MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In recent years, hoarding has become a well-known phenomenon discussed in everything from blog posts to multi-series television shows. The DSM-V added hoarding as a disorder due to its distinct features as an illness with distinct methods of treatment. According to the American Psychiatric Association, those suffering from hoarding disorder possess a “persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of the value others may attribute to these possessions.” This definition leaves unanswered the question of “why?” Viewers of the show Hoarders: Collection wonder why a Texas man collects to the point that CPS, citing an unsafe environment, has taken his grandchildren. While the featured psychologists often focus on hoarders’ past traumatic experiences resulting in unresolved grief, I offer an anthropological approach, focusing particularly on issues of personhood: the theory that persons’ concepts of identity lies in their awareness of material cultural surrounding them and relationships that this material culture facilitates. This concept implies that the individual’s identity is not housed within the body, but is instead understood as being divisible into multiple parts, including objects, animals, people, and the materiality of built environments. Cultural constructions of time often inform this dynamic, with many hoarders conceptualizing objects as links to social others from their pasts or as safety nets for an otherwise isolated future. I hypothesize that many hoarders conceptualize their personhood through possessions to such an extent that losing things amounts to losing the self. Anthropologist Chris Fowler (2010) states, “Ordinary persons operate in a known field of relations, which are made manifest in their bodies, objects, buildings, and gardens.” Hoarding takes this “ordinary” dynamic to an extreme, vesting aspects of one’s personhood across so many objects that social relations, health, and many other aspects of life become encumbered.