The mention of hoarding conjures up images of unlivable homes stuffed with detritus and garbage that will be familiar to anyone who has ever seen an episode of the A&E TV show “Hoarders,” but despite this often sensationalist portrayal the issue raises serious questions about how humans relate to the material world around them, and to each other.
It’s a topic well-known to Professor Katie Kilroy-Marac, who has studied the lives and experiences of people who hoard and their families and written a number of articles on the subject. Most recently she contributed an article “Topoanalysis: Hoarding, Memory, and the Materialization of Kinship,” which features as a chapter in Of Hoarding and Housekeeping: Material Kinship and Domestic Space in Anthropological Perspective (ed. Sasha Newell), published by Berghahn Press.
Prof. Kilroy-Marac began studying the topic when she first moved to Toronto, doing participant observation with a group called the Toronto Hoarding Coalition. This group brought together frontline workers involved in hoarding intervention, including first responders, social workers, legal service providers, therapists, pet and elder care folks, and cleaning specialists.
Hoarding TV shows in particular usually operate from the viewpoint of the families or neighbours of people who hoard, points out Prof. Kilroy-Marac. “All of these shows were built around the moment of intervention, which is a very violent and confrontational moment. These shows are set up to pathologize and even demonize the person who hoards, and to get audiences to sympathize with family members or neighbours who have had enough. They play on creating sense of shock, disgust, and disbelief among audiences. Onlookers can’t help but find themselves asking, ‘how could things have gotten so bad!’ or ‘why can't they just tidy up, throw things away, and get it together?’ And then I think audiences also really felt a sense of relief when these disorderly places undergo an ‘extreme clean’ and are tidied right before their eyes. But of course, it's a really violent and potentially traumatizing process for the person whose stuff is being thrown away. Folks who do hoarding intervention work know that you can go in and clean a hoard, but this almost never changes hoarding behaviour, and sometimes actually makes things worse. It's really difficult to intervene in an effective and ethical way.” The secondary effect of these shows, notes Prof. Kilroy-Marac, is that by depicting scenes excessive or pathological accumulation, people can reflect on their own consumption and accumulation habits and think, “well at least I’m not that bad!”
These forms of attachment to things may appear a little excessive at first glance, but they're not unfamiliar. All of us invest feeling, memory, intimacy and possibility into the objects we collect.
There’s also an element of discrimination in the way the press covers hoarding. “Despite the fact that mental health professionals and service providers are usually quick to note that hoarding can affect anyone and therefore does not discriminate, media reports always seem to fixate upon certain groups more than others—older people, people of lower socioeconomic status, and residents of social housing.”
More recently, Prof. Kilroy-Marac also became involved in online forums for (adult) people who grew up in hoarding situations. The moderator of one such forum granted her permission to post a request for research participants, and lots of people got in touch wanting to share their experiences.
“I think many people who are part of these online communities are trying to make sense of their own childhood experiences,” states Prof. Kilroy-Marac. “They are thinking about how the hoard of their childhood – and which in many cases, still exists – had an impact on their family relations when they were growing up. For many, it caused friction and frustration; it was something that always had to be negotiated. The hoard became part of their primary relationships and how these came to be experienced. This was how I got to thinking about the hoard as a kind of substance of kinship.”
Prof. Kilroy-Marac began writing and thinking about the hoard and its place in family life. The material of the hoard itself creates friction in kinship and kinship ties. She noticed the hoard affects the ways people make use of and even “sense” space, how it makes people angry at each other, but also how it gives people a common shared experience. “In some ways, this is a kind of cross-cultural experience being with or around somebody who manages their material world so differently than you do,” says Prof. Kilroy-Marac.
Indeed, many people who exhibit hoarding tendencies seem to perceive their material worlds differently from other people. Home organizers recounted to Prof. Kilroy-Marac that they often observed their clients ordering (and not ordering) things in ways that were strange to them. In one case, while cleaning a kitchen, a client froze up because she was incapable of categorizing like with like objects, for instance spoons with other spoons, because of the different layers of meaning each object held for her.
Objects in a hoard may be perceived to contain memories, just as they might hold imagined futures. One adult child of a mother who hoards reported wanting to donate a stack of unused jigsaw puzzles. Their mother revealed that she was holding onto them in case the family went on vacation one day. By throwing away these objects, she felt as though they were throwing away that possible future.
“These forms of attachment to things may appear a little excessive at first glance, but they're not unfamiliar,” notes Prof. Kilroy-Marac. “All of us invest feeling, memory, intimacy and possibility into the objects we collect. These forms of material attachment are both past-oriented and future-oriented. One thing I heard again and again from adult children of hoarders was that while they were growing up, they often felt frustrated because more intimacy and connection was invested in objects than in people. Space was made for things, but not for people. They felt like they were in competition—even a kind of sibling rivalry—with things. And all of the sentimentality was either past or future-oriented, but was never really there in the present. The present was always deferred for these past memories and future fantasies. In the present, there was nowhere to sit to have dinner, or to hang out together.”