Mess: on domestic overflows

Löfgren, Orvar

doi:10.1080/10253866.2016.1158767

Cited by 17 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Lack of time, energy and space for household possessions is a commonplace modern-day experience, hardly restricted to hoarders (Arnold and Lang 2007:47;Löfgren 2016).…”

Section: Physical Constraintsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Meaning in hoarding: perspectives of people who hoard on clutter, culture and agency

Orr

Preston‐Shoot

Braye

2017

Anthropology & Medicine

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Hoarding has become increasingly prominent in clinical practice and popular culture in recent years, giving rise to extensive research and commentary. Critical responses in the social sciences have criticised the cultural assumptions built in to the construct of 'hoarding disorder' and expressed fears that it may generate stigma outweighing its benefits; however, few of these studies have engaged directly with 'hoarders' themselves. This paper reports on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 10 individuals living in England, who received assessment and intervention for hoarding from Social Services. Their narratives drew on the cultural repertoire of values and discourses around waste and worth, the mediation of sociality and relationships through material objects, physical constraints on keeping order and the role played by mental health. Analysing these perspectives anthropologically shows how dominant models of hoarding, such as the DSM-5 paradigm, potentially lend themselves to reductionist understandings that efface the meaning 'hoarding' may have and thereby deny agency to the person labelled as 'hoarder'. More culturally informed analysis, by contrast, affords insights into the complex landscape of value, waste, social critique, emotion, interpersonal relationships and practical difficulties that may underlie hoarding cases, and points the way to more person-centred practice and analysis.

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“…Lack of time, energy and space for household possessions is a commonplace modern-day experience, hardly restricted to hoarders (Arnold and Lang 2007:47;Löfgren 2016).…”

Section: Physical Constraintsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Meaning in hoarding: perspectives of people who hoard on clutter, culture and agency

Orr

Preston‐Shoot

Braye

2017

Anthropology & Medicine

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“…Keeping data organised also reflected the moral value attributed to being tidy, suggesting that like material objects in a well-organised home, for some participants keeping digital material tidy allowed daily life to become easier (Dion et al, 2014; Shove, 2003). These regular practices also resonated with current trends of decluttering homes from excessive amounts of possessions through adopting approaches such as the KonMari Method in order to pursue more minimalist or simplified ways of living (Hsin-Hsuan, 2017; Löfgren, 2017). Perhaps, surprisingly, several participants spoke enthusiastically about the task of backing up or sorting through what to keep and what to throw away without emphasising the time they had to set aside or emphasising it was something they had to do regularly.…”

Section: Digital Housework: Making Sense Of Digital Messmentioning

confidence: 95%

Digital housekeeping: Living with data

Horst

Sinanan

2021

New Media & Society

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The availability and affordability of memory and other services formats to store digital material has proliferated over the past 15 years. Making, sharing and storing digital material is now a mundane practice that is part of a broader ecology of living with different kinds of data. This article examines routines of managing networked technologies in the home: digital housekeeping through three core practices of sharing and storing everyday data. The first, what we will call tidying, involves the everyday routines of cleaning up the mess of data through practices such as syncing material ‘in the cloud’, creating inboxes and manually moving digital data such as pictures and videos to ‘folders’. The second set of practices comprises more periodic, but deeper forms of sorting, spring cleaning. During digital spring cleaning, the focus is upon decluttering digital data by disposing, editing and other forms of curation whereby digital materials can be ‘located’ when desired in the future. The final set of practices, moving house, consists of the shift or relocation of digital data from one device or service to another. Depending upon the age and functioning of the device or service, this often involves changes in format to render digital data useful into the future, the realisation of lost data, as well as an additional assessment of the value of moving such digital material. Through fine-grained attention to the ways in which households live with digital materials, this article considers the engagement with and consequence of everyday data in our lives.

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“…By investigating storage spaces and their uses in everyday life, storage highlights what can be considered as invisible processes of consumption, items that are often hidden from sight, but are still a part of daily routines and social relations. Furthermore, the storage itself, such as closets and cupboards, materialize certain ideal practices and aesthetics that are time-contingent (see Cwerner & Metcalfe 2003;Löfgren 2017). This includes how the storage space should look like, how it should be organized, as well as what it should contain.…”

Section: Storing Stuff Storing Emotionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pantry Memories

Marshall

Pétursson

2022

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In recent years, references to “old-fashioned pantries” and “classic root cellars” have regularly popped up in real estate ads across Sweden as a potential selling point for people seeking new homes. The use of the words “classic” and “old-fashioned” indicates a shift in the thinking about traditional food storage spaces. In this article, we explore the recontextualization and emotionalization of traditional food storage spaces in Swedish society. We base our analysis on an open-ended questionnaire on food storage, preservation, and household preparedness directed to Swedish households. We investigate how our respondents have recounted and shaped embodied memories in the act of writing about past food storage: the different spaces, times, people, practices, emotions, and objects. Viewing these acts of remembering and writing about past food storage as emotional practices has led to an understanding of how emotional experience in the past is reinterpreted in the present. Seeing these acts as emotional practices illustrates the relational nature of emotions, where longing for past food storage spaces is one way to reflexively deal with contemporary issues by managing everyday life. Finally, we argue that reflexive nostalgia helps to create and interpret emotions – making past and present food storage meaningful.

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Mess: on domestic overflows

Cited by 17 publications

References 9 publications

Meaning in hoarding: perspectives of people who hoard on clutter, culture and agency

Meaning in hoarding: perspectives of people who hoard on clutter, culture and agency

Digital housekeeping: Living with data

Pantry Memories

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