http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1858594,00.html

They’ve turned their collection into a museum, and the husband says:

“People think we’re strange, because of what we’ve collected and our lifestyle. Our sons all thought we were weird, but now they see the collection brings a lot of joy to a lot of people.”

Europeans certainly move less often over their lifetime than do (middle class) Americans, and Australians are probably somewhere in between the two. If your family has lived in the one place for several generations and you yourself are still there, you may have less need to find the fixed-point and the community which collecting can provide you.

I grew up in a region of rural Australia where my family had lived for close on a century, and they were deeply embedded in the local social fabric. My childhood, with its many stories of local relatives and ancestors and their exploits, was like a Faulkner novel. Perhaps a person has less psychological need to be a collector in this environment.

Peter, Wow, and this is why I’ve missed posting, I had no idea that this was a national pasttime but now that I think of it, there is collecting everywhere here in Connecticut and NYC, and when people talk about it, they do so with this charming balance of passionate intensity and a tone of “look at me, I must be nuts” amused disavowal. Very interesting. Thanks! Grant

On the topic of collecting: Having worked a lot with Americans, I came to the conclusion that collecting is a key feature of middle-class American culture. (I’ve not worked with Canadians, so I don’t know if the feature extends North.) As soon as one sits down to a social meal with American business colleagues, the stories will come out — about that they collect, what their parents, siblings, neighbours and children collect, and how far they’ve got, which things they snapped up, which they missed. The collections are usually of physical artefacts (civil war guns, beer cans, orchids, vintage car models, etc), but not always. I’ve also met people who collect experiences — eg, jazz festivals, art gallery visits (but only those galleries showing the work of a specific artist), WW I battle sites, etc.

Several aspects are interesting about this to me: First, collecting seems to be a means by which middle-class Americans define themselves, and establish their own identity. I think this explains why many people do not collect the same things as their parents. Second, collecting enables people to establish expertise and authority in some domain. When most people are in jobs which are generalist rather than specialist (eg, those in middle management), perhaps it is important for one’s self-esteem to acquire some very specific expertise in something. Third, it is only Americans who do this: I know very few middle-class Australians or Britons or Germans (the western cultures I know best) who seriously collect stuff, and the ones who do are considered somewhat eccentric or obsessive by the rest. Why is this a feature of middle-class American life, but not elsewhere?

Germany after the First World War went through a sort of national nervous breakdown so there could have been all sorts of pressures that would have encouraged people to get out. There were fears of a Bolshevik revolution, there were extremist anti-semitic groups attacking Jewish families (precursers of the Nazis although the Nazi party itself was not founded until 1923) but above all in 1922 and 1923 there was hyper-inflation with an exchange rate of a trillion German marks to one dollar. The hyper-inflation destroyed the middle classes as anyone who had savings saw their money just evaporate.

This is a fascinating post.