Attachment to Possessions

Abstract

While place attachment has received some recent attention in social science literature, such attention reveals the narrow partitions that have been employed in seeking to understand our bonds to the material environment. For bonds to place share much of the same phenomenology as bonds to our children, a favorite sweater, our cars, a pet, the family photograph album, and our own bodies. What such attachments have in common is their importance, for better or worse, in defining the self in a contemporary consumer culture.