WITH and WITHOUT THINGS. AN INTRODUCTION

Abstract

This theme issue deals with contemporary dispositions towards conserving or discarding objects at home. It investigates practices of sorting and divesting through an ethnographic approach. In a cross-cultural and cross-generational fashion, we illustrate the contemporary editing of domestic materiality and the social implications of re-accommodating things elsewhere. This means examining the spatialities of storage and how the decisions to get rid are taken. Also reconsidering the significance of the preposition ‘with’, which indicates responsibility, relation and use, as much as a potential separation, refusal or constrain.

Keywords:

• Material culture
• Domestic ecologies
• Living with less
• Hoarding
• Discard
• Sorting
• Consumption

The set of contributions looks at everyday artefacts and possessions through problems of disconnection and separation, instead of the traditional parallel lives of people and things that characterizes material culture studies (Appadurai 1986). It is because of a prevalent, unresolved tension around the link (or gap) between us and our material things what makes this closely-observed contextual studies particularly interesting. For instance, several of the papers deal with objects that are in somewhat of a limbo in terms of value and representation. As described by Julia Sonnleitner in relation to those who fled the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, material affinities are still experienced long after objects have been in our possession. Indeed, in the case of forced migration, it is not always clear if lived things are physically present or not, if a home is built from having them or if it is, in turn, their very absence that creates a sense of domesticity and belonging.

This is not unlike how things kept in basements allow other things to be seen in our apartments, as Francisco Martínez observes. In this case, the mutually transformative between home and inhabitant occurs through what is not, or purposely remains out of sight. By focusing on the preposition ‘without’, we put the emphasis on the kind of itineraries, entries and exits, and trajectories that the separation from something in our domestic realms manifest. This approach distances us from the literature that centres on meanings and punctual situations or states (Hahn and Weiss 2013).

For instance, Tomás Errázuriz notes how his grandmother found the need to gradually abandon certain domestic spaces in order to die. Indeed, each of the articles shows a particular way in which people distance themselves from things in the domestic realm. All of the papers make evident, nonetheless, that the ‘without’ is not only the result of a rational or economic decision. Instead, they point out a complex, dynamic process that is built from shared trajectories (Martínez, Sonnleitner), from co-habitation (Pfeiffer, Errázuriz), from a domestic ecology of things that frames, and therefore favour certain types of relationships (Raahauge, Errázuriz), as well as from accommodations and negotiations regarding the ideals and external demands (Kajander and Koskinen-Koivisto, Derwanz).

The study of the irregular trajectories of disconnection and changing value of things give us access to systems of social classification, rules of inclusion, and situated ways of being ‘with’ and ‘without’, manifesting how places, beings, and things are interrelated and mutually needed to generate a sense of domesticity. Nevertheless, we do not place ‘living without things’, as simply opposed to ‘living with things’, but rather focus on the frames, patterns and relations around home editing, which evidences complex instances between inclusion and exclusion, alongside an increasing multiplicity and overflow of materials.

Traditionally, a vital aspect of home is a sense of intimacy, familiarity and socio-material stability. In this vein, home-keeping is described in cultural studies as part of any durable solution, turning homes into a problem-solving entity, characterized by its endurance and meaning-giving capacity (Gibson 1995; Brun and Fábos 2015; Čapo 2015). Furthermore, experiences of domesticity and practices of care within private spaces also appear as correlated with public meaning-making, showing how people are, or can be, subjects of a collective (Buchli 1999; Lawrence-Zúñiga 2001). However, a contemporary understanding of domesticity should no longer presume the possibility of people owning their own homes, or those being physically connected to a house. In short, things do not ‘matter’ in the ways they used to.

