COLLECTING

It has been estimated that one of every three Americans collects something (Schiffer, Downing, and McCarthy). Just how common collecting is depends on how it is defined. If the definition encompasses acquiring and possessing a clothing wardrobe, family photographs, and music, then few people in the more affluent world are not collectors. are not collectors. However, that definition is not widely held and can generally be ignored. Rather, collecting is the process of actively, selectively, and passionately acquiring and possessing things removed from ordinary use and perceived as part of a set of nonidentical objects or experiences (Belk 1995b, p. 67).

By this definition, individuals who seek, acquire, and keep different music CDs, records, or tapes and who listen to these recordings (ordinary use) would not be collectors, even if they are passionate in their music consumption experiences. But those who acquire and keep music in order to treasure it as part of a set of music would be collectors. The same is true of clothing. Individuals who collect and treasure hats but do not normally wear them are collectors, while those with closets full of shoes that they wear are not collectors. Individuals who take photos of family and vacations in order to recall these people and events are not collectors, even if they maintain photo albums or digital archives with thousands of such photos. But those who ardently build sets of photos of particular types (e.g., photos of old barns, daguerreotypes, photos by Robert Mapplethorpe) because of their rarity, beauty, or interest are collectors.

This definition also distinguishes collecting from curating, hoarding, and accumulating. People who have collections can be curators without being collectors if they do not actively add to or modify their collections. Although they may have once been collectors while they assembled the objects, if they no longer make new acquisitions, they are no longer collectors. Hoarders fail to be collectors on two counts: They quite likely have multiple identical objects (e.g., rolls of toilet paper), and they plan to put these objects to their ordinary use. Likewise, packrats who cannot bear to part with objects are not collectors because they are neither selective nor passionate about the objects they retain. They also may envision a possible future use for these objects.

Each year auction houses like Sotheby's sell billions of dollars of collectibles. At the lower end of the market, baseball cards alone have sales of over $500 million in the U.S. market (Rogoli). The $250 million in annual sales by the Bradford Exchange suggests the size of the collectible plate market (Berman and Sullivan). While until recently the vast majority of collectors could not hope to recoup their investments in their collections, much less profit from their collections, the Internet and online auctions like eBay are rapidly changing the potential to find ready buyers and establish market prices for virtually any collectible object. But these observations falsely suggest that collecting is an investment activity. This is seldom the case, and investing may be the antithesis of collecting.

Collecting as Consuming

A collection is a special set of objects pursued and cherished by the collector for reasons other than the use value of these objects. A collection of interesting pebbles in an 80,000-year-old cave habitat in France suggests that collecting is not a new human passion. Nevertheless, it appears that the incidence and magnitude of collecting increases with the growth of societal affluence and during periods when contact between cultures introduces new and novel objects into circulation.

In the United States, the earliest collections were likely of Indian arrowheads and hunting trophies. Except for a small number of the elite, few early Americans had the time or money to devote to collecting purchased objects such as books or art. Among the less elite, some of the earliest U.S. collectors were artists and clergymen. Charles Wilson Peale was a prominent collector-artist who collected and eventually exhibited portraits, fossils, insects, minerals, stuffed birds, and busts of heroes of the American Revolution. Ministers with noted collections included Cotton Mather and his son Samuel, who collected books; William Sprague, who collected autographs; and William Bentley, who collected portraits, prints, books, manuscripts, furniture, coins, and various specimens of natural history, ethnology, and archaeology. By the late nineteenth century collecting had become more of a mass phenomenon in the United States; popular areas of collecting included postage stamps, cigarette cards and other chromolithographs, pressed flowers, cigar bands, coins, and antiques.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the increase in collecting in the United States has been aided by decreasing work hours, increased affluence, and greater alienation in the workplace. Organizations like the Campfire Girls, Girl Scouts, Cub Scouts, and Boy Scouts have also played a part in legitimizing collecting as an activity among children. As collecting became more popular, advertisers like cigarette companies provided collectible objects to win loyal patrons, and other companies began to market products specifically intended to be purchased and collected, like model airplanes or Christmas plates.

