The art of collection: Personal creativity and presentation in everyday life

This study looks at the phenomenon of collection as it exists in current American popular culture. Recent estimates hold that approximately one in three people living in the United States collect some form of object. The cultural landscape that accommodates this proportion of collectors is well-equipped to support such activity, but understanding collecting behavior as a mere response to a public environment of consumption fails to grasp the individual motivations and responses of collectors themselves. This dissertation focuses upon collectors in North Carolina in order to learn how collecting impacts individual lives. The fieldwork undertaken is organized through theoretical frameworks relevant to the research of material culture; hence, it is grounded in ideas of text and context. Collections, organized assemblages of objects, are understood to be texts with legible forms. The human behaviors and circumstances that relate to and surround collections serve as context. Relationships between text and context frame much of the investigative work of folklore, and ideas related to material culture studies and performance theory are especially pertinent to the issue of collection. Through attention to a collector's interactions with groups and other individuals, information is gathered on issues of consumption, creativity, and communication as they relate to the actual process of collecting. A collector's intentions in and responses to collecting, as well as the responses of others to a collector's work, are elements identified within portraits written for each individual. Patterns that emerge among the collector portraits are identified and form the basis for the designation of collection as a genre of material narrative. Individuals who appear in this research demonstrate some of the ways in which the culture of collection is made by its populace. This dissertation, therefore, aims to explore the phenomenon of collection with authority of experience given to individual collectors; it is an attempt to inform the discourse on collection with ethnographic data that demonstrate the humanity of this cultural phenomenon.