Collectibles as an Elicitation of the Personal Cultural Temporal Orientations
The article tries to understand time and temporality as the realization of various ways of expressing the personal temporal orientation of an individual through collecting, in particular. Collection accomplishes the transformation of temporality to harmonize personal space and personal sense of time by fixing the temporal orientation. The article examines the different types of personality temporal orientation and their expression in collectibles and outlines the role of collectibles in defining individual psychological personality types as well as cultural portraits, which can be useful in developing the theory of cultural typology. The collection acts as a subject of personality projection, a basis for self-identification, and a possible world created by a person bearing the features of a collector, including the display of different modi of inner time. The article explains how the properties of the collection can organize the micro world of an individual and to record time in visible and tangible images, to ease temporal tension, to create the hint of manipulation or control over time. An approximate typology of the personality types of collectors and their relationship to the types of collectibles and collections is given.