Required reading:
To introduce some basic features of containers for clutter, we begin by presenting some fieldwork material from an interview with Nicola, a mother in a household of four (two sons, 6 and 9; Nicola; and her husband). For Nicola, “junk bowls” figure prominently in the family home. In the open plan kitchen/dining area, three stacks of bowls sit on a waist-high shelf facing the entrance to the room. Located not far from the kitchen table and near to the work surfaces, the bowls are placed to be used, it appears, for the preparation or serving of food. It is immediately apparent, however, that they have been appropriated to act as repositories for an assortment of bits and pieces.
[…]
What we would like to suggest is that this distinction between making things visible versus making them hidden is not merely physical; it has symbolic, even emotional properties. We would like to suggest that to be made the special kind of place that it is, the home must be worked on, so to speak. A specialness is achieved through tidying and all the attendant processes, tasks and even battles this entails. By displaying, tidying away, and making decisions about those things that might sit in-between visible and hidden, the home is suffused with judgments, ideals, even a moral fabric. Sociology and anthropology have addressed such matters, considering the home directly, and also what, at first blush, might appear to be the far less related juxtaposition of the sacred and profane.
[…]
In a drawer in Emma’s family kitchen, what we have then is a place where stuff—clutter—can sit unperturbed. The drawer is ordered, but only just so. The status of the contents may not be terminal, may transform from the mundane to rubbish or useful matter, but, whatever the case, in this receptacle, stuff is given leeway. The drawer, with its marked place in the home, is given the status of a place of respite for those things to be cast out, causing disorder, or threatening household peace—respite from what Douglas [2002] calls the threat of “danger.” The drawer, and other places that have a similar status conferred upon them (like Nicola’s bowls), might be thought of as—to borrow from the anthropology of ritual [Turner 1977; van Gennep 1960]—liminal places that:
… are seen as being outside of everyday place—they are a type of special place
where everyday rules of life are seen as being held in abeyance. [Smith 1999
p. 16]The unclassifiable—the wooden apple, torn Yughio card, and so on—are thus placed into the drawer, set precariously in a liminal state between treasured items and refuse, between, if you like, things that are sacred, because they have earned that right, and those things that are profane, a threat to the worked-on order that binds the home and its inhabitants.
Just absolutely fascinating and profound stuff. A must-read for anyone with an interest in category, theory of organization, systems theory, etc.
