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- Convenors:
-
Gustav Peebles
(University of Stockholm)
Sasha Newell (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-D299
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 15 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to intervene in the social scientific literature on hoarding, currently dominated by psychology and economics. These disciplines have not attended to the difference between sanctioned and unsanctioned hoards, nor do they attempt to place the practice in any cultural context.
Long Abstract:
When is accumulation beneficial and when is it immoral, irrational, or otherwise unsanctioned? When is hoarding equivalent to saving; when is it miserly, deviant or dangerous? When does spending, circulation or release garner approval and when scorn? How does hoarding and its evaluation vary cross-culturally and historically?
The phenomenon of hoarding has been approached primarily from either psychology, with its focus on individual mental disorder and the irrationality of useless accumulation, or economics, which since the crisis of 2008 has been concerned with the collective problem of hoarded wealth, leading to a lack of circulation and unhealthy economies where banks refuse to release useful liquidity into the market. In contrast, as anthropologists we seek to approach hoarding as a dialectical relationship between individual and collective attributions of value in relationship to time. We contend that hoarding and storage aims to divert contents outside normal flows of temporality - either congealing the past (heirlooms, archives, databanks, keepsakes) or retaining potential futures (confidential information, unspent wealth, unfinished projects, unsorted clutter).
As the contents of our social lives agglomerate over lifetimes, various registers of value (familial connection, exchange value, personal memory, future potentiality, public documentation) become jumbled and disconnected and more difficult to contain. In a conference dedicated to Staying, Moving, and Settling, we investigate the relationship between humans and their accumulations—the struggle to keep them in place or send them flying outward, as well as the collective judgments directed toward the mobilization and immobilization of valuables and un-valuables.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 15 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
what can multisensory analysis bring to understandings of hoarding? If we abandon the poles of order/disorder as the paradigmatic mode of enquiry, and pursue multisensory analytic avenues, new insights might be made of hoarding practice. in this paper I focus especially on the violence of touch.
Paper long abstract:
A range of analytic themes have been applied to the practice of hoarding, all of which privilege notions of order/disorder to systems and (intimate) spaces. Hoarding disorders space and its relations: inappropriate or too many material things move beyond their parameters to get in the way of the mundane domestic revolutions occasioned by receiving guests, dining, engaging in the cycles of sleep and wakefulness, in ablutions, in the lounge room, the dining room, the bedroom, the bathroom. Hoarding is disobedient: as Emily Martin observed of bipolar disorder, hoarding might be symptomatic of a collectively appreciated anxiety about out of control relations with the material manifestations of late capitalism. Hoarding materialises the self, alerting us to the inalienability of things from person. All of these takes on hoarding speak to its disordering capacity and disorderly manifestation in the world of the person and the larger space and structures to which she belongs, and they all speak to temporalities and ordinary rhythms gone out of whack. But arraying hoarding around poles of order and disorder takes us only so far. In this paper, I want to abandon those poles and instead turn to a multisensory analysis for its capacity to bring us to new understandings of hoarding practice, and in particular to its temporal patternings and qualities.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I examine suitcases and wardrobes as forms of dress storage among young Bamileke women living in Yaounde, Cameroon. I argue that garments are sensory memory forms through which Bamileke women write their personal biographies.
Paper long abstract:
The fashionable and everyday garments that are accumulated and stored in Bamileke women's suitcases and wardrobes made their ways into these containers in various ways including: as items gifted by kin, as garments purchased with the money offered by suitor, as parts of textiles shared with a friend, as second-hand garments purchased at the flea market and so on. These garments are often stitched, purchased or gifted in view of a specific occasion: life-cycle ceremonies such as funerals, marriages, state-related celebrations such as woman's day and village-related association reunions. As such garments come to index specific events and materialise women's personal relationships. As dresses are accumulated, stored and cared for over time, closed suitcases and wardrobes are filled with memories of specific people, places and time.
