 17, 21, 80, 93 cupboard 14, 62, 85 digital storage 21, 260 domestic 41, 78–9, 83, 95, 163, 165, 185, 188, 197 ethics 68–72 infrastructure 64 as kin-making 2, 3, 50, 59, 65, 80, 82, 89, 94, 96 and organizing 2, 111–2, 152 rental 87, 165, 184 and Rubbish Theory seed conservation 46–50 and tension 67, 118 as transformative 9, 94 versus clutter 80–1 versus divestment 187 visible 12 warehouses 58, 60–1, 64, 71–2, 241 and wealth 57, 60–1, 63 Strathern, Marilyn 3, 14, 28, 32, 41, 55, 78, 98, 104, 117, 133, 141, 255–6, 258, 263 stuff accumulating stuff 89 collecting stuff 87 detaching 145, 155, 163, 168, 174, 184, 196–7 excess 1–2, 105, 165–7 good stuff 85 as intergenerational burden 191–4 of kinship 25, 36, 77, 96, 104 peak stuff 6

Index 277

sovereignty over stuff 48 system of stuff and people 248–9 stuff of dreams 100 valuable stuff 186 See also things stuffing. See containment subjectivity 26, 35, 120, 133, 147 subsistence 61, 63, 70, 204, 212–3, 222 substance 3, 26, 28, 36, 54, 102, 117, 204 Sumatra 61 surfaces 4, 6, 63, 83, 99–100, 104, 108 surplus 1, 26, 61, 63–4, 83, 130, 166, 260 sustainability 47, 50, 187, 222, 251–2, 254 Sweden 187, 191 symbols 58, 77, 86, 134, 148, 169, 189–90, 198, 216, 249, 252, 261 syndrome. See mental disorder T tangible 37, 48, 170, 185, 260 techniques 26, 102, 122, 137–9, 152, 158, 171, 190–1, 193, 225–6 technology 3, 12, 64, 116, 127, 189, 237, 241, 245–7, 251–2, 257, 259, 262–3 temporality 12–3, 23, 45, 61, 72, 80, 89, 125, 128, 185, 197, 232 Texas 7, 54–5, 162 Thames 117 things attachment 4, 13, 15 circulation of things 16, 108, 174 digital 262 excess 83, 91, 130, 163 keeping 2, 19, 22, 80, 92, 108, 119, 187 maintenance 21, 92 and relatedness 3, 15, 133, 152, 157, 173, 186, 258 shedding things 146–7, 168 stored 14, 22, 79–80, 82, 90, 94 stories 175–6 tension between house and things 125

thingly 166, 177 thing-power 164, 176–7, 179, 191 “troublesome things” 194 wrapping things 128 worthless things 10, 155 Thompson, Michael 3, 9, 22, 79, 92, 94, 228, 233, 235, 244–6, 248 tidy 17, 121–2, 130, 139, 146, 151–2, 156, 236–7, 260 tidying. See housekeeping time and capitalism 5 family time 105–6 for all time 100 giving/spending/taking/consuming/ wasting time 21, 107, 125, 151, 152, 155, 185–6, 189, 211, 214, 220, 248 and detachment 4, 131 and deterioration 23, 45, 61, 113 and labor 24, 67, 123, 155, 157, 172, 191 lifetime 85, 95, 96, 101, 245, 256 and maintenance 51, 113, 163, 167, 189 not enough time 13, 23, 82, 87, 91 objects and the past 101, 170, 175 period 6, 37, 218 present time 81, 153 and rubbish theory 94 and speculation 60 and storage 64, 88–90, 93–4 temporal cycle 35 uncertain times 65, 129 wrong time 247 Tiv 232–4, 250 Tokyo 120–1, 251 topoanalysis 99, 101, 103–5, 107, 109, 111, 113, 115, 117 Toronto 54, 101–2, 108, 114 town 7, 9, 54, 57, 59, 71, 78, 82, 97, 150, 209, 220–1, 223, 229, 243, 245, 256–7, 261 toys. See possessions traces 4, 12, 19, 27, 50, 79, 96, 177, 194, 229 traders. See exchange

