Luisa Leonini

Department of di Sociology

Milan University,

Via Conservatorio 7

20122 Milano, Italy

Email: lleonini@mail.sociol.unimi.it

Paper to be discussed at ESA sub group SOCIOLOGY OF CONSUMPTION

Milan University 17-19 September 1998-

In contemporary society it is more and more difficult to perceive the complexity of our relation to things, their significance in our life; all tend to be confused with the exchange value of commodities, with their monetary expression, with the material possibility for us to acquire a particular product, to sacrifice part of our income in order to achieve something. This has produced also a confusion in the perception of needs, in the understanding of wants. Modern industrial society with its emphasis on impersonal relationships, individualistic behaviour, competition, working relations between employer and employee based on strictly economic grounds, is a clear manifestation of this phenomenon. Nevertheless it is important not to underrate the individual's capacity to react against this trend. We can study Baudelaire's attempt to deny and oppose the objectification of art; other less glamorous attempts can be found in the life of normal individuals.

In this sense Mauss is right when he claims that "homo-oeconomicus is not behind us, but before, like the moral man, the man of duty, the scientific man and the reasonable man".⁽¹⁾ He is right when he emphasizes that although our relationships with fellow human beings and with the external world have generally changed, still the modern individual has not been reduced to the state of a thing facing another thing but tries to assert himself as a human being.

It is often in the peripheral areas of our everyday life, in the marginal activities and hobbies, in our private contexts that we try to establish a satisfactory relationship with the world, that we try to recover aspects, feelings and meanings we have been gradually deprived of. If we analyze in this perspective, phenomena such as the diffusion and the expansion of do-it-yourself activities, the increasing interest in crafts- (weaving, pottery, leatherwork, etc.), in collecting, etc., we realise that all these are attempts to find an answer to a feeling of uneasiness and dissatisfaction that permeates the existence of modern individuals. These are attempts to satisfy needs and wants that do not find any fulfilment in the public life of the individual. In this way we try to avoid the objectification that permeates our relationships and our lives. From this point of view it is important to pay more attention, than is usually given them, to these residual activities. They in fact constitute a way of relating to things that tries to avoid the impersonality of the market, the objectification of relationships, the overlap of different meanings and their confusion.

Our interactions with others are cool and impersonal, the purely and deeply personal traits of one's life, are mostly absent from social contacts with other individuals. As Simmel correctly pointed out:

Discretion is at the basis of sociability and implies the restraining of human interaction within precise boundaries. The individual has to control his behaviour, he plays the role of the sociable person hiding his individuality under the impersonal freedom of a mask. The fact is that our interactions and relationships are imprisoned by cool and impersonal rules which prevent the expression of personality and the finding of a satisfactory sphere of identification and self-expression. In this sense one can speak of the unsociable character of sociability, of the fact that no individual, even the most successful and integrated in the social system, can entirely solve in it the problem of his own identity. A feeling of "selflessness" as Goffman puts it permeates the individual’s life, and the multiplicity of roles one has to play makes even more difficult the solution of this problem. This explains why the quest for identity is a universal problem in contemporary society.

Disappointment and dissatisfaction are indeed common aspects of the individual personality whatever one's success in professional life, whatever his working conditions, status, education, etc. In contemporary society it is highly probable that the individual will look for remedies more in private than in public life. It is for this reason that it is interesting to take into consideration those attempts to solve one's identity problems which are carried out in the private realm. As Goffman clearly observes, it is often in the 'cracks', in the apparently less significant and important spaces that our self resides:

The immersion in private life is perceived as a liberating experience, as the only way to express oneself without being constrained by social rules and rituals. Obviously, immersion in private life means very different things according to the personality, sex, age, education, status, etc., of the single actor. Anyway it is above all in the free time activities that one tries to find an answer to boredom, routine, frustration. One wishes for an escape, an area where he can abstract from everyday reality and construct an identity from new symbolic material. The existence of these areas is socially accepted and legitimate; their existence is institutionalized not because the individual perceived them as such but because society recognizes their importance as safety valves and for this reason regulates and monitors them and, because sectors of the leisure time industry exploit them by creating a wide market of products related to these activities.

The hobby is one of these free areas. Under this label an incredible number of different activities finds its place: modelling, collecting, gardening, do-it-yourself activities, etc. What distinguishes a hobby from a normal working activity is sometimes only the fact that the hobby is voluntarily undertaken, the time dedicated to it is not sold on the market, and it is perceived as an adequate opportunity for self-expression. Nevertheless it can have many aspects similar to or in common with the world one tries to escape from: routine, repetition, etc.