Inasmuch as collecting can be thought of as a perpetual quest for inessential luxury objects, it is easy to infer that collecting is an exaggerated expression of consumer culture. Certain aspects of collecting do seem to be related to consumerism, especially in an era like the new millennium, when the majority of collectible objects are purchased (rather than found or made by the collector) and when many objects are produced and marketed with the express intent of inspiring people to collect them. For most collectors desire is born and reborn as they hunt or save for the objects of their dreams. Evidence from the early 2000s suggests that such object desires may be prompted by an underlying desire for the state of unfulfilled but hopeful desire itself.

But to summarize collector motives as an expression of materialism and consumerism and to conclude that the phenomenon of collecting is simply a socially sanctioned manifestation of living in a consumer society is to overlook other factors that help to account for our fascination with this particular leisure activity. At an individual psychological level, explanations of collecting emphasize possible benefits of this activity to the collector: being able to control a small world of collectible objects, feeling accomplishment, achieving success in competition with other collectors, gaining status within a narrow avocational realm, deriving interpersonal pleasures from interacting with other collectors, seeking economic gain, enjoying the "thrill of the hunt" in seeking rare objects and bargain-priced treasures, developing expertise and connoisseurship, pursuing self-definition and self-extension in the collection, kindling nostalgia and recapturing childhood joys, feeling a sense of contribution to society by "rescuing" treasures overlooked by others, and even gaining immortality through the postmortem preservation of a collection. At a more psychoanalytic level, collecting has been characterized as a striving to earn parental love denied or frustrated in childhood. With so many people collecting such a wide array of objects, no single motive can fully account for all of this activity.

Collecting and Society

A more sociological set of factors also needs to be taken into consideration in trying to understand why we collect. Collecting requires that the collector perceive value in the set of objects collected, and this valuation depends on the judgments of others. Whether these others are fellow collectors competing for the same objects or those who learn of the collector's activities and collection, social appraisal of collecting activity is hard to avoid. This appraisal likely starts in childhood when parents sanction collecting and subtly or overtly suggest rules of order, pattern, and selectivity that distinguish a "good" collection from a "bad" one. In a broader sense the activity or hobby of collecting has been characterized as "serious leisure" (Stebbins; Gelber, 1999). That is, collecting can be approached as a purposeful and productive activity that is more worklike than playlike. This orientation likely appeals to those steeped in puritanical guilt that their leisure activity might otherwise be characterized as frivolous, playful, self-indulgent, or childlike. As Steven Gelber explains, because the objects of most collections are luxury products from a consumer society, social approval is more likely to be forthcoming if collecting can be framed as an act of production (of a meaningful, purposeful collection) rather than an act of consumption (of the baubles of a consumer society).

That a worklike orientation and justification for collecting is adopted by some collectors is not surprising considering the opprobrium often directed toward collecting. In most fiction about collectors, including John Fowles's The Collector, Honoré de Balzac's Cousin Pons, Gustave Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet, and Bruce Chatwin's Utz, collecting is portrayed as a strange obsession and collectors are characterized as silly, asocial, and narrowly focused isolates who have chosen the world of things over the world of people. While such views of collectors are most prevalent in fiction, they are found in behavioral analyses as well. For example, Jean Baudrillard describes collectors as infantile and deficient personalities; Werner Muensterberger suggests that there is a parallel between the activities of collectors and the "fetishes of preliterate human kind" (p. 9).

Besides taking a worklike approach, a further escape from social critiques of collecting can be found in the romantic notion of the collectors' passion. Passionate collectors yearn to add adored objects to their collections and can be carried away by these emotions. Collecting transcends the here and now and transports collectors to a special realm filled with myth, ritual, and sacred objects that are revered and seen as sublime. Within this discourse collectors are saviors who risk all to rescue treasures that are inadequately appreciated by noncollectors. Unlike those who see empty beer cans or used postage stamps as trash, collectors find these objects to be sources of intense desire for the blissful delight their possession is imagined to bring.

Passionate collectors also potentially escape the critique that collecting is the epitome of materialism. Rather than striving for status or economic gain, romantic collectors place the collection above nearly everything else, including the money and labor that are sacrificed in the noble pursuit of these objects. Dealers in collectible objects are accordingly seen as noncollectors who instead pursue the base motives of profit and gain. By elevating the collection and its objects to the extreme where passion overwhelms reason, collectors behave in a way that can be seen as antithetical to the charge of materialism. At the same time, others have charged that this is merely a sublimation of sexual desire and that, like romantic love, collectors overesteem and idolize the beloved, which in this case is a collectible object.

