Collecting and Collectibles

Collecting and collectibles comprise a relatively new and distinct form of consumption. Those who identify contemporary forms of collecting in modernity as some form of continuity with our primordial past as hunters and gatherers forget that most hunters and gatherers are nomadic and tend to have very small and portable material cultures. Critically, collecting in the modern period dates from the time when Europe began to expand beyond its own longstanding boundaries to explore a hitherto unseen world, its cultures, species, and objects. Europeans were astonished by the seemingly endless range of plants, artifacts, material cultures, and animals that a variety of wealthy individuals (and then institutions) began to collect and display—as a source of wonderment. Such collections were not unrelated to the scientific quests that were also stimulated at the same time. This is why collecting has both educational and spectacular qualities that come together most in museums, although both were exploited as a form of marketing by commercial companies wishing to sell items in series (boosting consumption) or encourage consumer loyalty through collectible giveaways, such as cigarette and tea cards.

In the later twentieth century, collecting also related to the nature of modernity to constantly improve and replace, thus threatening to make obscure and extinct a wide range of objects that comprise most people's everyday worlds and cultures. Collecting and restoring, displaying and rendering into heritage is a new form of culture that relates to what Walter Benjamin described as a form of memory and, in recent years, this has driven an expansion in the number of collectors, collectibles, and collector markets. Collecting is a way of preserving former ways of life as experienced through their material cultures and might include fashion, technologies, packaging, decorative arts, and industrial objects such as tools and machinery.

Studies of collecting have shown that around one-third of all Americans or 63 percent of American households collect something, with an average of 2.6 collections per household (Pearce 1995). What began as the treasure-trove hobby of princes and kings in early modern Europe (whose collections became the foundations for the modern museum) was emulated by middle-class amateurs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and then “recommended” to working-class cultures as an improving leisure (particularly by church and chapel organizations). According to Russell Belk and colleagues, collecting accelerated in the remaining part of the twentieth century.