What interests me in the hobby is the fact that it is focussed on a world of non-human objects: one has to deal with paint, wood, glue, butterflies, stamps, flowers, etc. In almost every activity that finds its place under the label "hobby" a great deal of time is spent in searching, buying, classifying, organizing, arranging, and mastering this inanimate world. It is a small and fragile world made of material things, and the interaction between the individual and this world is not alien to obsessive and ritualistic features. All these activities have a solitary character; the individual, in this way, tries to isolate himself and to suspend consciousness, since there is no human being to interact with, to respond to. Often, the only people the hobbyist interacts with are the dealers of useful tools and, in some cases only, other individuals who share the same passions and with whom he makes exchanges, comparisons, etc. Both these categories (dealer and hobby-mate) have essentially a functional role more than a social one.

Most of the hobbies are pursued at home, a private and safe place, and quite often in a particular and specific place within the house that delimits space further, creating a sort of home within the home, a solid defence against the external world. But these precautions are not sufficient to prevent the infiltration of the external world into the hobbyist's den. As has been said, hobbies are socially accepted and institutionalized; they generally coexist peacefully with people's everyday life. But precisely the fact that these activities are carried out within normal life-plans brings as a consequence a contamination of these free areas by the very features one wants to escape: routine, intrinsic banality of the activity, ritualization of the experience by mass media, commercialization of all that concerns the hobby (specialist magazines, clubs, shops, etc.).

I would like to develop further the analysis of the hobby, of the role it plays in the individual's life by taking into consideration a specific but, at the same time, particularly significant example for the understanding of the role things play in our life.

A discussion of the phenomenon of collecting may shed light upon important aspects of these private enclaves of free expression and upon the meanings, functions and roles that things take on in everyday life.⁽⁵⁾

A hobby so widely spread and popular as collecting⁽⁶⁾ involves people from every background, with different working experiences and levels of education. I have deliberately chosen to study collectors of objects of little or no economic value. By keeping under control the "economic value" variable one can understand better which motivations and reasons compel so many people to surround themselves with material objects that have nothing to do with the communication of their spending power and status.

Through this analysis one may gain a better understanding of the meanings, roles, values, functions, projections that people attribute to the material world with which they build their refuges against anxiety, insecurity, feelings of "selflessness." By separating oneself from the external world and building one's private universe through the collected objects, the individual transfers himself to an imaginary made-to-measure world which reflects and responds to his most intimate needs, wishes and passions. A collector of war memories, for instance, at the same time half-ashamed and half-proud of himself, showed me a portrait of himself wearing an old military uniform. This is perhaps an extreme example of how through their beloved collections these individuals escape from everyday life and live - at an imaginary level - fantastic experiences, which respond to their needs and desires. In this sense, one can say that collections are, at least to a certain extent, personal phantasmagoria of the world. Schematically, one can say that there are four main motivations at the basis of collecting; a) the desire of possessing; b) the need of free expression, of spontaneous activity; c) the need to test oneself; d) the need to keep the world under control.

The tendency to accumulate and keep large amounts of objects, many of them of little or no use, is a typical feature of several individuals and is probably due to a sense of insecurity, it is in a way a sort of defensive behaviour against an unpredictable (and therefore unsafe) future. It is quite common to meet people who store used wrapping paper, empty jam jars, boxes of every shape, etc. But this is not enough to make collectors out of them.

Collectors love their objects and collecting means to them the possibility to project in them particular needs, to expand their personalities. They do not perceive their behaviour as a transitory attempt to find satisfaction to their needs but they in a way embody themselves in their collections. They are not able to give a rational explanation of this activity, of why they hoard a specific kind of object. Usually they tend to rationalize their behaviour by saying that in this way they preserve from destruction and disappearance these humble but beautiful products of human genius, in order to transmit them to future generations. But then, the collectors themselves, are the first to admit that this is not the real motivation, they just do not really know from which springs their behaviour originates, they stress that for them collecting is not a means to an end but an end in itself. The collected items are devoid of any trace of functional value: the can of beer is carefully emptied because the liquid can damage the beloved container, the packet of cigarettes is opened, reduced to a unidimensional state, and religiously located in a plastic envelope, wine, spirits, mineral water, soft drinks labels are carefully detached from the bottles and kept in albums, etc.

