berghahn New York · Oxford

Contents

Illustrations

Introduction: House/Keeping
Sasha Newell

Part I: Food Storage and Family Values

Chapter 1. Food Storage and the Making of Potato Kin in Andean Houses
Olivia Angé

Chapter 2. Making Space for Onions: Material Production and Social Reproduction in Rural India
Tanya Matthan

Part II: Domestic Accumulation and Disorder

Chapter 3. The “Stuffing” of Kinship: Containing Clutter and Expanding Relatedness in U.S. Homes
Sasha Newell

Chapter 4. Topoanalysis: Hoarding, Memory, and the Materialization of Kinship
Katie Kilroy-Marac

Chapter 5. Locating Hoarding: How Spatial Concepts Shape Disorders in Japan and the Anglophone World
Fabio Gygi

Part III: Decluttering and Minimalist Aesthetics

Chapter 6. Decluttering the House, Purify Yourself: Women Discarding Objects andSpiritualizing Everyday Lifein Buenos Aires (Argentina)
María Florencia BlancoEsmoris

Chapter 7. The American Garage Sale: Liberating Space and Creating Kin
Gretchen M. Herrmann

Chapter 8. Minimalist Mortality: Decluttering as a Practice of Death Acceptance
Hannah Gould

Part IV: Holding on to Rubbish: Trash and Transmutation

Chapter 9. “It’s Not Waste, It’s Diamonds!”: Recovery Practices and Public Waste Management in Garoua and Maroua (Cameroon)
Émilie Guitard

Chapter 10. Where Would We be Without Rubbish?
Michael Thompson

Conclusion: The Shape of Things to Come
Daniel Miller

Index

Of Hoarding and Housekeeping

Material Kinship and Domestic Space in Anthropological Perspective

Edited by Sasha Newell

288 pages, 16 illus., bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-80539-092-3 Hb Published (October 2023)

eISBN 978-1-80539-385-6 eBook

Details

“This is an exciting endeavor … linked to some of the most pressing issues in the field of anthropology today. The scholarship is excellent, and ethnographic research represents a diverse breadth of geographical areas and analytical perspectives.” • Anne Allison,Duke University

“The collection provides a timely discussion of a topic that up to now has been marginal to anthropological writing, and yet is clearly critical to domestic practice on a global scale.” • Pauline Garvey, Maynooth University

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.

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.

Series: Volume 13, Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement

Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology Cultural Studies (General)

Area:

BISAC: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; SOC026030 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Sociology/Urban; SOC026040 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Sociology/Social Theory