When dresses are taken out of the storage and worn at different occasions they not only revive dormant personal stories imbued with affect but create openings for potential symbolic and material reconfigurations. Others' evaluations and judgements including jealousy and appraisal leading to a request for a dress can shift value registers and meanings. When the doors of wardrobes and zips of suitcases fail to contain dresses - in physical and/or affective terms - and the garments circulate, how do registers of value change? I argue that dresses are sensory memory forms through which Bamileke women write their personal biographies.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes the dynamics of hoarding in contemporary Argentina. Probing the relation between control over a symbolic hoard and the production of memory and history, it attends to how the Kirchnerist state deployed money's fungibility to narrate the body politic.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyzes the dynamics of hoarding that shaped the second Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK) administration in Argentina (2011-15) in terms of political claims over memory and national history. While exchange controls implemented by the administration created sociopolitical conflicts over access to foreign exchange markets, recent scholarship in exchange theory and the anthropology of money emphasizes how, beyond the technical aspects of state monetary policies, hoarding practices are entangled with subject formation and the delineation of community boundaries. I thus read hoarding in a symbolic register to examine how the Kirchnerist state narratively linked money and debt with memory, history, and the body politic. In her inauguration of a research center amid the liminal moment of 2015 elections, CFK highlighted state investment in Argentina's National Genetic Data Bank and its work of "restituting identities" of people abducted during the 1976-83 dictatorship. Linking the upcoming presidential runoff vote to postdictatorship debates over memory and indebtedness as well as foundational 19th century conflicts over nationhood, this inauguration built on her administration's launch of a commemorative 100-peso banknote in homage to human rights groups that included an image of the human DNA sequence. By inquiring into the relation between control over a hoard and the production of memory and history, I argue that the Kirchnerist state deployed money's fungibility to inscribe pivotal 2015 elections within its broader narrative of historical revisionism, thus blurring distinctions between victory and defeat, past and future, and individual and collective identities.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the morality of hoarding in the process of citizen making among small-scale traders in Northern Ghana.
Paper long abstract:
In a process of citizen-making, in which the state attempts to formalize an economy it simultaneously defines as informal, small-scale traders in Ghana invest their earnings in durable products that last the test of time, heat and inflation. Hajia, a market trader in Tamale, have during the last decade invested in several large bags of hair. Natural and fake hair-extensions are popular among women all over Ghana. These bags of hair enable her to plan and "think ahead". The price of hair and other long-lasting products can be raised following the devaluation of the currency. Also, such investments make it easier to avoid obligations of small cash contributions to distant friends and kin. Meanwhile, to enhance the flow of money and simplify regulation and taxing, the government encourages traders to increasingly use bank accounts and take micro credits. While the government in this way blames traders of hoarding, traders reverse the accusation back to the state. The common saying "there is no money in the system" encapsulate how traders claim economic insecurity and slow markets are due to the government's inability to let the money flow. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among small-scale traders in northern Ghana, this paper draws on recent literature on hoarding and banking (Peebles 2014, James 2012, Hull 2012) and seeks to explore the morality of hoarding as a way to study the process of citizen-making and formalization.
Paper short abstract:
I draw upon fieldwork in the storage spaces of US middle class homes in order to investigate how the contradictory intersections between value and time in such concealed spaces challenges conceptions of the collective value of capitalist accumulation and hoarding as personal pathology.
