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

Hoarding has largely been approached from a psychological and universal perspective, and decluttering from an aesthetic and ecological one, while little work has been done to think about the cultural and global economic aspects of these phenomena. Of Hoarding and Housekeeping provides an anthropological, global, and comparative angle to the understanding of hoarding and decluttering using case studies from the likes of the US, Japan, India, and Argentina. Focusing on the house, with careful attention to material flows in and out, this book examines practices of accumulation, storage, decluttering, and waste as practices of kinship and the objects themselves as material kin. Contents 5 List of Figures 7 Introduction. House/Keeping 9 Part I Food Storage and Family Values 43 1. Food Abundance and the Storage of Tuberous Kin: The Houses of the Potato Park in the Peruvian Andes 43 2. Making Space for Onions: Material Production and Social Reproduction in Rural India 64 Part II Domestic Accumulation and Disorder 85 3. The “Stuffing” of Kinship: Containing Clutter and Expanding Relatedness in US Homes 85 4. Topoanalysis: Hoarding, Memory, and the Materialization of Kinship 107 5. Locating Hoarding: How Spatial Concepts Shape Disorders in Japan and the Anglophone World 127 Part III Decluttering and Minimalist Aesthetics 153 6. Decluttering the House, Purifying the Self: Women Discarding Objects and Spiritualizing Everyday Life in Buenos Aires (Argentina) 153 7. The American Garage Sale: Liberating Space and Creating Kin 171 8. Minimalist Mortality: Decluttering as a Practice of Death Acceptance 191 Part IV Holding on to Rubbish: Trash and Transmutation 211 9. “It’s Not Waste, It’s Diamonds!”: Recovery Practices and Public Waste Management in Garoua and Maroua (Cameroon) 211 10. Where Would We Be Without Rubbish? 236 Afterword. The Shape of Things to Come 263 Index 272 Hoarding has largely been approached from a psychological and universal perspective, and decluttering from an aesthetic and ecological one, while little work has been done to think about the cultural and global economic aspects of these phenomena. Of Hoarding and Housekeeping provides an anthropological, global, and comparative angle to the understanding of hoarding and decluttering using cases from a variety of countries including US, Japan, India, Cameroon, and Argentina. Focusing on the house, with careful attention to material flows in and out, this book examines practices of accumulation, storage, decluttering, and waste as practices of kinship and the objects themselves as material kin.