Churning (Canada)

Churning 🇨🇦
Location: Canada
Definition: Lit. "mixing", is the act of hoarding material things
Keywords: Canada – North America – Mental health – Unproductive
Author: Katie Kilroy-Marac
Affiliation: Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto,Canada

By Katie Kilroy-Marac, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto,Canada

Churning is a term used by professional home organizers (POs) across Canada and the USA to describe an unproductive behaviour that they commonly observe among clients. When clients churn, they may pick household items up and put them down again, move items from place to place, shuffle piles around, defer decisions about what should be done with this or that object, or walk away from unfinished sorting tasks to start other. Outside of this context, churning typically refers to the repetitive motion of mixing, stirring, shaking, blending, or otherwise agitating. In North American English, the word is most commonly associated with the process of making butter (cream is churned into butter), or with a feeling one might have in one’s stomach (a churning stomach is an upset or unsettled stomach, related to indigestion or negative emotions).

There are currently more than certified 4600 professional home organizers (POs) working across Canada and the US, the majority of whom are white middle-class women between the ages of 40–55. The majority of their clients fit a similar demographic. POs are hired by their clients to lend their expertise in organizing, decluttering, and the optimization of domestic (or sometimes, digital) space. They work with clients on short-term projects—putting an organizational system in place in a bedroom closet, for example, or sorting and digitizing files in a home office—or their visits may stretch over a period of months or even years.

An ethnographic study of POs across southern Ontario in Canada offers unique insights into how, in this historical moment and with such a surplus of stuff everywhere, we are supposed to handle, manage, and be with our ever-expanding world of material things (Kilroy-Marac 2016, 2018). As part of a larger project designed to track the emergence of hoarding in North America—whether as psychiatric disorder, public health hazard, or media spectacle—a series of interviews with POs revealed them to be keen observers with a wholly anthropological sensitivity and a great deal of insight into the human condition.

Allie, the first PO to mention churning in 2014, had been working in the Toronto area for about four years. “What’s really frustrating for me,” she admitted, “is when I start working with a new client and it becomes clear that they don’t actually want to get rid of anything. They just want to shuffle things around. They call it churning, you know, like you churn butter. They’re just moving things from one room to another, or from one spot to another, because they can’t make a decision about it.”

Regardless of the client’s situation or demands, POs know churning when they see it. Churning, POs explain, not only keeps clients from achieving their organizing goals, but actually makes matter(s) worse because it disperses piles and created new ones, which themselves attract more stuff. Extending the butter metaphor, we might say that churning acts as a “thickener” of clutter within the home, thereby exacerbating the problem. In clutter, sentimental objects might mix and mingle with important documents, food wrappers, knick-knacks, and waste. Take this example: a client starts out with the intention of sorting through a large pile of papers that has accumulated on a kitchen countertop. The client begins sorting, but soon realizes that some of the items (receipts, for example), need to be reviewed by another member of the household. There are birthday cards in the pile, too. Should these be thrown away, or digitized, or kept in a memento box upstairs? And here is an unsigned school form, and an overdue bill. Each item requires a decision and demands action. “Decision fatigue” quickly sets in. Overwhelmed, the client decides to move part of the stack into the living room where it can be sorted later, perhaps while watching TV. Now there is a pile of papers on the end table next to the couch, in addition to the pile that remains on the countertop. Both of these piles have become “landing places” into which more paper, clutter, and other items may be set. Clutter, POs say, always attracts more of itself; it grows and thickens. Sophie Woodward describes clutter in relational terms: Comprised as it is of multiple, disparate objects that come together to form a “relational materiality” (Woodward 2021: 1219, italics in original), it is also indexical of social and domestic relations. Clutter, she notes, “emerges through the relations of the home” and acts as a “medium through which people negotiate and manage these relations” (Ibid.: 1221).

POs have developed many creative methods for addressing clutter and intervening in the relationships clients have with their possessions in order to prevent churning. One trick in the POs toolbox is what is known as “body doubling.” Body doubling is a technique, first described by Judith Kolberg, a formative figure in the world of professional organizing (Kolberg 2007, 2009). When a PO acts as a body double, they work alongside their clients and model behavior through action. POs keep their clients’ attention fixed on the task at hand and gently redirect them when they lose focus. Barbara, a PO working in southern Ontario, explained: “As a body double, you are an anchor and a mirror—you are keeping the client rooted in the [sorting] work and you’re modeling appropriate behavior.” In body doubling, POs reorient their clients’ habits by example as much as by instruction. In this, physical co-presence is key. Barbara notes that “[a] lot of clients will say to me, ‘I don’t understand why I can only do this when you’re here!... You know, what I’m doing is I’m lending my focus to my clients when we are working together. […] For some clients...it really is the body doubling that keeps them able to do what they’re doing.” In this description, the physical co-presence of PO and client may go beyond simple task-modeling to enable an almost mystical transfer of skill and affect. Indeed, the magical lexicon employed by POs—body doubling, lending focus, becoming an anchor and mirror—suggests that the PO and client join together in order to put distance between the client their material world. It is, in effect, the affectively stickiness of things that muddles this distance and leads to churning in the first place.

As POs join forces with their clients to bring attention and focus to their material worlds, they encourage their clients to sort and organize what must be kept and let go of the rest. “Letting go” of an object might mean giving it away or passing it along, donating it, or throwing it out. POs generally refrain from using terms like “purging,” “getting rid of,” or “throwing away” in their practice, for these may be experienced by clients as harsh—even violent intrusions—and result in them hold onto the objects more tightly. In their work, then, POs recognize that they are not just manipulating objects but also transforming relationships with people and things alike.

In the context of the growing environmental concern, the wide availability of cheap consumer goods has ushered a growing sense of anxiety about how to manage the ever-expanding world of material possessions. Discourses about excessive accumulation, restricted consumption, and the (im)proper handling, organization, and upkeep of objects have come to signal both status and virtue. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that an industry of experts has appeared on the scene to quell these material anxieties and bring order to things.

References

Kilroy-Marac, Katie. 2016. “A Magical Reorientation of the Modern: Professional Organizers and Thingly Care in Contemporary North America.” Cultural Anthropology 31 (3): 438–57

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. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183517729428

Kolberg, Judith. 2007. Conquering Chronic Disorganization. Squall Press

Kolberg, Judith. 2009. What Every Professional Organizer Needs to Know about Hoarding. Squall Press

Woodward, Sophie. 2021. “Clutter in Domestic Spaces: Material Vibrancy, and Competing Moralities.” The Sociological Review 69(6): 1214-1228. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026121998218