Paper long abstract:
In capitalist societies the accumulation of value is one of the tenets of social virtue, acclaimed by the likes of Benjamin Franklin, and yet hoarding is now understood to be a pathological mental disorder. In this paper, I draw upon fieldwork in seemingly normative US middle class homes in Illinois, Vermont, and North Carolina to try to discover how the things that accumulate in and out of storage space might explode such distinctions and challenge theories of consumption as the primary form of relationships with objects in capitalist societies. Rather than accepting the definition of hoarding as the disordered accumulation of valueless things as opposed to the organized amassment of wealth, what might we discover if we examine the spatiotemporal trajectories of possessions in relationship to value production? While Munn described the Gawan circulation of goods through space and time as key to the production of social recognition, Wiener highlighted the importance of keeping and concealing valuables, producing a fixed and enduring spatiotemporal relationship with possessions. Counterpointing between ethnographic particulars of US domestic practices and broad historical and cross-cultural perspectives on hoarding, I seek to reframe the distinction between hoarding and collection through a sense of accumulation as a social force that intersects with moral economies of value in culturally specific ways. The fact that accumulation is increasingly represented as pathological in late-capitalist society may indicate a sea change in the cultural evaluation of amassing possessions.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes an episode from Zimbabwe in 2006, which involved the hoarding of cash whose value was certain to drop. After explaining the complex circuits of exchange involved, I challenge the association of hoarding with abiding (or transcendent) value.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyzes a peculiar practice: hoarding cash whose value is certain to drop. In August, 2006, after years of severe inflation, Zimbabwe's government embarked upon "Operation Sunrise." On its face it was a currency redenomination, in which three zeros were knocked off the Zimdollar, and a new series of money deemed "heroes" was introduced--thus the operation's slogan, "From Zero to Hero." But it was also explicitly intended to eliminate the hoarding of cash outside the formal banking system. The first week was marked by ubiquitous police searches, druing which cash without clear formal sector provenance was seized from the travelling public. Government claimed that the "hoarding" of money (and goods) was being perpetrated by foreign (i.e. "white") businesses and racially deluded "sell-outs," intent upon reversing the gains of independence and the country's land reform program. Actually, plummeting exchange rates, when combined with a raft of official price controls, created enormous incentives to soak up Zimdollars, especially Zimdollar cash. After explaining the complex circuits of exchange involved--in which drops in the Zimdollar exchange rate proved to be perversely lucrative--I turn to the conceptual ramifications. Hoarding has generally been associated with the same spatial and temporal qualities that make up the "store of value" function in money. Indeed, abiding value is what makes "good" money good in Gresham's law. Following Jane Guyer, though, I suggest that we carefully analyze the characteristic circuits of "bad" money, including the ways that it is harnessed, pooled, and dispersed.
Paper short abstract:
Through an investigation of material transformations, this paper gives a glimpse of the lifeworlds and historically forged relationships between subjects whose lives and livelihoods are caught up with used stuff in Cairo. Thus, bringing forth entanglements of temporalities and spaces.
Paper long abstract:
Inspired by calls for 'following the thing' and anthropological conversations on things of rubbish value, this paper follows the lives of used objects and materials and the people, worlds and institutions they bring together. This study of secondary materiality in Cairo builds on Thompson's Rubbish Theory as it adopts a dynamic theory of things. I therefore trace durable objects as well as things of rubbish value as they move between different categories, looking at the entanglements between the different people who are engaged in their circulation. I make sense of the different flows of used and discarded materials in Cairo by considering culturally and historically specific frameworks and registers, thus shedding light on the plurality of materiality. I also frame this study within the wider contexts of power and class shaping the entwined lives of materials and people.
Abandoned in derelict apartments, displaced, thrown away, resold or decomposed and transformed into other objects, used materials tell us many stories about the city of Cairo and the people whose lives and livelihoods depend on them. Each chapter in this dissertation gives the reader a glimpse of what secondary materials tell us about struggles, triumphs, cultural identities and relationships subjects have with the past and with others.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the substantial hoards of islamic silver found by archeologists in Baltic and Eastern Europe and argues that we can understand why silver was buried in substantial amounts by looking how the institution of slavery unsettled local populations in medieval Northern Europe.