While collecting passion is a romantic ethos to which many may aspire, for many collectors collecting is not an all-embracing enterprise. One example includes collectors who would not be collecting were it not for the frequent receipt of collectible gifts in a certain category (e.g., nutcrackers, souvenir spoons, representations of frogs, owls, elephants, or pigs). Others may simply stop collecting and become curators of "dead" collections or dispose of former collections. Collecting is common in childhood, but often as children approach puberty they abandon their collections. Increased sexual interests and the association of former collections with an earlier period of childhood are likely responsible for this decline in interest. Thus, Beanie Babies, Pokéman characters, stickers, baseball cards, Barbies, and other once-revered objects may find themselves unceremoniously dispatched to a box, closet, or drawer.

Occasionally, marketer-inspired fads make temporary collectors of those who normally express little or no interest in collecting. For instance, in 1998, McDonald's introduced in its 147 Hong Kong restaurants three-inchtall plastic Snoopy dolls. The restaurants featured Snoopy dressed in a different national costume each day. People began queuing up early to buy the dolls; when fights broke out over queue jumping, police had to be called in to restore order. Although the dolls cost less than U.S.$1 with the purchase of an Extra Value Meal, some people paid more than U.S.$100 per doll to complete their collections. While most commercial promotions are not as successful as this one, the mania found among these temporary Hong Kong collectors demonstrates how collecting something can become fashionable and intensely competitive, simply because others are doing it.

At a political and institutional level, it is easy to see the links between collecting and the capitalist system of commodity relations. Indeed, Gelber characterizes stamp collecting as a metaphor for the free market system; it teaches competition, accumulation, buying, trading, and profit making. Daniel Cook characterizes 1990s fads of collecting sports "chase" cards, Beanie Babies, and Pokémon trading cards as teaching children to value acquisition for acquisition's sake. Brenda Danet and Tamar Katriel report that not even religion is exempt from collecting commodification, as children in Israel collect rabbi trading cards. Stamp collecting was prevalent in the former Soviet Union and contemporary China. A similar phenomenon was observed in Romania from 1991 to 1992. Romanians, who were barred from leaving the country during the years of communism, collected stamps and maps that allowed them to travel vicariously.

The Collector

Not all childhood collections are abandoned; adults, especially middle-age men, also start new collections. Sigmund Freud, for example, began collecting antiquities upon the death of his father. Women also collect, but men dominate most areas of collecting. This dominance may be a reflection of economic power, competitiveness, or desire for mastery, but collecting also involves stereotypically feminine traits such as creating, preserving, and nurturing the collection. However, the gender bias in collecting may be diminishing or disappearing. Susan Pearce finds that in the United Kingdom at least as many women as men are collectors.

There are, nevertheless, gender differences in the types of objects collected. Gender role stereotypes help account for the predominance of men as collectors of military objects, weapons, machines (including cars, model trains, and tractors), sports memorabilia, and beer cans, and the predominance of women as collectors of dolls, jewelry, housewares, and animal replicas. In analyzing a pair of husband and wife collectors in which he collected antique fire engines and African hunting trophies and she collected mouse replicas, Belk, Wallendorf, Sherry, and Holbrook detected the following Female to Male differences in symbolism:

Pearce expands upon this list in a similar vein. As these contrasts suggest, the woman's collection not only exhibits stereotypical female traits, but also is likely to be esteemed as less important than the man's. There are exceptions to such patterns, however, and there are women who have been prominent in many areas of collecting.

The collector can be disparaged on two opposing grounds. One criticism, especially likely to be directed at women, is that collecting is a trivial and wasteful consumption activity. The gendered and class-related nature of this criticism is evident in Rémy Saisselin's observation that in nineteenth-century France women who collected were seen as "mere buyers of bibelots," while male collectors were seen to be seriously enacting purposeful and meaningful vision.

A historical grain of truth that may underlie this characterization of female collectors is that women have historically commanded fewer economic resources, and therefore, like poorer classes, have found it more difficult to assemble the "best" collections in the highest status areas of collecting such as fine art.

