9 - MAKING SAVINGS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 October 2009
Summary
On the first day of our fieldwork, a discussant spoke at length about “making savings” (hacer economías) and “economizing” (economizar). The need to make savings and ways of doing so entered our discussions many times after, but the construct proved difficult to place. “Making savings” applies to a diverse and changing list of practices whose connection is not immediately apparent. It also belongs to two worlds, the house and the market. Since that initial talk, we have come to realize that “making savings” has a double, overlapping sense – being thrifty and hoarding – and that our contemporary usage is not coincident with the rural Colombians'. In the attempt to sort out these varying usages, we followed several textual trails, but when we realized that the distinction between being parsimonious and making hoards had been used to advantage by John Maynard Keynes (1964[1936]) the historical discussion became much clearer. The long conversation about “making savings” is complex, as is the local ethnography, but an examination of it has much to suggest about the relations between practice and text, margin and center.
We often use “making savings” to translate hacer economías, but terms such as being “thrifty,” “parsimonious,” “frugal,” “abstinent,” or “economical” can also be employed. Economizing is common to both house and corporation. In the rural economy, being thrifty means controlling expenditures to have leftovers; these increase savings or the base.
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- Conversations in ColombiaThe Domestic Economy in Life and Text, pp. 160 - 182Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990