Article révisé par les pairs
| Résumé : | Research on Us storage space and accumulation reveals that hoarded objects are not only mementos of former sociality, but are often felt by their hosts as entities with whom ongoing social relationships of obligation and care must be negotiated. In this essay, I consider what it might mean to conceptualize storage (and its more extreme form, hoarding) as a kind of hospitality towards objects. This leads me to envision relations with objects in terms of hospitality rather than property. When objects become parasitic guests that take over the social space of the home, as in the case of compulsive hoarders, how does this encroach upon their ability to host actual people ? Examining the shifting balance between hospitality-toward-things and hospitality-toward-humans, between retention and redistribution, I consider the various ways that accumulations of social relations with material things and those with humans (wealth-in-people) entangle with one another. |
