Popular Collecting and the Everyday Self

This work is an attempt to explore both the increase in and the breadth of popular collecting in Britain. It does this by examining the contexts of social change of the past 20 years. This change, it is argued, has led to a culture of social and material insecurity, in which collecting is used for the creation and defence of identity. The social world and values of collectors are explored through their clubs. These, it is asserted, comprise an alternative society, one in which a legitimization of the collector's activities and preferences can be made and in which they develop complementary reality. It is argued that as collectors develop in sophistication, museums are increasingly overlapping. Museums and collectors should converge to form a mutually beneficial knowledge-sharing forum, which can strengthen and deepen communal bonds, and act as an anchor in a changing and diversifying museum profession and in an increasingly individualistic society.