Of Hoarding and Housekeeping - Material Kinship and Domestic Space in Anthropological Perspective

Hoarding has largely been approached from a psychological and universal perspective, and decluttering from an aesthetic and ecological one, while little work has been done to think about the cultural and global economic aspects of these phenomena. Of Hoarding and Housekeeping provides an anthropological, global, and comparative angle to the understanding of hoarding and decluttering using cases from a variety of countries including US, Japan, India, Cameroon, and Argentina. Focusing on the house, with careful attention to material flows in and out, this book examines practices of accumulation, storage, decluttering, and waste as practices of kinship and the objects themselves as material kin.

About the author

Sasha Newell is Associate Professor and Director of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporain at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He is author of The Modernity Bluff: Crime, Consumption, and Citizenship in Côte d’Ivoire (University of Chicago Press, 2012), which won the Amaury Talbot prize. 

Product details

• Authors: Sasha Newell
• Assisted by: Sasha Newell (Editor), Newell Sasha (Editor)
• Publisher: BERGHAHN BOOKS, INC
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.10.2023
• EAN: 9781805390923
• ISBN: 978-1-80539-092-3
• No. of pages: 288
• Series: Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement; Material Mediations: People an
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Social sciences (general); SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / Social Theory, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / Urban, Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography, Behavioural economics, Sociology: family & relationships, Social and cultural anthropology, Sociology: family, kinship and relationships