278

tradition 5, 40, 140, 158, 184, 193, 257, 261 traditional 49, 93, 122, 125, 128, 159, 165, 173, 217, 223, 236–7, 241, 257, 260 transformation 3–4, 17, 21, 44, 52, 55, 60, 110, 140, 168, 218, 231 transience 113, 124, 188, 195, 197, 231, 233–4 transportal homes 259–60 treasures Trobriand 25, 36, 55, 70, 149, 162, 255 tubers. See food tubes 212–3 turkey. See food U uncanny 132, 137, 183, 225 undead. See death, zombie Unilever 236–7 universal 4, 16, 93, 159, 165, 194 unwanted. See possessions upper-class See class United Kingdom 2, 31, 180, 184, 193–4, 245, 250n11, 254 United States 1, 4–5, 12–4, 17, 19, 49, 64, 79, 95, 184. See also North American valuable. See possessions values 1, 10, 29, 33, 51, 55, 57, 68, 72, 115–6, 127, 145–8, 156–7, 171, 182, 190, 244, 256, 258 vegetarianism 236 vehicles 148, 203, 208, 220, 250 cars 6–7, 16, 20, 81, 85, 104, 111, 165, 167, 174, 189, 193, 206, 212, 233, 235 trucks 68–9, 81, 115, 209, 211–4, 218–24 van 36, 40, 55, 199, 223, 227, 253 Vermont 6, 27, 78, 81–2, 89 Vesuvius 245 vibrant matter 177 Victorian 87, 124, 239 videos 158 Vienna 239, 253 Vietnamese 7 Viking 199

Index

villages 14, 26, 36, 39–40, 42, 56–7, 59, 62–3, 67–8, 70–1, 165, 209 virtual 53, 79, 81, 93, 95, 141, 155, 161 virtues 6, 39, 127, 258 visible 12, 20, 26, 51, 68, 80–1, 90, 94–5, 121, 123, 129, 134, 166–7, 223 vital 10, 23, 26, 35, 37, 44, 50, 63, 66, 145, 156, 249 voluntary 166–7, 173, 179–80, 187, 197 W Waddington, Conrad Hal 250n16 walls 6, 12, 15, 17, 19, 22, 42, 56, 62–4, 90, 95, 99–100, 104, 108, 122, 128, 141, 150, 153, 176, 183, 186, 204, 211, 221, 228–9, 240–1 warehouses. See storage waste 1, 3, 4–5, 7, 9–10, 22, 23–5, 44, 50, 67, 166, 178, 184, 187, 192, 203–4, 206–7, 209, 211–2, 214, 218–21, 244, 245, 247, 249, 250n15 domestic 4–5, 26, 208, 210, 216–7, 223n12, 238 disposal 24, 204, 206, 213, 221 management 215–22, 224n17 pickers, 204, 224 dump 82, 196, 210, 214–5, 220–1, 223, 225 dumpsites 206, 217–8, 220 garbage 10, 24, 45, 61, 104, 109, 112, 207, 211, 213, 221–3 wealth 1, 5, 10–1, 20, 24–7, 57–8, 60, 65–6, 68, 70, 72, 79, 96, 101–2, 115–7, 182, 186–7, 189–90, 192, 215–6 poverty 14, 62–3, 78, 96, 102, 158, 189–90, 199, 207, 210, 229, 245, 261 rich 39, 61, 120–1, 131, 182, 216, 235, 238 wealthy. See class website. See digital Weiner, Annette 3, 12, 16, 26, 36, 41,

Index 279

55, 70, 95, 98, 101, 108, 115, 118, 149, 160, 162, 194, 200, 255–6, 263 well-being. See health WhatsApp. See digital wheat. See food wife. See family witchcraft. See magic women. See gender wood 6, 13, 64, 124, 150, 206, 209, 228, 239 word-of-mouth 241 workers 101, 112, 127, 134, 261 working-class. See class worms 35, 40–1, 45 worthless. See possessions

wrapping 7, 40, 48, 128 Wringham, Robert 188, 200 Wundt, Wilhelm 133, 142 Y yam. See food Yaoundé 221, 223, 260 yard 4, 20, 22, 86, 91, 150, 165, 173, 176, 180 yard sale. See second-hand youth 13, 218, 263 YouTube. See digital Z Zimbabwe 222 zombie 10