Wider socio-cultural transformations are produced, experienced, and negotiated at home by re-working the existing ecology of things. Such is the case of the Danish homes studied by Kirsten Marie Raahauge, whereby imperatives such as hygienic and shiny might work against the maintenance of relationships. As she notes, domestic surfaces are increasingly designed towards oblivion, limiting the possibility of accessing to the past and, in turn, to remembering. To complicate things even more, Raahauge shows that the obsessive orientation towards cleanliness and renewal does not necessarily preclude ordering but just contraction. The active curating of what comes in and out from the homes may also turn the domestic realm into testing-grounds for further transformations to happen. Hence, practices of sorting, discarding and saving are not simply reactive, but also proactive and preventive. For example, Katherine Pfeiffer’s paper engages with the work of British biodesigners who are developing new materials and technologies to imagine domestic ecologies where humans, non-humans and things are related more organically and, in some cases, co-produced. In this case, minimalism involves complex relations with technology and containers, and not just with stuff. Perhaps, besides reconsidering how many of the things around us we actually need, we should begin to secure as much storage space as possible.

LIVING WITH LESS

This theme issue is an invitation to go beyond the meanings of possessing something in the domestic realm and think, instead, about how material affordances, the work of time, and different human and non-humans participate in the formation of the kind of relationship we have with things. Understanding this ecological relationship is important not simply because it is changing rapidly, but also due to the current environmental urgencies. Around us, there are things and more things and more things. Ours is the civilization of thousands of things in the house, most of them superfluous and ephemeral. We industrially produce, consume, and discard, and, alas the mental health disorders around us suggest that we are not necessarily happier than before (Löfgren 2017). Hence, there is a need to ponder the line between essential products for life and those that are not, as well as to reconsider the ecological consequences of this and the strongly unequal geographies of lavish consumption and irresponsible production and discard.

The phenomena of excess and acceleration, previously confined territorially and socially, have advanced with an unprecedented movement in the history of humanity, becoming a structural part of the daily lives of millions of people. These transformations in consumption practices intensely affect the domestic sphere, altering how we live materially and symbolically. The ecological circumstances in which domestic life unfolds have changed accordingly, yet there is a new trend of people who are deploying more mindful consumption practices, for instance living with less material things than they did before and reconsidering the discard that moves into waste streams. The rather defensive filtering of what we let into our lives has become a matter of social distinction, different from historical, aristocratic ostentations. We are talking of a chosen frugality or austerity, the ‘less is more’ motto, nowadays practiced as a demonstration of taste, wealth, and stability, as Derwanz points out in her paper.

Generally, living with less is associated with economic or environmental issues. The few studies available have examined the matter within the specific framework of a problem—related to poverty or ecological concerns. Consequently, this issue has been polarized either as a problem-cause or problem-solution, presenting living with less as: 1. Abnormal and deviated from mainstream behaviour (Bauman 2007); 2. A conscious strategy necessary to overcome pollution and to create environmental change, often following anti-consumerist ideas (D’Alisa 2015); 3. A forced reality due to precarity and austerity policies, thus associated with sacrifice and suffering (Bear 2015; Powers and Rakopoulos 2019; Martínez 2020b); 4. A frugal life style related to minimal aesthetics that convey status (Elgin 1981; Bourdieu 1984).

Our research rethinks living with less anew to understand how it is actually done, whether these practices are transformational, and which concepts help to explain the process. For instance, a philosophy of minimalism is increasingly practiced in Western societies and recommended to those who appear not to be able to keep things under control. In this vein, Heike Derwanz presents minimalism as a way to live with mindfulness and care, establishing a frame of behaviour to cope with the current material overflow and wastefulness. Minimalism involves both the symbolic and material deconstruction of our homes, reducing our possessions and changing how households look. Derwanz also points out how material degrowth can involve social development and personal wellbeing. She refers to the downshifting of domestic materiality as a strategic withdrawal to a more manageable kit, emphasizing the practical benefits of dealing with less stuff. Derwanz concludes that reducing our belongings on purpose serves to both cope with wider social changes and boost self-worth.

