Thrift and its Paradoxes

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.Daniel Sosna is a senior researcher in the Department of Ecological Anthropology, Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences. Sosna is a specialist on ethnographic and archaeological research of waste regimes with a regional focus on Central Europe. He co-edited the book Archaeologies of Waste: Encounters with the Unwanted (Oxbow Books, 2017).

“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

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Thrift, Anti-thrift, Scale, and ParadoxCatherine Alexander and Daniel SosnaChapter 1. Making SavingsStephen GudemanChapter 2. Saving, Investment, Thrift? Welfare Beneficiary Households and Borrowing in South AfricaDeborah James, David Neves, and Erin TorkelsonChapter 3. Wages, Patronage, and Welfare: Thrift and its Limits in Argentina's Gran ChacoAgustin DizChapter 4. Generous Thrift: Post-Pastoral Cooperation and Fortune-making among the Torghut of MongoliaTomasz RakowskiChapter 5. Discretio and the Golden Mean: Working Out Frugality and Thrift in Two Czech Post-Socialist MonasteriesBarbora SpalováChapter 6. Regimes of Asceticism: Austerity and Thrift in a Spiritual EconomyDaromir RudnyckyjChapter 7. Saving and Wasting: The Paradox of Thrift in a Czech LandfillDaniel SosnaChapter 8. Thrift and its OppositesRichard WilkAfterwordChris HannIndex