Abstract

As a category of psychological diagnosis, Hoarding Disorder has spawned a conception of “the
hoarder” marked by social exclusion, a habitual urge to possess objects, and an apparent
difficulty in disposing them. Against this limited definition, which stems from a lack of long-term historical and social awareness among scholars of hoarding disorder, my work asks, How is
hoarding logical? Can we read hoarding as non-pathological or adaptive? What kind of monuments and record have historical hoarders left behind? Proceeding from the longer etymology of the word, hoard, and coupled with oral history interviews drawn from my own life, this thesis recasts “hoarding” as more complex than the current paradigm implies, pertaining to the rise of capitalism, commodity fetishism, and broader forms of socio-economic reciprocity which preceded and responded to formal and informal empire.

Supported by historical documents from major thinkers in political economy, classical Liberalism, Marxism, Social Anthropology, and Neoliberalism, alongside periodical documents from nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain and the United States, I argue that hoarding among the poor and socially vulnerable, such as those affected by post-colonialism, deindustrialization, austerity, statelessness, etc., may be reread as a mode of economic survival and social investment, if the economic idiosyncrasies of an individual hoarder’s subjective lifeworld and context are taken into consideration. In tandem with this line of reasoning, I argue that hoarding is a spectrum of behavior that also includes more ‘normative’ behaviors of the super-wealthy, including cash and land hoarding.

This thesis uses oral history, with cultural, anthropological, and literary sources, to shift the language around hoarding and to present it as an underlying logic of capitalism, as a mediator of interpersonal and family relationships, and as a dangerous extension of twentieth-century empire, functioning through hegemonic, legal, but deeply unethical institutions and financial tools such as major accountancy firms, central banks, international tax havens, and international corporations. Using sentimental objects from personal collections, I situate myself as embedded within history, and at the cusp of different economic and cultural worlds, wherein objects are read as unique signifiers of memory and meaning.