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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.
“This compilation of eight essays assessing thrift in modern cultures is a full examination that opens up a new arena of research. This volume presents a comprehensive definition and study of thrift…and through multiple ethnographic examples illustrates the importance of thrift in understanding economic relations at the household and supra-household level, including work cultures…The moral implications of thrift are explored in detail and a much-needed history of the concept in anthropological literature is offered, including on waste and discard studies, the limits of thrift, and its scale…This book would be ideal for advanced undergraduate or graduate seminars in economic anthropology. It is a valuable addition to the field.” • Society for the Anthropology of Work (americananthro.org)
“This is an exciting and theoretically innovative volume… It presents a collection of richly ethnographic, well-written chapters from across the globe which re-consider thrift – as a category of social, material, and economic action – in the light of contemporary ethnographic research and theory.” • Nicolette Makovicky, University of Oxford
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