However, there are few empirical studies of the process of downshifting and its outcomes as a major life-transforming event. More than simply economizing money, we can notice, for instance, how living with less can be experienced as an adventure (Schor 1998), an attempt to get control over our time (Huneke 2005; Schreurs et al. 2010), or a form of resisting wastefulness, commodification, and excess (Isenhour and Reno 2019). Paradoxically, living with less may assume heightened importance as a way for people to realize aspects of self-identity and social and ecological sustainability in environments that were characterised by economic and material abundance, but also in contexts of scarcity. For instance, we examine how having fewer things provides the opportunity to engage more intensely with them, leading to alternative forms of consumption and deepen relationship with the things we chose to keep (Errázuriz 2020; Martínez 2023). Also, that a reduction of spending might not follow a coherent pattern, since people might downshift in one domain and consume conspicuously in another domain (Miller 2001; Schreurs 2010).

A revaluation of both habits and the quality of things is, however, required for achieving simple living. We need to practice now what we want to preserve in the midst of the ecological catastrophe. Certainly, the set of papers do not explicitly engage in discussions of degrowth, but they nonetheless hint that the minimalist gesture is more than aesthetic, and entails infrapolitical connotations—a discreet form of sustainability that can be deployed without solid intellectual basis or normative rules, and despite not being free from contradictions. Indeed, households are often guided by an ethic of care that define our practical relationship with the physical world and promote lifestyle-oriented and place-based solutions—i.e. by turning off lights, taking shorter showers, buying fewer disposable products, by extending the notions of care to objects, and so forth (Muñoz et al. 2022; Errázuriz & Green 2021).

Reductions of our socio-material living can be motivated by different reasons, for instance by a natural decline of abilities and the aging of mind and body, by divorce or the death of a partner, by the will to edit or curate our identities and social relations, in anticipation of an event or as part of a practical preparation for death (Marcoux 2001b). Most often, in Western contexts, the ‘less is more’ motto is practiced as a demonstration of taste, wealth, and stability, deciding voluntarily to go without a car, to avoid packaged food, or not to have a smartphone. Hence, downshifting refers to individual choices that follow ethical or political aims. This gesture appears as pericapitalist, simultaneously inside and outside market economy (Tsing 2021). However, in countries such as Chile and Brazil, changes in consumption do not center on individual, market choices nor to ideological goals, but rather refer to practical decisions often related with kinship, tradition and situated responsibilities (Ariztia et al. 2016, 2018). Hence, the need to contrast the critiques that refer to living with less as a form of entrepreneurial idealism that bolsters the status quo rather than countering it (Aureli 2013; Nóvoa 2020).

The interest in degrowth postulates has been increasing over the last few years in the Global North, fact that is evidenced by a growing number of academic publications, activist initiatives, blogs, podcasts, and social media groups (Chayka 2020; Hook et al. 2023). In this ethos, the multiplicity of practices of socioecological reconfiguration is taken as a resource (Latouche 2009). Nevertheless, calls for sufficiency in production and consumption lack a shared understanding on how to operationalize it politically (Parrique 2023). Degrowth itself is a concept in the making, still poorly defined, with weak policy prescriptions, and lacking transition scenarios (Petridis 2015; Romano 2019).

I SORT, THUS I INHABIT

The selected contributions demonstrate that subjectivity and domesticity are not simply cumulative, but rather forged through contingent practices of discard and redemption in a complex oscillation between home making and unmaking. In other words, dwelling requires the capacity to both discard and store stuff; in some cases, even to conceal things so they can be found anew, yet differently. Decisions to discard are an intrinsic part of dwelling, but not of ordering. Therefore, questions regarding the formal and functional discontinuation of domestic things, and how and why some things are backgrounded in domestic spaces deserve ethnographic detail.

As noted by Anna Kajander and Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto, ordering might be found not in contraction but in a cluttering. Their ethnographic approach to hoarding shows that stuff that is supposedly on the verge of being garbage might still be significant and constitutive of relationships. However, ‘clutter’ has a strong moral charge and is taken as a sign of laziness and a demonstration of our personal incapacity to organize our own home and, by extension, our personal lives.

