Not moving things along: hoarding, clutter and other ambiguous matter

This paper arises from two eye-catching newspaper reports; the first concerned the death of an elderly woman, Joan Cunnane, who had died as a result of being crushed under falling suitcases of new, unworn clothes which filled every room in her home. The second reported the death of Gordon Stewart who had accumulated so much 'stuff' that he was forced to live by crawling through tunnels he had made inside his hoard. It is believed that

he had become disorientated and died of dehydration. Despite such regular media reports there is a relative paucity of research on hoarding. Most is of a medical nature, insisting, as it does on behavioural and chemical explanations and favouring characterisations of hoarders as helpless compulsives. There is, also, a vocal Internet presence concerning hoarding most of which firmly adopts and reinforces the medical explanation. What is often missing in these forums is the voice of the hoarder themselves.¹

There is small amount of research which relates hoarding activity to consumer behaviour more broadly and from it we can construct some general parameters. We can readily identify manifestations of what might be called 'rational' hoarding of useful goods. For example, early 20th century American 'pack-rats' tended to accumulate stores of unsorted utilitarian objects which they would altruistically redistribute to neighbours (Belk, 1988; Arnould, 2003). Such 'functional' hoarding persists (Ponner and Cherrier, 2008) and both forms share an acute sense of the economic context in which hoarding is carried on (in the first instance the privations of the Great Depression and in the second an antipathy towards the injunctions of a 'throw away' society) and a positive experience of the passing on of the objects accumulated. Less altruistic but still a largely 'rational' response to economic circumstances, Lofman (1993) has documented hoarding behaviour of goods in societies in transition from state to market economies. Here, hoarding is seen as a logical response to imperfect state mechanisms of goods provision. Hoarding becomes a pragmatic insurance against scarcity.² Hoarding can also be the result of seemingly less 'rational' or orthodox consumer behaviour but of a manner which tends to garner sympathy. Joan Cunname, for example, was more of a 'compulsive shopper' than hoarder and her meticulously organised and tidy hoard was the result of this behaviour. Likewise, Hattenstone (2009) relates the case of another owner of a precisely organised hoard who had been a concentration camp survivor and who was continuing and enlarging a behaviour that had possibly been life saving in its original context.

Most media attention, and correspondingly least consumer behaviour oriented research, focuses on the seemingly 'irrational' hoarding of prosaic, used up, waste and defunct goods often accumulated into physically overwhelming and squalid agglomerations of undifferentiated stuff.

It is this type of hoarding which is of interest here though it must be admitted that the edges between the various forms of hoarding described are 'fuzzy' at best. There seems to be no overall agreement from any perspective concerning a fully accepted definition of such 'irrational' hoarding, its scope, causes, and so on. Methodologically, such hoarding does present some empirical research difficulties. Firstly, hoarders do not leave the material traces associated with disposition, divestment and disposal. The goods' divestment circuits which comprise the platform for extended research on product disposition are largely avoided. Secondly, many of those who are aware of hoarding, family members, and many hoarders themselves, are embarrassed to acknowledge or discuss it with outsiders. It is often explained away as a transient or 'local' difficulty, the result of some recent illness or physical incapacity. Finally, the material environment and constitution of the hoard itself can be challenging socially, conceptually and viscerally. Consequently, one may be tempted to explain hoarding by building an analysis 'negatively', from the results of disposition studies. This paper attempts to avoid explanations which resemble a relief cut from the positive findings of disposition research. And, while it does not seek to heap upon it a social significance it cannot bear, it does seek to engage with hoarding in a sympathetic and curious manner.

