The Hoarders

Material Deviance in Modern American Culture

Dante put hoarders in the forth circle of Hell, but these were people who accumulated money rather than trash. During the 18th and 19th centuries, unrestrained collectors were regarded as entertaining eccentrics. Then in 1947, Homer Collyer was found dead amid more than 100 tons of stuff – a sort of deranged ‘Wonder Cabinet’ – in his run-down Harlem brownstone. Days later, the rotting body of his brother Langley was discovered nearby, buried alive by fallen newspapers.

Social workers and psychiatrists have regarded hoarding as a threat to social order and public health, a “psychopathology of object relations” – but Scott Herring asserts: “There is no natural relation to our objects”. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2013) pathologised clutter addicts as victims of “hoarding disorder”. One psychologist even asserted: “Something at chromosome 14 may be associated with hoarding”. Herring turns his spotlight, not on the ‘disorder’, but on those who have defined it. His book “is not a defence of hoarding but an attempt to understand what made possible the condition of defending or condemning hoarding in the first place.” Spotlighting the Collyers, Andy Warhol and Jackie Kennedy’s cousins, Big and Little Edie Beale, the book examines how fears of urban disorder, poor housekeeping and the infirmities of old age can skew our perspective.

Anthropologist Mary Douglas defined dirt as “matter out of place”. Herring tells us that “the hoarder’s material deviance is best viewed as a moral panic over stuff”.