Thrift and Its Paradoxes

Download or read book Thrift and Its Paradoxes written by Catherine Alexander and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2022-04-08 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.