An order of distinction (or, how to tell a collection from a hoard)

Abstract

What is the difference between a collection and a hoard? This article draws upon an array of sources – from the DSM-V and current psychiatric research on hoarding, to recent media stories and artist Song Dong’s Waste Not (2009), to the author’s own participant observation with the Toronto Hoarding Coalition and the 21 ethnographic interviews she conducted with professional home organizers in the Greater Toronto Area between 2014 and 2015 – to examine how popular and psychiatric discourses that distinguish collecting and hoarding reveal a complex set of rules about what constitutes the healthy and moral ordering, organization and arrangement of one’s material possessions in contemporary life. In an age of seemingly limitless possibilities for accumulation, the author argues that it is not just the fact of having things that stands as a matter of distinction. One must also demonstrate an active engagement in practices related to the curation and management of one’s object world.