Thing-Work: Organizing as Practice and Profession

The very best ethnographic research and writing is that which unseats our expectations and keeps us open to surprise. Carrie Lane tells us, in her introduction to More than Pretty Boxes, that while she originally thought her research with US-based home organizers would lead her to produce a cultural critique of the profession, she came to be struck by—and deeply appreciative of—the intimacy and complexity of their work. Lane’s affection for her organizer-interlocutors shines through this ethnography; the care with which she describes both the history and workings of the profession mirrors the care work that organizers themselves undertake with their clients.

My connection to this delightful ethnography comes not by way of any expertise in labour history or the anthropology of work, but rather by way of things—I have for many years been obsessed with how people relate to, talk about, and manage their material worlds and the material worlds of others. The ethnographic research I’ve conducted in this domain began in 2011 and took hoarding at its point of departure. Hoarding was having what we might call “a moment.” It was everywhere: as an emergent psychiatric diagnosis (Hoarding Disorder became a standalone diagnosis in the DSM-5, which was published in 2013); as a public health hazard (municipalities all over North America were putting into place hoarding task forces, and newspapers regularly reported stories of hoarding-related fires and other dangers); and as a media spectacle (all sorts of sensational TV shows suddenly appeared on the scene about hoarding, many of which were built around the spectacle of intervention). A primary motivation for my research was the question of why, at that specific historical moment, such intense popular and psychiatric scrutiny was being given to the designation of normative vs. pathological ways of being with things. As I started asking people questions, even casually, I saw again and again a kind of self-conscious anxiety about how “we” are supposed to consume (and not consume), how we are supposed to order and organize our belongings, and how we are supposed to throw (or not throw) things away. Hoarding’s public moment was part of a larger cultural moment that produced The Container Store, Marie Kondo, and Real Simple magazine; it was also the moment that professional home organizing exploded onto the scene. Lane watched all of this happen; her research fortuitously tracked this very moment. She recounts that when she began her research for this book, friends and acquaintances frequently expressed confusion about who her organizers were and what exactly they were organizing. By the time of the book’s publication, however, organizing had become a well-known and widely available service amidst an array of emergent lifestyle occupations like personal training and life coaching. NAPO (the National Association of Professional Organizers) also grew during this period, both in size and self-awareness. The Association grappled with the politics of inclusion (and exclusion), and organizers of color formed the National Association of Black Professional Organizers (NABPO) and #BlackGirlsWhoOrganize.

My own hoarding-related research led me to encounter, work alongside, and interview a handful professional organizers in 2014-2015. Stemming from this research, I wrote about how the work organizers do with their clients reorients them materially and affectively as it reorders their habits and things (Kilroy-Marac 2016). I also tried to get my head around the distinctions that are commonly made, in popular and psychiatric discourses, between a collection, a hoard, and an archive (Kilroy-Marac 2018). I saw among my organizer-interlocutors the keen ethnographic sensibility they brought to their work—their astute observation skills, the interest and patience with which they listened to clients, their ability to build rapport and navigate intimacy. They demonstrated an acute curiosity and desire to understand what makes people tick, and they were excited to share their thoughts about the difficulties (relational, emotional, economic, professional) of everyday North American life. These were delightful humans with great deal of insight into the human condition. Lane’s ethnography fills a gap by offering readers a brilliant cultural history of the emergence of this profession and a deep ethnographic dive into the profession-as-practice. Even beyond this, however, Lane shows us that we have a great deal to learn from organizers about the conditions of labour in the US at this moment, about neoliberal exploitation and exhaustion, about the gendered nature of paid (and unpaid) work, about good (and bad) jobs, about the pursuit of a meaningful career and what this might look like, about connection and presence, about consumerism and its discontents.

Given my fixation with how people think about, manage, and relate to their material possessions, my appreciation for the “organizing stories” included in Lane’s book will come as no surprise. These rich vignettes, which appear at the start of the book and also serve as interludes between chapters, provide readers with a glimpse of people’s everyday material entanglements and offer valuable insight into the practice of organisers’ work with clients. We also get to see Lane herself, participating as an assistant to her organizer interlocutors and observing their process. We meet clients like Lauren, who has no problem getting rid of paperwork with organizer Sara (and with Lane also assisting), but who clings tightly to her large collection of empty frames for the potential future selves and relationships they represent—frames that would hold works of art she might someday create, and that would be gifted to friends she had not yet met. We meet Marcia, a successful clothing designer and mother of three, who for years had worked out of a cluttered basement that doubled as her family’s storage space. After working with organizers, Marcia professed to feeling like a professional for the very first time. We meet Cece and her inalienable collection of coffee cups, and we meet Nan, who handled, tested, and told organizer Marilyn stories about each pen before deciding on its fate, but whose enthusiasm for sorting grew cold when faced with a deep pile of shirts.

By way of these “organizing stories” and presented in the second part of Lane’s book, readers not only get a sense for how people see past, present, and future versions of themselves in and through their material things, but also for the careful physical, emotional, and relational work organizers do with clients. We see the deep listening and affirmative support they offer as they help clients take stock of and reframe not just their material or domestic lives, but their desires, values, goals, and relationships—not to mention the gendered social and cultural expectations that drive them. Lane insightfully describes this as feminist work. In my own reading, I could not help but think of this labor as triadic (organizer-client-stuff) rather than dyadic (organizer-client), with material possessions serving as actants alongside organizers and clients. And I was especially drawn to what I came to see as the “sticking points” of their triadic interactions—the frictions, the small wounds and discomforts, the tense moments, and the pushed boundaries, as well as the affordances, the healing, and the work of repair.

There is much to be learned from Lane’s More than Pretty Boxes; I can’t wait to share it with my students, and I look forward assigning it in both my materiality/material culture and ethnographic methods courses. Just as Lane insightfully describes the work of organizers as a form of connective labor, so too might we come to understand the work of ethnographers—and in particular, the careful research at the heart of Lane’s brilliant ethnography—to be similarly cast.

References

Kilroy-Marac, Katie. 2016. “A Magical Reorientation of the Modern: Professional Organizers and Thingly Care in Contemporary North America.” Cultural Anthropology 31(3):439-458.

Kilroy-Marac, Katie. 2018. “An Order of Distinction (Or, How to Tell a Collection from a Hoard).” Journal of Material Culture 23(1): 20-38.

Author Bio

Katie Kilroy-Marac (PhD, Columbia University) is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. She is the author of An Impossible Inheritance: Postcolonial Psychiatry and the Work of Memory in a West African Clinic (University of California Press, 2019), which was awarded the 2019 Labrecque-Lee Book Prize by the Canadian Anthropology Society/ La Société canadienne d’anthropologie (CASCA). Kilroy-Marac is currently involved in two research projects: the first, tentatively titled “The Colonial Psychiatric Imagination in Senegal and Southern France, circa 1900,” investigates the relocation of West African mental patients to a large public asylum in Marseille between 1897-1914. The second considers hoarding and domestic accumulation practices across North America.