A Magical Reorientation of the Modern

Professional Organizers and Thingly Care in Contemporary North America

Bibliographic Data

ID2435570
AuthorsKatie Kilroy-Marac, Katie Kilroy‐marac (The Scarborough Hospital, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume31
Issue3
Pages438-457
Publication date2016-08-09
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCultural Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0886-7356 • E-ISSN: 1548-1360
PublisherAmerican Anthropological Association (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.14506/ca31.3.09
OpenAlexW2515245066
LanguageEN
Citations received17
References cited23

Within the past decade, material disorder-especially that of the domestic variety-has come to stand alternately as evidence, symptom, and potential cause of mental disorder in the North American popular and psychiatric imagination. Sources ranging from the newly defined Hoarding Disorder diagnosis in the DSM-V, to popular media, to agents of the burgeoning clutter-management industry describe disorder in terms of an irrational attachment, closeness, or overidentification with objects. At the same time, these sources imagine order to result from the cool distance and controlled passion a person is able to maintain toward his or her possessions. Drawing on more than twenty interviews and numerous fieldwork encounters with professional organizers (POs) in Toronto between 2014 and 2015, this article describes how POs aim to reorient their clients materially, morally, and affectively to relieve the disorder they report in their lives. Here, I argue, POs emerge as a species of late capitalist healer whose interventions are animated by a paradoxical double movement. For just as POs act to loosen the object attachments and disrupt the "secret sympathy" their clients share with their possessions, they operate within a realm of magical correspondence where matter and mind are imagined to reflect and affect one another, and where bringing order to a client's possessions means also bringing order to his or her mind

Aesthetics · Art · Irrational number · Order (exchange · Paranormal · Psychoanalysis · Realm · Sociology · Sympathy · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · History · Management and Organizational Studies · Medicine · Psychology · Social Psychology