Clearing out a Cupboard: Memory, Materiality and Transitions

Abstract

This chapter is about moments in life when — perhaps in the course of leaving home, or moving house, or living-on after bereavement — we find ourselves clearing out a cupboard, sorting through its contents, sifting through shelves full of a life’s materiality. We reflect upon some personal memories and emotions occasioned by such a task: sometimes haunting, sometimes odd, sometimes joyful and sometimes banal. In particular, we will suggest that small practices with/around material things and memories are central to doing, resolving and dealing with major life-course events and transitions. The chapter has a fourfold structure. Firstly, we outline some key conceptual frames of reference, which direct attention towards complex intersections between memories/affects, material objects and geographies of life-course transitions. Secondly, we locate the chapter within social scientific experiments with longer-standing methodological traditions of autoethnography and memory work. Thirdly, at the heart of the chapter, we present three autoethnographic vignettes: cataloguing the contents of three particular cupboards and narrating something of the circumstances in which they were cleared out. We use these very particular, situated, individual reflections as points of departure to consider broader ways in which material things are folded into the timing of lives, biographies and memories.