While the majority of research on product disposition focuses upon movements of objects within contemporary market economies, a persuasive case can be made that a propensity to divest is an historically longstanding feature of human culture. Strasser (1999: p. 4) notes that various harvest customs and funerary practices have been '...ways of dealing with excess that keeps it out of the trash' while Hyde (2006) has documented the manner in which tribal societies have consistently

engaged in gift exchange practices. In the gift economy there is no end to the circulation, it is frowned upon, things are not consumed but passed along the gift chain or circuit. In commodity economies disposition can mirror this form whereby useful goods are given away or it can proceed via the selling on of goods. Moreover 'used up' or consumed goods may be thrown away, given away or sold as scrap, waste, raw materials for new productive enterprises and so on (Gregson and Crewe, 2003).

The historical landscape of opportunities for disposition has radically altered. Means of disposition of useful goods based around the close geographical proximity of friends and family have somewhat given way due to the break up of that traditional proximity. Much proximal giving has given way to other means of disposition (Gregson et al., 2007). Similarly, waste is no longer seen so much as a neighbourhood resource and the various trades depending on this resource - swill girls, rag pickers, rag-and-bone men - have all but disappeared.³ Waste is now overwhelmingly moved professionally and anonymously away, over much greater distances, via carefully organised and increasingly managed waste collection and disposal services.

Given the available opportunities and mechanisms of disposition, of both useful and useless goods, why do some people not rid themselves of goods but, rather, hang onto new, unused goods, used goods, worn out goods, and even waste itself, accumulating them to such an extent that their own lives become endangered through exposure to various risks; crushing, increased likelihood of fire, exposure to dirt and disease, and so on? Hoarding is interesting precisely because it runs counter to so much; to the widespread

cultural propensity for humans to distribute excess, to the consumerist injunctions to dispose in order to consume more, to the modernist imperatives to cleanliness and order, to recent discourses of both storage and de-cluttering and to the multifarious invitations to 'disposition'.

Nonetheless, it is tempting to see cluttering as a mild form of hoarding or as a progenitor to

hoarding. However, clutter tends to obey what might be called accepted 'schemes of material order' (Edensor, 2005: p. 312), that is, the position of the goods constituting clutter follow the 'common-sense obviousness of the "proper" position of things in space' (Edensor, 2005: p. 312). In this sense clutter can be regarded as a form of storage (Cwerner and Metcalfe, 2003). Hoarding, in contrast, can be seen as the 'disordering' of such common sense schemes. Strasser argues that,

Sorting and classification have a spatial dimension: this goes here, that goes there. Nontrash belongs in the house; trash goes outside. Marginal categories get sorted in marginal places (attics, basements, and outbuildings), eventually to be used, sold or given away... (Strasser, 1999: p. 6).

However, the 'proper' positioning of things in particular places does not have to be such that the material comprising the clutter is well sorted, efficiently arranged, classified, and so on. Such disorganisation of discrete objects may visually be reminiscent of the archetypal hoard. A couple of examples may be introduced as a means of scrutinising these affinities; the 'rammel' drawer and the 'bottom' of the garden.⁵

The rammel drawer is often a kitchen drawer and is, therefore, usually of a predictable, regular size. The similar positioning and dimensions of such drawers both invites as well as constrains the accommodation of certain kinds of objects, imposing a clear upper size limit for individual things, for example. It also limits the total amount of 'stuff' that can be accommodated. For many, an amount of 'rammel' above this threshold, involving a larger drawer or additional drawers would take the accumu-

lation of 'ambiguous' things into questionable territory. Similarly an untoward location of such a drawer may become a cause for concern, although the kitchen drawer is often used simply because it is convenient as a household repository.

Larger objects and those with certain material characteristics may be transferred to other transitional, though largely 'acceptable' locations, one common place being a part of the garden or yard. A daily train journey through suburban areas reveals the 'bottom' of the garden as a particularly favoured location. Such sites are usually as far from the house as possible, are often obscured from view from the house and frequently offer a contrast to clearly manicured and managed aspects of the garden. Using the garden, rather than somewhere out of doors but undercover, may be significant in terms of a recognition that objects disposed of in this way are inevitably going to undergo transformations due to weather, climatic and 'natural' processes. However, when such objects are accumulated in outside spaces which are not seen to be proper such as the front garden, or other sites clearly visible to neighbours and the public, problems may arise (Strasser, 1999). Neighbourhood disputes, the involvement of state agencies and general community 'friction' can be seen as both the reaction to such 'improper' practices of disposition as well as regulatory mechanisms which seek to maintain social norms in respect of the 'proper' placement of particular objects in particular locations.