The ethnographic angle allows us to investigate the implications of the without, bringing up questions about what the actual need of what we have, connecting our study with contemporary ecological concerns such as overconsumption and the difficulties of reversing our habits. Let us start by the editors of this issue, who have an acute tendency towards accumulating stuff. Things seem to multiply around them, emerging unexpectedly from different origins and forming their own geographies seemingly apart from our will; here towers and mountains of stuff, there an archipelago of things, and in the drawers, a collection of useless objects and memorabilia. Alas, it is not only the current overflow of things what makes a proactive sorting of things precious, but also the ordinary crafting of our subjectivity and domesticity.

Maren, a friend of Francisco, ironically encouraged him to reconsider his middle-class complacency towards stuff. Still, she donated to his apartment all her collection of design books. Simply because she feels ‘uncomfortable possessing things’. But what kind of gift was this? Interestingly, no reciprocity was expected from this gesture; Maren just wanted to give things away and keep them circulating (see also Bohlin 2019), while making happy a friend who enjoys being surrounded by beautiful things.

Still Francisco is not living like John Soane, though he would not mind to do so. In a house located in the number 13 of Lincoln Inn Fields, in London, Sir Soane put his architectural ideas into practice adapting his small palace whereby he was placing design and archaeological objects from his travels. For him, any space was an opportunity, so Soane began to twist and transform the building into a labyrinth of carefully designed lightening, shadows, and altars. Upon entering, the house leads you through a series of rooms connected to each other by voids, corridors and stairs, they all stuffed with Greek and Roman statues, medieval relics, neoclassical pictures, illuminations, and an Egyptian sarcophagus. John Soane even specified that all the objects in his collection were left in exactly the same position in which he had left them on the day of his death. Also, he made clear that all this inheritance would not fall in his (detested) son’s hands and instead it became a state museum.

Self-worth is not correlated with the accumulation of nice things at home. In some cases, giving things away make our lives better. Reductions may also occur in anticipation of an event or as part of a practical preparation for death, as in the ‘casser maison’ ritual des­cribed by Jean-Sébastien Marcoux (2001b). In Québec, when people move from one home to another, they make use of this event to update their relationships to possessions, to sort personal biographies, and to express how they want to see themselves. In this ceremonial dispersal of belongings, deciding what to keep is partly about deciding what to remember. As a result, certain relationships get discarded along with the objects that memorialised them. These practices are key in the ‘resume effect’ happening as we grow older (Miller and Parrot 2009).

Another object of study of this set of papers is how the meanings of home and the motivations to store change as people age. Non-linear itineraries reflect the material reality of human deterioration, correlating the degree of control over our own bodies with the arrangement of our domestic ecology of things (Chapman and Hockey 1999). However, sorting things is a rather forced activity, a struggle that requires working with and through time, dealing along with family roles, personal relationships and what not (Ekström 2013). Sorting and storing acts are part of a domestic system of exchange that include both flow and closure. Indeed, if we are to understand the significance of sorting and disposal in relation to home editing, we need to pay attention to how these practices occur in connection with the outside world.

How we get rid of what is unwanted is also entangled with moral assessments such as excess, loss, hygiene and thrift (Lucas 2002; Cherrier and Ponnor 2010; Czarniawska and Löfgren 2012; Baxter and Brickell 2014). To this, Nicky Gregson (2023) adds that home-curation is increasingly influenced by the financialization of waste, which industrially turns what we discard into a commodity. We can thus identify diverse sequences, itineraries and even styles of separation and discard. In some cases, divesting takes the form of a gap of accommodation, a temporal interval and a spatial displacement that is intrinsic to the forging of both subjectivity and domesticity.