Possessing the objects is what really matters, not their usefulness. Actually, if the item is new - that is it has never been touched by other hands - it is more appreciated. The collector is deeply jealous about his collection, he does not generally like to show it and does not like the idea of lending, even if temporarily, a piece or two to somebody else. Jealousy is a feeling strictly linked to the idea of property since it arises when something belonging to us, i.e. in which we have particular rights, is taken or used by somebody else who has no rights in it.

It is crucial to understand the great importance that possessing has for the collector. There is a long list of anecdotes about collectors - extremely respectable individuals - who stole or commissioned thefts of particular objects possessed by other collectors or by institutions such as libraries, etc., in order to own the objects.⁽⁸⁾ These objects, whatever they are, are desired because they satisfy important needs, such as that of self-expression, of ownership, of testing oneself, because they represent and embody personal meanings and values. In this way they supply important material for the integration of the individual's personality.

These considerations, that in the case of collectors arise and stand out in an extreme way, are more generally valid in order to explain some aspects of the general relationship tying individuals and objects in everyday life. In the case of collectors the relevance and emphasis are simply stronger:

A number of examples of this attitude towards things can be found in everybody's life; our car, armchair, etc. In all these cases other than utilitaristic considerations influence our relations with personal belongings.⁽¹⁰⁾

Something has already been said about the need of private enclaves for the individual's self-expression. But it is necessary to add some further remarks. Variables such as routine, repetitiveness, alienation from work, do not seem to be relevant in order to explain why people need these free areas. One can find collectors in almost every possible occupation: from the industrial designer, to the successful painter, from the worker in the large factory to the architect, etc. Both extremely rich people and people of modest means collect the same kind of objects with the same determination and emotional involvement.

Variables such as gender and age seem to be far more important in order to explain this phenomenon. In fact the great majority of collectors are middle-aged males.⁽¹¹⁾

We can therefore say that there are modalities of relating to things that are more typical of one sex and of a particular age. (on this more below).

There are types of collection such as stamps, coins, etc., that probably share some elements with the speculative character of the accumulation of money. In fact both stamp and coin collecting can be pursued - and indeed often are - as forms of investment more than as an area of self-expression. In the interviews the collectors often criticized these forms of collecting as speculative and therefore alien to the mentality of the "true" and "pure" collector, who is far from the idea of accumulating objects as a form of investment. Other forms of collecting such as art, ancient books, etc., may have an ambiguous flavour, since the two motivations (collecting and investing) can coexist. For this reason I decided to limit this enquiry to collectors of valueless objects; in this way one can analyse the relevance that things have in our life apart from utility and value. From this point of view I think that the "pure" collector is an interesting character since we find in him amplified characteristics of our own ways of relating to objects.

Collecting is, as I said, a spontaneous activity since the collector acts for the sake of his personal satisfaction, neither for economic interest nor for conspicuous display nor for prestige reasons. His activity is not imposed on him by anybody. It is undertaken voluntarily often against pressures and derision - above all from the family - to abandon it or - at least - to devote to it less time and resources (emotional, economic, etc.). Indeed, collecting if it is not restrained and kept under control, can become the dominant interest and passion of the collector's life:

On the other hand, for collectors their passion is something absolutely essential for personal survival; an unbelievable emotional investment is made in it. Many of them dream of reaching the age of retirement to dedicate themselves full time to their beloved activity:

Oddly enough, the stimulus to a continuous enlargement of the collection has to be sought more in the solitary challenge of the individual to himself, in order to reach an abstract ideal of completeness, than in competition with other collectors. I say "abstract ideal of completeness" because the collector deliberately chooses his hunting territory in order to avoid the risk of completing the series of objects too easily. Actually, quite often, there is no possible logical end to his collecting and anyway, when seldom it happens, the collector immediately starts a new collection. The great majority of collectors then, maintain several collections at the same time although they have a favourite one.

The criteria according to which they consider one more important than the others are not usually related to the size of the collections but to biographical and personal reasons; the oldest, the most beautiful, etc.

In a way it is possible to say that collecting is an endless challenge to oneself, to reach a target that it is almost impossible to reach and, if reached, is moved further on; to acquire a sophisticated and deep knowledge of the field in which this challenge takes place and of all the necessary techniques to preserve the fruits of the chase.