The above mentioned train journey, however, reveals an interesting and novel twist to these practices of disposition; the 'spill over' of unwanted objects into the space between garden and rail line. Small strips of land which separate the boundary of the property from the rail bed are often used to dispose of various goods. Spatially a fraction of extra distance but conceptually a world of difference as stuff placed there is rubbish and no longer ambiguous stuff whose future utility has not yet been resolved. It is a curious kind of rubbish, however, which stays visible and lingers. It is moved along no further unless by others

though there is no guarantee of this. Such contiguous waste may then, in principle, be still recoverable although its placement is such that it runs the constant risk of being removed by the rail authorities or recovered by neighbours, children, or by those who have seen something of value from a passing train.

'Orthodox' consumers may well, then, fill up various marginal spaces but the dynamic tends to be outwards; from the draw to the attic, the garage, the garden, commercial storage facilities and various forms of 'fly-tipping'. Nonetheless, the 'visible' space of domestic everyday life is preserved, and the 'proper' ordering of objects in space is largely maintained. The hoarder, however, breaks with these conventions 'storing' their things in the non-marginal domestic space itself, slowly filling rooms up, usually working from periphery to centre, sometimes carving out elaborate pathways or structures in order to enable functional day to day living and, often, more hoarding.

We can gain some, limited, understanding of hoarding from well-documented accounts. The most notable concerns a pair of reclusive brothers, the Collyers, in New York in the 1940s (Lidz, 2003). Sharing a house for most of their adult life, the brothers died within days and feet of each other but in extraordinary circumstances. Homer Collyer, who was both blind and paralysed, was found dead, the result of dehydration and starvation. It was initially believed that his body was the cause of a foul smell that had been detected emanating from the house. However, Homer's body was found to be only very recently deceased. After nearly three weeks of searching, and clearing 84 out of a total of 100 tons of objects removed from the house, the badly decomposed body of Langley Collyer was found just a few feet away from that of his brother's. Langley had died, some days before Homer, killed by falling material, a victim of one of the many booby-traps he had set in the elaborately fashioned

tunnels of the hoard as a deterrent against burglars. He had been killed bringing food to his brother.

There was much lurid media coverage of the Collyers at the time and it is an enduring media response. For example, in the early 2000s BBC television broadcast the series A Life of Crime which followed the work of environmental health officers. One notable case involved that of Edmund Trebus an elderly Polish immigrant. The programme set a framework in which the viewer was encouraged to regard hoarding in a pejorative manner. A Life of Crime is a play on the phrase 'a life of crime' and the programme piled on the scornful tone by using 'What a Wonderful World' as its theme tune, various sardonic narrators and a contrived focus on the more unusual cases that crossed the inspectors' paths. Trebus was presented as a wilful, cantankerous and deliberately obstructive character whose description of himself as a 'collector' was allowed no serious interrogation. Any sense his activities made to him was effaced by his representation as a problematic and obsessive character.

It is this obsessive aspect of hoarding which underlies the current medical explanations. Without any undisputed explanation having emerged, the medical literature consistently correlates hoarding (which is redefined as 'compulsive hoarding') with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) or obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD). However, it is admitted that many hoarders do not display any of the symptoms of either OCD or OCPD (Steketee and Frost, 2003). Consequently, more general medical labels including 'disposophobia' and 'syllogomania' have also emerged. As would be expected, explanations of OCD and OCPD which depend on an analysis of brain chemistry, have led to drug therapies being advocated and administered in an effort to address hoarding behaviour (along with various types of cognitive-behavioural therapy).

