A few months into my estate sale crawl, I discovered that when sales are advertised as being a “real dig” or even “a bit of a dig,” this is code that the seller has been a something of a pathological collector along the lines of cartoonist R. Crumb. The old term for this was “pathological hoarding,” but the new and supposedly less pejorative term is “obsessive-compulsive collecting disorder.” The proposed description and diagnosis for this disorder in the upcoming fifth revised edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) offers the following description: “Persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of the value others may attribute to these possessions. This difficulty is due to strong urges to save items and/or distress associated with discarding. The symptoms result in the accumulation of a large number of possessions that fill up and clutter active living areas of the home or workplace to the extent that their intended use is no longer possible. If all living areas are uncluttered, it is only because of the interventions of third parties (e.g., family members, cleaners, authorities). The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning (including maintaining a safe environment for self and others).” I will confess that when it turned out that two of the three estate sale “digs” I first encountered happened to be the homes of retired college professors (seriously), I became a bit more self-conscious about my own home and office. On the other hand, that’s what we do—dig, sift, and collect; dig, sift, and collect. It is much neater and cleaner to focus on the self-evident realm of the religious—the family Bibles, the confirmation certificates, the menorahs, and the statues of Mary with the baby Jesus. I can compartmentalize and organize those things more readily. I know where to put them.
But what about the carefully kept shrines of tittie magazines and the holy sepulchres of Hummels? Where do I put them and the stories of their devotees? And what of the passing away of shrines over time, as with one woman’s reliquary of 165 pairs of fancy gloves, or closets stacked high with dusty embroidered linens—a vestige of holidays once celebrated in a way that no longer makes sense to most Americans. What was sacred once is no longer as lives shift and change and objects get discarded altogether, or they change hands and take on new meanings in new homes. Cast-off shamrocks that have lost their power in the U.S. take on a new life and become coveted symbolic treasures in their migration to Beijing tables. If, as Ray Browne has argued, popular culture studies are the “new humanities,” then what can cast-offs and collections tell us about American spiritualities and the religious dimensions of an ever-changing consumer culture?
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