This effort to continuously surpass oneself more than to compete and confront oneself with others makes collecting a solitary activity, where others come into play above all because of their functional roles: to make exchanges, to barter or to buy when the items collected are present on the market. It is very rare for collectors to make friends with other collectors.

They usually keep their collections jealously apart from the world, they do not like to talk about them. Female collectors seem to be even more reticent than men, they keep their passion under a deeper blanket of secrecy, they do not like bartering, making exchanges, showing their collections in exhibitions, etc.

Collectors generally do not like to show their "treasures" above all to other collectors and this, I believe, must be interpreted as a preventive defence against the jealousy, competition, terrible hatred that comparisons will inevitably set in motion. The direct competition with other collectors is frightening and therefore avoided in order not to suffer too much. To see a collection larger, more complete, than the one possessed, is such a dreadful experience that it is carefully avoided.

Others, in order to exclude competition from their activity chose to collect items that are not commonly gathered by others (e.g. mineral water labels).

Competition is deliberately kept at the margins of this activity probably because the emotional investment in collecting is so strong that if one started to compete with others one would be completely overcome by passion and collecting would become more a suffering than a way to express and find an answer to one's needs.

To complete the analysis of the most important characteristics of collecting one has to take into consideration the need to give order and a sense to the world, to classify, to keep the universe under one's control, to eliminate uncertainty. The single object for the collector is not important in itself but as a part of a series, of a whole.

According to the people interviewed, to classify, that is to give a logical order to the collection, is one of the greatest pleasure, together with the discovery and the possession of a new object. Every item is religiously registered, catalogued, ordered according to various criteria. In a word, their private world must be under control, neither uncertainty nor doubt can enter the collector's kingdom. Every item is a distinct element that has its proper place.

This aspect of classification is indeed extremely important -if not essential - to distinguish a collection from an assemblage of similar things. "The collection is a logical class of items accumulated and rationally ordered according to various criteria".⁽¹²⁾ In this concept the idea is implicit of a systematic and methodical plan to be pursued with extreme precision.

Classifying "is a manifestation of a taxonomic propensity akin to bureaucratic rationality".⁽¹³⁾ It is therefore an expression of a way of relating to the world that is typical of modern society.

The originality of the collector lies in the creation of his own unique taxonomy.

All the characteristics we have described in discussing collectors are indeed present, with a different intensity, in our way of relating to the world. We are all aware of the importance that certain particular objects have for us and of the difficulty with which we part with them just because we identify in them, and through them we build our identity; at the same time we know how it is important sometimes to isolate ourselves in a personal world in order to assemble together our identity; how annoying and embarrassing it can be to find ourselves in an environment where things and people are out of place, and the sense of anxiety it can stimulate.⁽¹⁴⁾ There are then, persons that, although they are not collectors, have strong similarities with them in their way of relating to objects. In the miser personality, for example, one finds a similar need of possessing, a similar tendency to emphasise quantity. But the prevalent feeling in the miser's personality is the insecurity that induces the person to hoard money or other valuables because of the uncertainty of the future. In a sense the miser's need of possessing is similar to that of the collector, but what the miser seeks is the accumulation of money and not of particular (and often cheap) objects. There is no hunting for the beloved and wished objects, but a rigid control of personal consumption in order to save and accumulate as much as possible.⁽¹⁵⁾

Both in the miser's accumulation of wealth and in the conspicuous hoarding of precious objects, typical of some rich people (above all the nouveaux riches who have to legitimise through consumption the recently acquired status), many important elements typical of the "pure" collector are lacking: there is no personal effort in seeking and "hunting" the objects, no passion and love towards them since they are appreciated only for their exchange-value. For this very reason they will be more easily sold or exchanged with new ones while, in the case of the collector, the real end is their mythical completeness.

An attitude towards objects similar to a certain extent to that of the "pure" collector may be found in the amateur collector. Both the amateur and the collector are practitioners with a definite and ending purpose about them. Both of them pursue their activities because they enjoy them and their pursuit is enduring. They are serious about their leisure activities. Still there are important differences between their personalities: what attracts the amateur towards the acquisition of objects is above all an intellectual interest, it is a search led by a cultural interest which one has in particular objects, for their rarity, oddity or whatever other quality. It is not a desperate effort-to reach completeness; quantity is not a relevant feature of his pursuit. He does not consider his objects as part of a series, but appreciates the particular qualities of a single object, its uniqueness.