Such OCD type explanations are problematic. Firstly, they rely on a reductionist model of human behaviour and there is little attempt to provide any kind of context in which such explanations could justify social responses to

individual hoarding behaviour. Moreover, many medical explanations rely on highly contentious factors in order to identify the presence of the condition in the first place. These include the presence of large numbers of possessions which 'appear' to be useless or of limited value and the cluttering of living spaces such that activities for which those spaces were designed become difficult to carry out (Frost and Hartl, 1996). However, what counts as useful and useless, and to whom, is not straightforward (Maycroft, 2004) and the intentional design of living spaces is historically and cultural so variable that breaches of normative functionality are commonplace. If hoarding becomes manifest when the disruption of the 'proper' ordering of things in space is adjudged to have occurred, how can the contravention of such a culturally variable norm be justified as a basis for the intervention of outside agencies into the lives of individuals?⁶

A more prosaic explanation of hoarding points to miserliness. However, cultural representations of miserliness would tend to reinforce a contrast with hoarding. Miserliness is more often associated with emptiness, with lack of accumulation of stuff, with the decrepitude of neglect and non-use, with the threadbare, and with privation (Orlando, 2006). Misers hoard only that which is socially accepted to be valuable; money, often in the form of gold. Hoarders, in contrast, are portrayed as those who accumulate only that which is socially regarded as worthless; old newspapers, worn out clothes, bin liners bursting with unlikely detritus, packaging, old food and even human waste.

Nonetheless, avarice of a sort may provide the basis of certain insights into hoarding. Interesting in this regard is Erich Fromm. Fromm is most well known for proposing a distinction between 'having' and 'being'

modes of existence. Humans have the propensity for both and it is the nature of the social arrangements within which people find themselves that conditions to a large extent which of these two 'modes' will predominate. Unsurprisingly, Fromm regards the mechanisms of market capitalism, and its supporting ideologies and institutions, as providing a great momentum which pushes people towards the having orientation. In an extension of his approach, Fromm identifies a number of 'productive' and 'non-productive' personality orientations towards the world. Of interest here is his specific identification of a 'hoarding orientation'.

This orientation makes people have little faith in anything new they might get from the outside world; their security is based upon hoarding and saving, while spending is felt to be a threat. They have surrounded themselves, as it were, by a protective wall, and their main aim is to bring as much as possible into this fortified position and to let as little as possible out of it. (Fromm, 1947: p. 65).

For Fromm, the hoarding orientation has many positive aspects; hoarders are practical, economical, careful, patient, tenacious, imperturbable, orderly, methodical, loyal and calm under stress. It also has negative aspects; stinginess, suspicion, coldness, anxiety, stubbornness, indolence, pedantry, obsessiveness and possessiveness. Often the negative results from an intensification of the positive, a movement along a continuum. This may be significant in relation to hoarding as it tends to reinforce the idea that hoarding often starts with rational actions. Moreover, the positive aspects of the hoarding orientation are those very ones which foster and encourage the accumulative sensibility associated with capitalism (Shankar and Fitchett, 2002).

Fromm's focus on the self also resonates with contemporary explanations of goods divestment. One view of meaningful disposition relates the activity to notions of the self such that objects form part of an extended

sense of self and disposition represents the divestment of these extensions or their detachment from the self (Lastovicka and Fernandez, 2005). Perhaps, then hoarders have a grossly extended sense of self, one from which they are not prepared to detach pieces? However, the hoarder's cache of often unidentifiable, impersonal stuff seems unlikely as the basis of the specific divestment anxieties identified by Lastovicka and Fernandez. Hirschman and Stern (1998) offer an insight here arguing that hoarding is consumption behaviour typical of depression, one in which disposition is perceived as a dissipation of one's meagre stock of goods and by extension one's meagre stock of self generally rather than in relation to particular objects which carry specific and discrete meanings.

