A Magical Reorientation of the Modern

Professional Organizers and Thingly Care in Contemporary North America

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2435570
AutoresKatie Kilroy-Marac, Katie Kilroy‐marac (The Scarborough Hospital, autor correspondente)
Ano2016
Volume31
Fascículo3
Páginas438-457
Data de publicação2016-08-09
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoCultural Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0886-7356 • E-ISSN: 1548-1360
EditoraAmerican Anthropological Association (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.14506/ca31.3.09
OpenAlexW2515245066
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas17
Referências citadas23

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