Thrift and Its Paradoxes

From Domestic to Political Economy

Catherine Alexander, Daniel Sosna (Herausgeber)

Buch | Hardcover

252 Seiten

2022
Berghahn Books (Verlag)
978-1-80073-462-3 (ISBN)

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Thrift is a central concern for most people, especially in turbulent economic times. It is both an economic and an ethical logic of frugal living, saving and avoiding waste for long-term kin care. These logics echo the ancient ideal of household self-sufficiency, contrasting with capitalism’s wasteful present-focused growth. But thrift now exceeds domestic matters straying across scales to justify public expenditure cuts. Through a wide range of ethnographic contexts this book explores how practices and moralities of thrift are intertwined with austerity, debt, welfare, and patronage across various social and temporal scales and are constantly re-negotiated at the nexus of socio-economic, religious, and kinship ideals and praxis.

Catherine Alexander is Professor of Anthropology at Durham University. Drawing on fieldwork in Turkey, Kazakhstan and Britain, she has written widely on economic anthropology and material culture including households, recycling and waste.

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Thrift, Anti-thrift, Scale, and Paradox

Catherine Alexander and Daniel Sosna

Chapter 1. Making Savings

Stephen Gudeman

Chapter 2. Saving, Investment, Thrift? Welfare Beneficiary Households and Borrowing in South Africa

Deborah James, David Neves, and Erin Torkelson

Chapter 3. Wages, Patronage, and Welfare: Thrift and its Limits in Argentina’s Gran Chaco

Agustin Diz

Chapter 4. Generous Thrift: Post-Pastoral Cooperation and Fortune-making among the Torghut of Mongolia

Tomasz Rakowski

Chapter 5. Discretio and the Golden Mean: Working Out Frugality and Thrift in Two Czech Post-Socialist Monasteries

Barbora Spalová

Chapter 6. Regimes of Asceticism: Austerity and Thrift in a Spiritual Economy

Daromir Rudnyckyj

Chapter 7. Saving and Wasting: The Paradox of Thrift in a Czech Landfill

Daniel Sosna

Chapter 8. Thrift and its Opposites

Richard Wilk

Afterword

Chris Hann

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	15.03.2022
Reihe/Serie	Max Planck Studies in Anthropology and Economy
Verlagsort	Oxford
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
	Wirtschaft ► Volkswirtschaftslehre ► Finanzwissenschaft
	Wirtschaft ► Volkswirtschaftslehre ► Wirtschaftspolitik
ISBN-10	1-80073-462-X / 180073462X
ISBN-13	978-1-80073-462-3 / 9781800734623
Zustand	Neuware