You rip what you don’t sew

By Arianna Squarcina – I recently discovered that my bag has a hole in it. Something sharp I threw in there must have caused the internal lining to tear and now an increasing number of objects are falling in it and becoming hard to reach. It all started with a small bump that could be felt at the bottom, probably a pen cap that slipped through; such an insignificant loss that I chose to discard it. This morning, as I looked for my eyeliner, it dawned on me just how many of my possessions have been going missing. I proceeded to take the bag and turn it upside down, I dumped all its contents on my carpet and still I couldn’t find the tear responsible for the theft. What I did find were two separate tears in another compartment and a whole bunch of junk.

As I took out my second lip gloss tube and deposited it on a growing pile of old receipts, medicine, and miscellaneous makeup, I began to ask myself how I could accumulate so much stuff that it took a “necessary” item going missing for me to start caring about the other things I lost. Once the bag was emptied, I could start to feel the outline of a pair of sunglasses, alongside coins, pencils and many other unknown shapes I couldn’t recognize cloaked under the synthetic fabric. What an odd thing, I thought, how easily I could do without my possessions, how many doubles I own that I am not left wanting, how careless I have been with my things to the point of letting one of them keep tearing apart. But isn’t that how most of us think in our consumerist society? Buy two, get one free, get it cheap and just replace it, buy it in a slightly different shade just because it’s there…

Gone are the days when my father taught me to mend my socks and my mom insisted I re-wear outfits. Now, as I consider cutting the lining of my bag and resewing it shut after fishing out my possessions, I think about how problems left unchecked keep growing, until the shape of what hides under the surface pushes up uncomfortably like a constant reminder of my neglectfulness. If I had simply cared enough to inspect my bag before, I wouldn’t have to go through all this trouble now; I wouldn’t have to alter it to such an extent. If I had given more thought to the dangers of leaving things as they are I wouldn’t find myself in this predicament. Yet the chaos of everyday life got to me, the same way it gets to everybody, leaving me in a state of overwhelm and inaction; postponing intervention until a small nuisance turned into bigger trouble. I kept throwing cheap items into a sea of other cheap items, so that the things that really matter got lost under it and forgotten.

What happened with my bag might seem insignificant, yet it shouldn’t, as it is proof that even the things I claim to cherish, aren’t safe from my carelessness. In anthropology we encounter many such examples of issues that develop from small to global scales; all of it happening under our noses and all of us none-the-wiser. When the pace of the world is so fast and the choices we have are so many, we risk getting blinded by excess, distracted by every shiny new thing, quantity surpassing real value.

I don’t like to be like this, to only take care of things when the risk of losing them is tangible, to always think in hindsight. As I progress in my studies, I rejoice in the awareness I gained, in the possibilities for action, in the chance to uncover processes before they dramatically escalate. Anthropology has shown me that change can be made and tears can be resewn… Still a small, but dangerous, voice in the back of my head tells me to leave needle and thread in their drawer and to just keep using the bag a little longer, after all just how expensive would it be to get a new eyeliner?

Arianna Squarcina is a second year student Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.