The ethnographic examination of the endless divestments to things shows a more nuanced relationship than just a linear sequence of use and value, thus bringing abandonment, vanishing, spillage, detachment and also redemption to the picture (Strathern 1991; Newell 2018). Furthermore, the displacement of possessions into storage is not necessarily a negatively coded process, as we can learn in Kajander and Koskinen-Koivisto’s study of clutter in Finnish homes and in Martínez’ ethnography of basements in Estonia. Rather, sorting refers to the complex boundary between attention and termination and the correlated relocations. Hence, the storing or discarding of things does not simply answer to present hardships, but also makes room for the elaboration of new narratives of the past and to lay out projects for the future. The connection between things and identity construction is a well-known topic in both consumer research and material culture. After investigating the interiors of 30 households in London, Daniel Miller (2008) describes how material culture contributes to domestic distractions, comforts and order, also expressing relationships, and in some cases, generating self-deception, oppression and alienation too. One of the examples that Miller provides is George’s flat: disorienting because of its emptiness, a chilling absence that is experienced by the visitor as violent, tense, impolite.

Concerned with how the things around us set the scene and ensure normative behaviour (precisely because we do not ‘see’ objects as important), Miller (1987, 2012) holds people express themselves through personally elaborated shopping and style preferences, thus consumption is firstly about relationships, status and local symbolic systems. In turn, David Graeber (2011) questioned consumption’s heightened importance as a way for people to realise aspects of self-identity and criticised how material culture studies most often ignore the broader structure within which the individual operates and the role of the industry in shaping consumption patterns.

There might not be a single, definitive answer for why people are drawn to consumption, transcending the boundaries of necessity, but still this aspect of sociality deserves empirical scrutiny and cross-cultural analysis. The social significance of consumption has been previously invoked as a form of status display (Veblen 1992), and regulation of sociality (Douglas and Isherwood 1996), to name a few. Yet in the same way as the consumption of objects is used to constitute relationships, or that storing signifies the continuance of meaning and bonding, our material divestment is also central to the process by which people separate from their companions and make room for new relationships. For example, in Errázuriz’ insights, getting rid of things is part of feelings of mourning. Following Gregson, he notes how everyday objects move through different stages, referring to how we accommodate relationships with others at home.

In Living with Things (2007), which Gregson revisits in this theme issue, she called for an approach to consumption that also considers the riding, divesting, and disposal of things too. In this vein, and despite agreeing that things silently perform the task of socialization, Martínez remarks the need to keep some things in the dark because of their capacity to challenge our present life and sense of order, both physically and symbolically. In turn, storing stuff in basements allows the release of both things and emotions, placing certain items on standby while making room for new sides of the self to unfold. Interruptions and pauses thus become part of the domestic flow of things characterizing inhabitation.

Changes in domesticity can also be seen as a form of domopolitical action, being part of state policies of disciplining (Walters 2004), as much as capable of shaping subjectivities, legitimacy and social belonging (Ralph and Staeheli 2011). Perhaps not order, but material and symbolic stability is favoured by the reduced traffic of objects entering and leaving the house. An example of this is Errázuriz’ study of his grandmother’s material culture. As he describes, a particular socio-material entity, house-grandmother, had been created, stabilizing kinship networks and reinforcing affective relations materially. His grandmother lived for more than seventy years in the same building, carefully curating anything that comes in and out of the house (Errázuriz 2019a, 2019b; 2020), Errázuriz tells us how for the elder ones in our families, a knife and a chair could last a lifetime and accompany a person until the last of her days. However, for young people such as him, each item does not mean much: it is rather disposable and replaceable, thus not worth caring for or repairing because they are abundant, cheap, and made in series by unknown people living faraway. As a result, if comparing his own way of living with that of his grandmother, Errázuriz can only acknowledge a one-night-stand relationship with things in his apartment.

In some cases, however, things rather stand beyond our possession or even might possess us back, pathologically. For instance, Katie Kilroy-Marac (2018) engaged with this question by studying current psychiatric research on hoarding and the work of so-called ‘professional organizers’, an emerging industry helping clients to sort out and categorize their things. As she explains, the distinction between a collection and a hoard has to do with the extent to which a person orders, arranges, frames and displays things, and also with how a person feels and behaves toward his or her possessions. She thus establishes two kinds of distinctions: aesthetic and affective. While a collection is accessible yet separated from everyday use, a hoard is just there, lying entropically. Unlike the curation of collections, prominently displayed around the home, material accumulations seem to happen of their own accord, piled up to become clutter as observed by Koskinen-Koivisto and Kajander.

