Les livres de l'IS - Of Hoarding and Housekeeping Material Kinship and Domestic Space in Anthropological Perspective

Title : Of Hoarding and Housekeeping Material Kinship and Domestic Space in Anthropological Perspective

Speaker : Sasha Newell (LAMC)

Abstract :

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.

Bio :

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 2012), which won the Amaury Talbot prize, based upon field research carried out for his doctorate at Cornell University (2003). While he continues to write about Côte d’Ivoire, most recently on cybercrime and digital sorcery (African Studies Review, Africa), since 2007, he has also worked on questions of domestic accumulation in US homes, developing publications around storage, hoarding, clutter, and possession. More recently, he has been investigating the material traces of Belgian colonialism in Bruxelles, including monuments, museums, and domestic objects.