As has been previously said, collecting is mainly a male activity. This aspect of the phenomenon deserves some attention since it implies that there are gender differences in the way in which we relate to the material world of objects.

In a kind of list⁽¹⁷⁾ of collectors of objects of little or no economic value made in Italy in 1977, out of 1229 collectors only 86 (7%) were women. From an inquiry I made on advertisements in a specialised magazine in 1981⁽¹⁸⁾, it emerges that out of 454 collectors 48 (10.6%) were women.

Besides, all collectors interviewed stated that women were a small minority among them and this is asserted also in all the literature on the subject.⁽¹⁹⁾

Furthermore, the universe of collectibles is divided into female and male objects. There are in fact "feminine objects" such as hat pins, perfume bottles, thimbles, dolls, fans, etc., which are the classical objects of female collections, while walking sticks, war medals, war memories, car and train models, etc., are part of the male world of collectibles. Of course, there are also objects with a neutral state, in the sense that they are collected by both sexes (post cards, commercial cards, matches, etc.). This sexual segregation of objects can be explained by considering that each sex is more attracted by objects that are in some way related to their life experience and that collections are, to a certain extent, extremely mediated phantasmagorias of the world. So the train ticket collection, for example, might have some relation with desire and love for travelling, the idea of adventure and so on.

Apart from the differences in the items collected by the two sexes, another element of diversity may be found in the way in which males and females organise their collections. Men find great pleasure not only in hunting and possessing their beloved objects but also as we have seen in organizing and classifying them according to various and personal criteria. Women, on the contrary, tend to be more accumulators than collectors, in the sense that they usually hoard large quantities of things of the same kind but do not classify them, do not order them according to any logic, nor, generally, become experts in studying, restoring, repairing, etc. of them. Unlike men, they do not like to exchange any object they possess even if they have more than one copy of it; they usually keep their collections in private places (bedroom, drawers, etc.) so that they are not accessible to the sight of strangers and guests. Many women chose to meet me for the interview in a "neutral" territory (cafeteria, place of work, etc.). They did not like the idea of showing their collections, while men usually were very proud of displaying them and talking with somebody who had no competitive interests in collecting, but showed curiosity toward their activities and took them seriously (often collectors have to submit to the derision of relatives and friends).

Another interesting difference is related to the period of life in which the two genders collect. Men, as I have said, usually become collectors around the age of forty even if some of them have been collecting in their youth too.⁽²⁰⁾ Female collectors, instead, do not pursue this activity while they have young children but later on in life, when children are grown up and when they retire from work (if they had outside employment). Usually women say that they had no time for any hobby while the children were 'at home', they had a lot of housework, and, sometimes, an outside job. Some of the women I interviewed started collecting just when they retired. Others, who were collectors in their youth and adolescence, interrupted it for about thirty years (from twenty to fifty), that is when they got married and started a family, and resumed collecting just about fifty-five, when they had more time at their disposal.

Time is indeed a necessary requirement for collecting, since a considerable amount of it has to be devoted to the search for the beloved objects, to going to exhibitions and specialised markets, to particular meetings points where collectors of specific objects periodically meet and exchange their materials. Then time is needed to correspond with collectors living in other cities and countries in order to obtain new material, etc.

For a married woman with children, housework and often a job it is indeed problematic to find the time to accomplish all these actions which are necessary if one wants to pursue an activity such as collecting. It is not by chance that the only woman I interview who was collecting with a "male style" was unmarried and without any domestic duty. In fact for a married woman it is extremely difficult to have a rigid timetable so that she has the certainty of some time for herself in a given day, at a particular time. Certainty that is necessary if she wants to go to those particular markets and to attend those meetings that happen only once in a while and for a few hours only. Her duties towards the family prevent her from dedicating time to this activity:

Besides, one has to dispose not only of time but also of money in a very free way, since it is spent for buying useless and almost valueless objects (many of these objects in fact have a value and a price only in the collectors' world and nobody would give a penny for them in the "normal" market). Therefore, it is difficult -if not impossible - to justify the purchase on rational grounds. (Some of the women confessed to retaining some of the household budget so as to have some "secret money" to be spent on collecting.) Even when both husband and wife work, the woman tends to be less free in the use of money. Male collectors quite often do not communicate to anybody in the family how much money they spend in this activity unless it is a great expenditure (the purchasing of a whole collection from another collector). Women feel always guilty toward the family if they use their money and time for personal and private purposes:

These two elements - time and money - contribute to explain why less women than men collect. But I do not think that they give a wholly satisfactory explanation of this different behaviour. There are gender differences in the way in which one interacts with the material world, in the meanings that one attributes to objects, in the projections one makes.