Nevertheless, Sonnleitner adds, the keeping or discard of objects is not always within people’s power range. Objects can potentially have their own biographies as well, going through different stages and interacting with temporal experience separately, not simply displaying specific aspects of individuals’ personalities (Kopytoff 1986; Hoskins 1998). Also, the very materiality of things might change or act-back, as Pfeiffer and Raahauge remind us through their contributions. However, while possessions can be accumulated, they can also be discarded, since ways of getting rid of things are used to narrate social relations, being part of our identity work (Marcoux 2001a; Gregson et al. 2007) and playing a dynamic, performative role within consumption (Hetherington 2004).

Our domestic ecology of things can be disrupted in a number of ways; for instance, by moving from one apartment to another, by divorce, by the arrival of annoying neighbours (Chapman and Hockey 1999), by the death of a partner and also by the proximity of ours—a phenomenon termed as ‘death cleaning’—avoiding to leave a mountain of stuff behind for our loved ones (Ekerdt et al. 2004; Magnusson 2017). In these cases, the relationship with things is deliberately untightened, and a sense of inattention or distance is enacted (Beck 2016). Decisions to execute domestic foreclosures are contingent, echoing a sense of distress originated from a correlation of both personal and physical reasons (Martínez 2020a; Pozzi 2021).

Interestingly, in a time of superabundance of things, characterized by an easy and cheap access to lots of stuff, we chose to study actual reconsiderations of what do we live with. An ethnographic examination of the complex itinerary of domestic things shows, for instance, how gaps of accumulation have a social impact in terms of value, taste, hygiene, self-worth and wider socioeconomic transformations. While possessions can be piled up, they can also be forsaken, following the aim to editing actual relationships and ideas, or as a form of aesthetic or political expression. This might eventually lead to the rejection of elements that are considered inappropriate but saving of those which do not fit but are kept because of functioning to sustain an emotional connection to the past (i.e. events, places, people), or because of an orientation toward the future (i.e. expectations, responsibility for younger generations). Hence, the meanings, practices and values involved in choices to discard or store the things found at home deserve empirical detail.

With or without things, that is the wicked question. Perhaps we need both, and to study the conduits and stages inbetween.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by the European Union [ERC grant number: 101043572] and the Academy of Finland [grant number: 350191]. Views expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the EU, the European Research C.

Notes on contributors

Francisco Martínez

Francisco Martínezis an anthropologist dealing with contemporary issues of material culture through ethnographic experiments. In 2018, he was awarded with the Early Career Prize of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. Currently, he works at Tampere University and convenes the Collaboratory for Ethnographic Experimentation (EASA Network). Francisco has published several books, including Ethnographic Experiments with Artists, Designers and Boundary Objects (UCL Press, 2021); Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia (UCL Press, 2018); and Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough (Berghahn, 2019). Also, he has curated different exhibitions.[email protected][email protected]

Tomás Errázuriz

Tomás ErrázurizWith a background in history, architecture, and urban studies, his research revolves around material culture, domestic life, and sustainability, particularly focusing on the dynamic nature of objects and places. Under this framework, his publications address diverse topics such as the shaping of affects towards objects, their material, symbolic and spatial trajectories, or the definition of boundaries between subjects and objects. Errázuriz is a co-founder and active member of ‘Cosas Maravillosas’ (Wonderful Things), a collective dedicated to promoting sustainable living through the research, recognition, and care of our everyday environments. He also serves as the editor-in-chief of the Green Handbook, a compendium of recommendations for reducing household consumption and leading a more sustainable lifestyle using existing resources. Furthermore, Tomás directs Bifurcaciones, a publishing house dedicated to urban cultural studies.