American Ethnological Society

Oral Presentation Session

Hoarding disorder, witchcraft and moral anxiety: toward a systemic approach to hoarding.

Presenter(s)

• ET

  Edgar Tasia

  Université Libre de Bruxelles

A growing literature on Hoarding Disorder (HD) has demonstrated how multiple, divergent behaviors became unified as a “disease” through the convergence of narratives about clutter, dirt and material deviance. Despite this process of “dévoilement” inspired by Foucauldian approaches, HD is still examined as a psychiatric object which seems to reveal something about material deviance in our late capitalistic society.

I would like to tackle the study of HD from a systemic approach considering two types of actors: Personal Organizers (POs) and so-called hoarders. HD, I argue, would never have become an object of social sciences if POs were not there to label HD as a disease or issue. Based upon fieldwork amongst Belgian POs, I suggest that the labelling of HD works much like witchcraft accusation. It generates a whole process of exorcism of the hoarder’s “sick mind” through the learning mechanism of dispossession. Such a system, I argue, allows the moral anxiety that hoarding and clutter generate regarding everyday consumption practices to be suppressed, reestablishing the current “ideal social order of society”(Douglas 2001).