Gogol's 1842 novel Dead Souls carries a literary depiction of the hoard belonging to Plyushkin a wealthy landowner,

It looked as if they were washing the floors in the house, and all the furniture bad for the time being been piled up there. On one table there even stood a broken chair, and next to it a clock with a stopped pendulum to which a spider had already attached its web. Near it, leaning its side against the wall stood a cupboard with old silver, decanters, and Chinese porcelain. On the bureau, inlaid with mother-of-pearl mosaic, which in places had fallen out and left only yellow grooves filled with glue, lay a various multitude of things: a stack of papers written all over in a small hand, covered by a marble paperweight, gone green, with a little egg on top of it, some ancient book in a leather binding with red-edges, a completely dried-up lemon no bigger than a hazelnut, the broken-off arm of an armchair, a glass with some sort of liquid and three flies in it, covered by a letter, a little piece of sealing-

wax, a little piece of rag picked up somewhere, two ink-stained pens... (Orlando, 2006: p. 29).

Contemporary descriptions of real hoards would add in items that are recognisably part of the material culture of current times; newspapers, plastic bags and bin liners. One way of approaching such an accumulation of disparate objects comes via an adoption of Edensor's writings on the nature of industrial ruins; the domestic hoard could be seen as a kind of ruin of homely material order or as a disordering of material goods in domestic space.

For Edensor (2005: p. 311), 'Social order is partly maintained by the predictable and regular distribution of objects in space'. Moreover,

Although such schemes of material order are culturally variable across time and space, in the context of quotidian life, they appear to be part of the way that things just are, beyond critical appraisal. (Edensor, 2005: p. 312).

Hence, it can be argued that the practices of disposition analysed in many academic accounts constitute part of the acceptable practices of re-situating objects in space and that hoarding represents the 'disordering' of these acceptable practices and circuits of disposition. This disordering has several forms: In relation to the regular circuits of, or opportunities for, disposition (i.e. to the acceptable forms of spatial re-situating), in relation to the classification of objects as useful or useless, in relation to the 'normal' practices of domestic arrangement and placing and, in relation to the nature of material boundaries within 'collected' matter itself. The first of these instances of 'disordering' has already been considered in a general sense: hoarders do not, in the main, participate in the practices of disposition identified in the mainstream literature and research on goods disposition.

One recurring feature of descriptions of hoards is the lack of recognisable organisation

of the goods hoarded. Sorting and classification of goods, and the regimes of disposition which result from such categorisation, rely on a knowledge and consciousness of specific materials and material forms. Such consciousness will be differentiated across social divisions of class, age, income, and so on, such that what is identified as useable, used up, broken but repairable, non-repairable, etc, will vary. The situation in which the hoarder finds themselves is, on the one hand, a close proximity to large quantities of 'stuff' and, on the other hand, a lack of, or indifferent, consciousness concerning the material properties of that stuff. Strasser (1999) notes that changing patterns of daily life and changing habits of housework and domestic labour have had an effect on the definition of what counts as rubbish, and we can see that in relation to Strasser's account the hoarder 'fails' in applying this discriminatory mechanism, that is, they generally fail to distinguish between the used up, barely used, useful for another day and the used up to be disposed of.

The status of the material which comprises the hoard challenges many observers. It is often regarded as that which should 'properly' be classified as rubbish but which has not been 'moved along' to one of the acceptable places or circuits of waste disposition including the bin (Lucas, 2002), transitional places (Lastovicka and Fernandez, 2005), and the dustbin or recycling bin (Strasser, 1999). We might also note that neither has the stuff constituting the hoard been moved along to other circuits of disposition associated with still useful goods (Gregson et al., 2007). However, if we turn this around, it becomes more problematic; the very fact that the stuff of the hoard has not been moved along in the above manner would suggest that to the hoarder this stuff is not rubbish or waste but is of some value and, potentially at least, usefulness or significance. One way in which it may be felt as useful may come not from its material nature as a collection of discrete useful or useless objects but from the nature of its overall material presence, the focus on usefulness may be missing the point. According to Edensor,

The common-sense obviousness of the 'proper' position of things in space is underpinned by their status as enduring fixtures around which habitual actions and routes are repetitively practiced, as props in the performance of everyday routine. (Edensor, 2005: p. 312).