In the case of collecting, for example, there is not only a difference in the sense that it is mainly a male activity, but also in the ways in which the two sexes pursue their collecting.

As I have said men - in this activity - show a greater propensity to classify, to organise their collections according to a bureaucratic order. Condet in his work on collecting emphasized this fact by arguing that "woman's character will push her to seek above all the intrinsic qualities of the collected object, and it will make of her a dilettante".⁽²¹⁾ But still one has to explain why, from this point of view, women behave differently. I would argue that the answer must be sought in the fact that men, being more involved in public life, have absorbed far more than women the principles and the logic on which modern industrial society is based.

Contemporary society requires from the individual specific qualities, particular ways of behaving which emphasise bureaucratic, technical, instrumental, functionally rational requirements.⁽²²⁾

This kind of attitude toward the world has permeated men more than women who have been traditionally segregated from the public sphere and relegated in the private realm, where they are encouraged to play an expressive more than instrumental role. And even when women have a public life they are expected to behave in an expressive more than instrumental way.⁽²⁴⁾ This different attitude toward the world, this different attribution of meanings to material objects as well as to human beings emerges quite clearly, as we shall see, also from the interviews made to people who have been robbed.

If among male collectors the irrationality of collecting is compensated for by the rationality of the method through which the end is pursued, among female collectors this opposition does not exist: neither rationality of the end nor rational strategies in order to pursue it, nor rational order are present in their hoarding of objects. For this reason one is inclined to say that women tend to be more accumulators than "true" collectors.

All the above considerations induce us to consider male collecting as more contaminated by the logic, criteria and principles that are predominant in public life; exchange, functional rationality, taxonomic propensity, emulation, etc., are all fundamental elements of male collecting activity and permeate and mark these private enclaves. Female collecting is, in a certain sense, more passional, more irrational and emotive.

Furthermore, some needs that in the case of men find an answer in collecting (such as the need of order, of keeping the world under control), in the case of women probably find satisfaction in other areas such as compulsive tidying up of the house (a number of female collectors declared this attitude), which are more "natural" to the kind of socialization they received, and therefore women do not need to look for a safety valve in other spheres.

What I argue is that the different socialisation of the two genders within society induces them to find satisfaction in different directions, in relating to the world (animate and inanimate) in different ways. In particular - since we are concerned here with the individual’s relationships with the material world - it should be stressed that the two genders interact with objects in different ways, find diverse solutions to satisfy similar needs, attribute various and different meanings to the world that surrounds them.

Moreover, the need of order, of keeping reality under control, is linked to the anguish that the ideas of transience and uncertainty produce. In this context the creation of a personal universe of objects, clearly defined in time and space, built according to rigid and precise criteria, becomes an attempt to circumscribe and keep under control one's anxiety. This explains the emotional involvement that is present in collecting. The individuals consider their collections as their creatures; they are no longer an assemblage of material inanimate things, they are perceived almost as living entities. This personification well represents the objectification of the need of possessing and love and emerges quite clearly in the way in which collectors talk of them.

As I have suggested, women have other domains where to give vent to their anxieties and find an answer to these needs. Besides, probably, maternity in itself gives an answer to the anguish related to transience, to death. (Several collectors told me that this activity had some, although confused, relation with the fear that the idea of death generated in them). The emotional involvement present in collecting is expressed in the anxiety - common to all male collectors - concerning the destiny of their objects after the collector's death. They are terrified by the idea that their collections might be split and shared among several people, or that they might be sold to somebody who lacks the competence to understand and appreciate them.

For this reason it seems that several collectors - when they think they are close to death - separate themselves from their collections by giving or selling them to other collectors, so that they are sure they will be rightly appreciated and loved; or when it is possible, (that is when the collections have particular characteristics), they decide to give them to museums or other institutions.

Women, on the other hand, do not seem concerned about the destiny of their collections; they say they do not care about it.

A few remarks on collecting by children seem appropriate,⁽²⁵⁾ since interesting analogies and differences with adult behaviour can be found. Collecting appears to be a quite popular activity among children of both sexes, being equally frequent among boys and girls.

