Of Hoarding and Housekeeping by Sasha Newell

Of Hoarding and Housekeeping by Sasha Newell

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.

“This is an exciting endeavor … linked to some of the most pressing issues in the field of anthropology todayThe 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

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.