Expertise, Knowledge, and Inherited Memories

Abstract

In Chap. 4 I examined the idea of home creativity, and the labour of designing a home environment—often a gendered activity and often conflated with leisure. In the process the participants learnt to live with and appreciate the ghosts and spectral remains of previous owners. In the previous chapter, I wrote about how people found their second-hand belongings, so here I look at what happened next to those vintage belongings, including the maintenance of collections, daily practices, and divestment. Collins (2015, p. 111) argues that ghosts ‘are often conjured up from the immediate environment … Even when largely mundane, hauntings can provoke awe and wonder, anxiety and even fear, and spectral places become places of affect’. To understand how people lived with second-hand and vintage things to the exclusion of new or modern items, I needed to go to vintage-styled homes and ask the vintage-styled owners to show me around. The main core sites for data collection were the homes of the participants, having asked prior to my visit whether I could look at how they stored and displayed their belongings. As with other studies, such as those by Woodward (2007), Miller (2008), and Pechurina (2015), the participants had to be willing to allow me access to areas of their homes usually designated as private, especially ‘backstage’ areas such as bedrooms, wardrobes, guest rooms, and cupboards. They had to feel comfortable unpacking (literally and metaphorically) the stuff they owned, the meanings of it, and how and why it was kept. This was the case with the face-to-face interviews and the online interviews. In the latter the participants sent me photos of the areas as we talked about them, explaining to me their systems, practices, and, as their collections grew, their issues.