As among adults, there are objects collected prevalently only by one sex and objects attracting above all the other one. Age too plays an important role in the definition of the objects that are collected; there are collections that are an adolescent affair while others are pursued during infancy.

Since the collected objects represent an extremely mediated phantasmagoria of the world, it is clear that according to the age, sex, place in which one lives, personal history, etc., it will alter the kind of object on which one's attention is fixed, fantasies are reflected and needs projected. Apart from differences in the kinds of objects which are collected, there are differences related to the size of collections; the influence exerted by friends, the love for quantity in the pre-adolescent period, (from eight to eleven or twelve years), collections reach their height in quantity and genuineness. There is more interest in the things themselves, as well as in the collecting of them. The interest is more directed, more purposeful, answers the call of inner needs more strongly. The imitative element is very strong at this period. With regard to ‘inner need’ we notice that the play interest reaches its height here, as shown in the marble, doll, etc., collections. The interest in nature too is more prominent at this age than at any other, shown in the collection of flowers, stones, mosses, butterflies, shells, eggs, etc. As regards ‘imitation’ we find that there are some types of collections more wide-spread at this age than earlier or later. At this age, too, the 'possession' idea of childhood seems to develop into love of quantities. The largest collections come now.

Collecting progressively dies out in adolescence giving way to other interests such as 'the sentimental and social, the hunting and the trading'.⁽²⁷⁾

Although collecting among children is evenly distributed between sexes, there are different ways of carrying out this activity. Boys seem to play a more active role in order to enlarge their collections (seeking, exchange, etc.,) while girls rely more on other people's co-operation and help (the objects are given to them). This characteristic is reflected in adult collecting. While men are very active and enjoy very much searching, hunting, bartering and trading, women very often declare that they enlarge their collections through gifts and the co-operation of relatives. When they buy objects they do it in their husband's company, so that the purchase itself has almost the flavour of a gift.

Among children the interest in quantity and the imitative behaviour seem to be the two most important motivations toward collecting, while competition with others seems to play a minor role. In contrast with imitation, or doing as others do, rivalry, or doing more than others do, seems to hold a comparatively small place, and in contrast with interest in quantity, interest in variety, in kind, is insignificant. The fact that imitation among children is an important element of collecting is interesting. It shows the sociable character of this activity, since they do what others do and interact by exchanging, trading, etc. Since competition plays a minor role it does not engender anxiety as among adults and therefore does not produce isolation, anti-social attitudes and so on.

This low interest in classification that we find in children is remindful of the behaviour of female collectors. For both of them one could say that obtaining a large quantity of a particular kind of object is more important than organizing them according to a criterion, than reaching completeness (since, if the collection is not "ordered", it is not possible to know which are the missing objects). In the case of children and women the desire to possess is by far the predominant and most relevant one. The methodical perseverance typical of collecting is essentially an adult male attitude. This kind of attitude is linked to and derives from a way of perceiving the world that is produced by modern society and that gradually permeates every aspect of the individual's life. Children and women are affected by it to a lesser degree, since they have been traditionally asked to play a more expressive than instrumental role.

The deep reasons of this quest without end must be sought in an attempt to address anxieties and dissatisfaction of different origin, which make human relationships difficult and problematic. What the collector asks of his beloved objects is the possibility of an absolute and exclusive identification. Objects, from this point of view, answer in a better way than human beings these demands, since for their nature - they are passive recipients of the collector's passion. Once possessed, they cannot escape and you are their only master. You can build a personal world with precise rules - you can create a personal sphere in which to feel safe. Each collector establishes rules and laws (kind of object, period of production, place of production, kind of material, etc.) which govern this world, and can autonomously and freely make a plan and work for its realisation. Sometimes it may be the only chance the individual has to test himself in such a complete task since it implies both the planning and the actualisation of a project. It is, in a way, a personal and private attempt to achieve that completeness (though only in abstract terms) which has almost disappeared from everyday existence.

Hunting, discovering, possessing, classifying, are all essential and basic aspects of collecting and all extremely important ones. The universe built to measure by each collector is perceived and experienced as a safe space since it is obsessively ordered according to criteria established by the single collector. There cannot be unpredictable events, nor uncertainty nor insecurity; actually, collecting is certainty and security. The collection is the most faithful creature the person can possess. It has precise spatial and temporal borders and therefore it is free from anxiety connected with the sense of transience.

