As a notoriously messy person, I can proudly say I have been gifted Marie Kondo’s bestselling book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, not once, but twice, by my well-meaning family and friends, as well as copies of Minimalism 101, The Minimalist Way, The Joy of Less, and The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning—the last book particularly unique in its philosophy that one should declutter as if they were going to die.
Each of these specific books, of the broader self-help book genre, and the ever-growing minimalist movement aims to categorize the objects we own into a dichotomy of productive or unproductive—the justification of this being that we as humans should strive to rid ourselves of the burden that is worldly possessions.
This hyper-efficient view of personal belongings is relatively new, anthropologically speaking. There is a prehistoric misconception that early AMH (anatomically modern humans) were the original minimalists; that is, so close to the brink of starvation and death that accruing any sort of personal inventory of symbolic objects, “useless” objects, was impossible. (The word “useless” is used here in relation to current minimalist philosophy, and not to suggest that symbolism in objects is useless in its general sense.) This belief furthers the idea that worldly possessions are conceptually new, something only made available to us after the Neolithic Revolution.
However, fieldwork conducted in the French Pyrénées shows that the Magdalenians, AMH living nearly 17,000 years ago, created a variety of nonfunctional art, such as engraved stone plaquettes; sculpted bone, antler, and ivory; and beads and pendants (Sterling, 2015, p.10). Of course, these objects held great symbolic and emotional significance, and the lack of economic or technological function in these art pieces did not deter the Magdalenians from creating and owning these objects. In fact, it seems that this was chiefly the motivation behind the existence of symbolic items—we as humans reached a social and cognitive capacity to use objects in a nonfunctional manner, and exactly that we did.
According to the brilliant Dr. Kathleen Sterling, “anatomically modern humans in the late Pleistocene may not have had the same beliefs, practices, or motivations as modern Western people, but they were fully cultural beings who made choices that were not restricted to concerns of efficiency” (Escobar, 1999; Dobres, 2000; Sterling, 2011). In a sense, it seems that AMH would be anti-minimalist, prioritizing the economy and symbolism of an object separately and equally. Behavioral modernity centers itself not necessarily around economic and technological innovation, but on symbolic thought and behavior; for example, Paleolithic archaeologist Lyn Wadley maintains that “the storage of symbolic information outside the human brain is the first undisputed evidence for cultural modernity” (2001, p. 201). In other words, the very thing that allowed us to define ourselves as somehow modern in our behavior was our love to collect “clutter”: objects and things that only serve to mean something to its owner and no one else.
WORKS CITED
Bazzle, Kelly. “Marie Kondo and Tidying Up.” ABC Action News, 14 Jan. 2019, http://www.abcactionnews.com/entertainment/everyone-is-tidyingup-their-homes-on-social-media-thanks-to-marie-kondo.
Kathleen Sterling (2015) Social Landscapes of the Late Palaeolithic: Marking Meaning in the Magdalenian, European Journal of Archaeology, 18:3, 380-401,
Wadley L. 2001. What is cultural modernity? A general view and a South African perspective from Rose Cottage Cave. Cambr. Archaeol. J. 11(2):201-21
The Museum of Modern Pasts 