Paper long abstract:
The staggering amounts of islamic dirhams dug up in Eastern and Baltic Europe has always perplexed historians. Now, they are gradually becoming a material fulcrum of an entirely novel theory of state-formation. The Polish state was founded not as a consequence of the eastward expansion of Latin Christendom or a gradual evolution of tribes into a more "advanced" institution, but because of a demand for slaves generated by the world of islam. Islamic coins arrived to Poland in three abrupt waves that are nearly perfectly congruent with construction booms and violent destructions of extant (tribal) social and material structures. I argue that the institution of slavery can account not only for why islamic silver arrived to countries such as Poland but also why they were buried - we know of the trade because archeologists have unearthed numerous silver hoards. Archeologists have been unable to explain the practice of silver hoarding and/or why silver in Poland was shredded - often into really tiny pieces. I reinterpret these silver hoards in the light of the islamic economic literature and (credit) theory of money, and embed the practice of hoarding in the context of slavery. Slavery not only generated the external push for state formation in Poland but also was employed for unsettling and remaking of local institutions. I suggest several reasons why silver was buried and discuss if these hoards can be regarded as examples of the very first capitalist "primitive accumulation" in Poland.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper we consider the present and future values interacted with in the personal stockpiles of UK preppers. Prepping practices look towards imagined future transgressions and collapses outside the home. The paper analyses the temporal and moral dimensions materialized in prepper hoards.
Paper long abstract:
'Preppers' are often understood through their practices of stockpiling and hoarding of food, medicine, water, self-defence and first aid supplies - in anticipation of catastrophic futures. Yet preppers typically defy definitions of hoarding (Herring 2014), as this form of intentional excess is neatly organized and well hidden to guard against ridicule, theft and invasion by 'the unprepared'.
Oriented towards anticipated future demands and threats, yet kept in constant rotation with present need, temporal flows are in flux inside the inner layers of the 'prepared' home. Ethnographic discussions of the temporalities, affective atmospheres (Bille, Bjerregaard, & Sørensen 2015) and 'haunting' (Navaro 2012; Newell 2018) sustained in home interiors, overlap with observations of the futures anticipated and resisted in prepper hoarding. However, questions arise as to whether these practices evidence inhabitation of an 'anticipatory state' (Choi 2015), peculiar to preppers.
We draw on interviews and ethnographic observation of UK prepper skills training events, as well as prepper interactions online, including 'how-to' resources shared in blogs and YouTube videos. Analysing the advice for food and medical stockpiling circulating, we consider the temporalities and values interacted with.
As preppers negotiate between forecasts of present and future abundance, scarcity, domesticity, morality and responsibility, and as they curate, invest in and ingest their stocks, we ask to what extent these 'hoarding' and accumulation practices subvert or epitomise the ideal, autonomous neo-liberal individual. What divides normal from abnormal hoarding? What divides 'the prepper' from the 'merely prepared', and the 'prepper' from the 'unprepared'?
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I rely on insights from Weiner's benchmark text, Inalienable Possessions, in order to highlight some aspects of hoarding that have been mostly ignored by anthropology, perhaps because of the denigration that hoarding has suffered under many centuries.
Paper long abstract:
My paper begins by exploring the nature of hoarding and its relationship to visions and plans for the future. Surveying such seemingly diverse phenomena as central bank reserves and granaries, the paper commences by exploring the ways in which attempts to "stabilize" the incessant flow of wealth seems to be an exceedingly common form of human behavior, just as Weiner insisted. I push this notion further, asking why it is that hoards often manage to transform from piles of unused—and unusable— specific items, into mounds of "sacred excess."
The second half of the paper will focus on a more specific example of this broader phenomenon, by investigating the burgeoning international movement in microfinance. By placing it within this larger "history of hoarding," the paper will rely on recent contributions in this field in order to illuminate the concrete ways in which microfinance expands into new communities by reorienting local hoarding practices. In so doing, I seek to contextualize microfinance as one of a long series of iterative efforts to control, regulate, and harmonize hoarding practices over a spatial and temporal field. As this process unfolds, we can track its impact on local hierarchies, as well as on its potential role in such seemingly unrelated events as Modi's recent demonetization effort in India. Taken together, I will hope to show the ways in which hoarding relates to both hierarchy and efforts to build particular visions of the future.