This is interesting in relation to hoarding because one certainly feels a sense of material disorder and unease on encountering hoards. Things are not in their usual, accepted position or they overwhelm those 'proper' positions. Yet, hoarders may rely on this disordering to consolidate a 'sense of being in place' (Edensor, 2005: p. 312) and ontological security; they may both disorder and rely on this disorder for the performance of everyday routine. The elaborate lengths that some hoarders go to in fashioning the material of the hoard into particular configurations may be evidence of this. It is as though hoarders are complicit in the curtailment of their own domestic spatial autonomy and that this is a necessary component in the prosecution of daily life. The sheer physical presence of some extreme hoards certainly requires constant embodied attention be paid to them. Edensor's comment in relation to investigating industrial ruins that, 'The demise of a stable materiality must be engaged with and learnt, so we become competent in the preservation of life and limb' (Edensor, 2005: p. 326) is applicable to many hoards, and the lack, or momentary loss, of such competence has led to the death of numerous hoarders.

The theme of the appearance of the hoard as the 'accidental surrealism' of 'ambiguous' and 'co-mingled' matter is a common one and this disordering of matter seems to reach its apogee within the materiality of many hoards both in terms of how they came to be and in relation to what constitutes them. Edensor, captures the first aspect well,

Whether manifest in the serial occurrence of distinct objects randomly strewn or the coalescence of stuff in piles and other aggregations, objects seem to have reached

their current situation according to no deliberate scheme of organisation but through the agency of obscure processes. (Edensor, 2005: p. 321).

Certain types of objects frequently occur in the accounts of hoarding; newspapers and magazines, worn out clothes, food packaging and past its sell-by-date-food, pet accoutrements, bottles, jars, empty plastic containers, broken electrical goods, unsorted money particularly coins, and dried up pens. However, over time various physical, chemical and environmental processes may have had any number of effects upon the material constituting the hoard. For example, the weight of accumulated matter may both crush that which is beneath as well as providing a fertile environment for the growth of particular fungi, conditions for certain infestations and so on. Chemical reactions in old foodstuffs, plus the effects of other degenerative processes, may give rise to pungent smells, obscure accretions, unidentifiable deposits and 'peculiar compounds of matter'. Thus physical engagement with the material qualities hoards can be off-putting.

The particular material qualities of hoards are also unnerving partly because of the manner in which the media construction of hoarding leads to certain expectations (that somehow this stuff is exceptional, unworldly or, to use Kristeva's term, 'abject' when, in fact, it is mostly prosaic) and partly due to 'normal' daily experience with the state and placement of objects. As Edensor observes,

In densensualised urban and domestic realms, the sheer smoothness of space, the constant maintenance of space and objects through cleaning, polishing and disposal effectively restricts and regulates sensory experience, minimising confrontations with textures, weight and other material agencies. (Edensor, 2005: p. 324).

Much of the material constituting hoards is, unlike Gogol's description of Plyushkin's rather 'dry' collection of discrete objects,

ambiguous, the actions of processes of decay are often well advanced. The slow transformation of 'culture' into 'nature' is not only the 'way of all flesh' but the way of all newspapers, old rags, desiccated food and so on. Much of the ambiguity associated with hoarded matter derives from such processes in which 'human artefacts blend imperceptibly into [a] mass of worldly matter' (DeSilvey, 2006: p. 332).