In collecting there is an overturning of the rules of the game governing everyday life where the individual has to submit to the obligations and constraints typical of social life, where the bureaucratic order imposes itself on our existence, where insecurity, competition, anxiety, hurriedness, struggle against time characterise our daily lives. Collecting therefore seems to be, within certain limits, a constraint-free area where it is possible to express oneself freely, to overturn the rules that dominate public life. But in fact, it is deeply contaminated by these very rules: it is threatened by routine, compulsion to repeat, monotony. It reflects, to a certain extent, the world from which one wants to escape, it is an odd mixture of irrationality (the attraction and fixation to a particular kind of object) and rationality (the criteria according to which one classifies), of passion and cool precision, of loneliness and creativity. The collector talks to and interacts with things; his passion is a solitary one, others are excluded and the collection itself becomes a substitute for human relationships, and a far more docile and tranquillising one as the collector himself establishes the limits of his world, the rituals to be respected.

1. M. Mauss, The Gift, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.

3. E. Goffman, Asylums, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968, p. 280

4. S. Cohen, L. Taylor, Escape Attempts: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Everyday Life, London: Allen Lane, 1976, p. 99.

5. The following reflections on collecting are based on research I have carried out on this subject. For more details cf. the methodological appendix.

6. Although one cannot have statistical evidence on the dimensions of the phenomenon, the large number of specialised magazines, the clubs and organizations that deal with it in many European countries and in the United States may give a general idea of the expansion of collecting in modern society.

7. W. Benjamin, Unpacking my Library, H. Arendt (ed.) Illuminations, Glasgow: Fontana, Collins, 1969, p. 67.

8. See, for example, M. Rheims, La vie etrange des objet, Paris: Librarie Plon, 1959; H. Condet, Essai sur le collectionnisme, Paris: Jouve & C. Editeurs, 1921.

9. E. Beaglehole, Property. A Study in Social Psychology, London: Allen & Unwin, 1931, p. 300.

10. We shall develop further this subject in the next chapter when we discuss robbery victims.

11. All the literature on collecting confirms this fact. See, for example, H. Condet, op. cit., M. Rheims, op. cit. The interviews with collectors point in the same direction.

12. D. Dannefer, "Rationa1ity and Passion in Private Experience: Modern Consciousness and the Social World of Old-Car Collectors", in Social Problems, vol. 27, n. 4, 1980, p. 402.

13. Ibidem, p. 401.

14. On this topic see M. Douglas, Purity and Danger, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966.

15. On the miser's attitude toward the world see G. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, London: Routledge and Regan Paul, 1978, above all pp. 238-47.

16. M. Rheims, op. cit., p. 4; on this subject see also R.A. Stebbins, "The Amateur", in Pacific Sociological Review. vol. 20, n. 4, October 1977, pp. 582-606.

17. Il Brogliaccio, Elenco volontario del collezionismo minore italiano, Vito Arienti, Lissone, 1979.

18. cf. the methodological appendix.

19. see H. Condet, op. cit., M. Rheims, op. cit., D. Dannefer, op. cit.

20. The phenomenon of collecting among children and youngsters is a very common one, and popular with both sexes; this does not necessarily imply that a child who collects will be a collector later on in life. Many of the most fanatic collectors never collected in their infancy and adolescence.

21. H. Condet, op. cit., p. 29.

22. I am referring here to the analyses of B. Berger, et al., The Homeless Mind, New York: Random House, 1973; A. Geheln, Man in the Age of Technology, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, etc.

23. D. Dannefer, op. cit. p. 393.

24. On this subject see L. Glennon, Women and Dualism, New York: Longman, 1973; T. Parsons, The Social System, Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1951.

25. The following remarks on Children's collecting are based on an analysis of secondary literature on the subject. Among others I would like to mention the following works: C. Burk, "The Collecting Instinct", Pedagogical Seminary, vol. 7, 1900, pp. 179-207; M. Rheims, op. cit.; S.E. Wiltse & Hall, "Children's Collections", Pedagogical Seminary, vol. VI, 1891, pp. 234-35; D.W. Winnicott, Collected Papers: through paediatrics to psychoanalysis, London: Tavistock Publications, 1958; Ibidem, Playing and Reality, Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, 1971; M. Wulff, "Fetishism and objects choice in early childhood", Psychoanalytic Quarterly, vol. 15, 1946, pp. 450-475.

26. cf. C. Burk, op. Cit., p. 191.

27. Ibidem, p. 193

28. Ibidem, p. 202.