The other criticism of collectors is that they are obsessive-compulsive personalities who are addicted to an unhealthy acquisitive and possessive habit. As Thatcher Freund observes of one antique collector:

His love for objects consumed him in a way that it consumes many collectors and dealers. Those who called him "obsessive". . . generally admitted . . . that "We're all neurotic. We're bugged. People involved with objects are compulsive. They care more about objects than they do about people sometimes. Their relationships with people are difficult" (pp. 183–184).

While a small portion of collectors may be clinically obsessive-compulsive (including historical examples of those who steal, kill, and impoverish themselves for the sake of their collections), this characterization does not apply to the vast majority of collectors. Nevertheless, a number of collectors themselves describe their collecting activity as an addiction, refer to their "habit," and speak of needing to get their "fix." This self-characterization is partly a humorous tongue-in-cheek effort to justify their unusual dedication to the pursuit of their collecting hobbies through hyperbole, and partly a semiserious attempt to excuse their behavior by invoking a recognizable medical model. Furthermore, by invoking the label of obsession, collectors may attempt to participate in the romantic model of passionate artists giving everything to their creations, which in this case are their collections.

But the romantic notion of passionate collectors differs from the romantic notion of passionate artists in that collectors are more consumers than they are artists. The notion of a perpetual desire to desire brings to mind Colin Campbell's contention that the essence of contemporary consumer culture is Romanticism and an endless cycle of desire and purchase. So too with collectors who simultaneously long for completion of the collection and fear this final end to collecting. When collectors see the end in sight with completion of a collection, they often either increase the standard they had previously set for their collections or switch to other collecting areas entirely. Thus, desire is renewed, and collecting continues.

The idea of completing a collection is applicable to the sort of collection exemplified by stamp collecting, where any given category contains a fixed set of stamps. This type of taxonomic box-filling collecting is called Type A collecting by Danet and Katriel. By contrast, Type B collectors follow aesthetic criteria and thus can never definitively complete a collection. Here art collectors are exemplary, although Type A approaches might also be possible with art if, for instance, someone sought to have an example of every artist in a given genre. Thus, when Gelber says, "Completing a set is so closely identified with collecting that it stands as a virtual definition of the hobby" (1999, p. 74), he is describing only Type A collectors. It seems reasonable to assume that Type A collectors are more prone to the excesses of obsessiveness, while Type B collectors are more prone to the excesses of Romanticism.

Conclusion: Collecting as a Response to Existential Angst

What then should we make of collecting as an individual practice and a societal institution? Besides the composite of individual collectors and the sanctions for or criticisms of their behavior, society jointly collects in its museums, galleries, zoos, libraries, and other "legitimate" collecting institutions that are less commonly subject to criticism than are individual collections of matchbooks, baseball cards, comic books, or salt and pepper shakers. It is likely that collecting at both personal and institutional levels is an attempt to make a statement to ourselves and others about who we are. Often the collection signifies roots, stability, golden days of the past, and pathways to the future.

As Ernest Becker has suggested, we do not fear death as much as we fear a life without meaning. If so, one effort to create meaning is to make a collection that can stand as a "monument to the self" (Belk et al., 1991, p. 180). In reflecting on his book collection, Walter Benjamin was prompted by his treasures into a Proustian reverie, not about his life as perhaps the last of the great intellectuals, but about his life as a book collector. In an increasingly commodified world, collecting offers a way to singularize objects by taking them out of their functional circulation and ritually enshrining them within the collection. Collecting fights against the sterility of appraising objects according to their use value and in so doing offers an approach to the sacred. Just as a gift from a loved one is a singular treasure not readily exchangeable for its marketplace equivalent, so too is an object within a collection set apart and revered for its extraordinary contextual meaning. Thus, while collecting may superficially appear to be the most materialistic manifestation of consumer culture, to the collector it is just the opposite. It is the antidote to the impersonal marketplace, the disposable society, and the alienation of fungible commodities.

See also: Antiques; Books and Manuscripts; Clocks and Watches; Coin Collecting; Comic Magazines; Crafts and Hobbies; Record, CD, Tape Collecting and Listening; Stamp Collecting

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Russell Belk