Nonetheless, various kinds of meaning are recoverable from such matter. Indeed, Rathje (2001), in the context of a long running investigation into waste, the 'Garbage Project', insists that physical engagement with material that is actually 'wasted' is a necessary aspect of the research process. It is as a physical repository of memories that the hoard may be of most material interest. For DeSilvey,

Remembrance comes into its own as a balancing act, an 'art of transience' which salvages meaning from waste things and reveals the complexity of our entangled material memories. (DeSilvey, 2006: p. 336).

This may be the case both in terms of personally meaningful objects and in relation to obsolete classes of objects (Moran, 2004; Parsons, 2008). Much of this depends on the relation of the observer to the hoard, of course, and, for many observers it is the sorting through of other people's stuff rather than that which one has accumulated oneself. The hoarder is rarely involved with this kind of confrontation with their own hoard, of the untangling of material memories. Rather, it is left to a family member, state agency, commercial operator, etc.

Hoarding is popularly represented as a marginal activity in comparison to mainstream practices of disposition and Strasser (1999: p. 8) reminds us that 'discussions of... marginal behaviours often merge with discussions about marginal people...' However, recent research has given rise to a growing body of

evidence that goods may be held onto more than was perhaps assumed. Practices of home maintenance, repair and reuse may act in concert to keep goods away from practices of disposition (Graham and Thrift, 2007; Gregson et al., 2009). Accumulation of ambiguous material may also be more widespread than the prurient media depictions of hoarding suggest. Hattenstone (2009) reports a survey which found not only that the average person accumulates over a tonne of unwanted stuff but also that a quarter of the respondents reported having to stop using one room because it was so full of stored possessions. Nonetheless, there seems to be no universally applicable description of hoarding activity. There are various medical analyses which all stress the range and unclassifiable nature of hoarding activity tout court. Moreover, the accounts of those involved directly with the lives and activities of hoarders also insist on individual variability against a background of common features. Indeed, it could be argued that hoarders are simply going about their own, material, business in their own way. Edmund Trebus' regular refrain to environmental health officials to 'Stick it up your chuffer' is notable in this regard.

This exploratory paper has proceeded in a rather theoretical vein in its attempt to draw insights concerning hoarding from a wide range of disciplines. Clearly, this account suffers from a lack of primary, ethnographic research. Research in relation to 'rational' or 'functional' hoarding (Ponner and Cherrier, 2008) is useful but needs to be bolstered by primary research into the 'irrational' or 'non-functional' hoarding that has been central to the discussion here. Despite numerous challenges, it should not be seen as an intractable research subject. Why do people hoard 'useless' stuff, what do the relationships between the practices of storage, clutter and collecting mean to those who hoard? Are we witnessing a 'vernacular' mode of living which should be respected, orthodox consumer behaviour somehow 'gone wrong' but which deserves sympathetic understanding or, a compulsive disorder best addressed from the perspectives

of mental health, environmental protection and personal well being?

While being both based on existing literature and acknowledging the need for primary, empirical research, this paper does draw on a further source of insight into hoarding. The author was raised in the home of an 'extreme' hoarder amid the kind of disorder and detritus alluded to in the paper. Furthermore, it recently fell to the author to physically confront and remove the hoard from the family home; it had grown considerably in scale and 'disorder' in the 25 years since the author lived there. While having such first hand knowledge of hoarding, and having drawn upon that knowledge, the author has tried hard not to extrapolate general and unsupported assertions from isolated and personal experience.

Neil Maycroft teaches material culture and design culture at the Lincoln School of Art and Design, University of Lincoln. Originally trained as a social scientist, Neil's initial research interests lay in the areas of Utopianism, everyday life and the work of Henri Lefebvre. After teaching in design departments for many years, Neil's research attention has broadened and diversified to include material culture studies, consumption and consumerism, 'green' design, and the culture industries. He is currently writing a manuscript, 'Friendly Things', which explores the material culture of a series of prosaic and largely neglected everyday objects.

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