To browse Academia. In Possessed, Rebecca R. Falkoff asks how hoarding—once a paradigm of economic rationality—came to be defined as a mental illness. Hoarding is unique among the disorders included in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5, because its diagnosis requires the existence of a material entity: the hoard. Possessed therefore considers the hoard as an aesthetic object produced by clashing perspectives about the meaning or value of objects.
The s have seen a surge of cultural interest in hoarding and those whose possessions overwhelm their living spaces. Unlike traditional economic elaborations of hoarding, which focus on stockpiles of bullion or grain, contemporary hoarding results in accumulations of objects that have little or no value or utility.
Doctorow—Falkoff traces the fraught materialities of the present to cluttered spaces of modernity: bibliomaniacs' libraries, flea markets, crime scenes, dust-heaps, and digital archives. Possessed shows how the figure of the hoarder has come to personify the economic, epistemological, and ecological conditions of modernity. In this article, I employ West African ideas of spirited materiality to rethink the semiosis of possession in North Atlantic societies.
I investigate this ethnographically through the lens of storage—those things kept out of sight and unused in US attics, basements, closets, and storage units. By constructing an ethnographic model of the unfetish in West Africa, I explore the sociality of possessions as belongings that truly belong. This article examines two Reality television series, Hoarders and Hoarding: Buried Alive, in terms of a variation in the understanding of the object in relation to value based upon an aesthetic tied to consumer capitalism.
Object collection is viewed as a spectacle of abjection in each episode, as items that were once worthy of purchase come to produce a garbage heap within the home. Additionally, hoarding does not occur in a vacuum and is often linked with depression and anxiety, as well as various forms of trauma. Hoarding has become increasingly prominent in clinical practice and popular culture in recent years, giving rise to extensive research and commentary.
