Taking care of resources and stuff: exploring environmental change through mundane domestic consumption in Latin America

Tomas Ariztia

Chapter 24 in Research Handbook on the Sociology of Consumption, 2026, pp 286-295 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter explores the theoretical and empirical connections between mundane consumption and socio-environmental change by examining domestic practices of conservation and resource management. It first reviews the recent ‘environmental turn’ in consumption studies, highlighting its focus on ordinary consumption as a key site of environmental transformation while addressing the limitations of this literature. The chapter addresses some of these limitations by expanding the empirical scope of mundane consumption research, specifically by exploring the practices of caring for resources and the moral economy of saving from other geographies and modes of living beyond the global north. It illustrates this through empirical vignettes from ethnographic and qualitative interviews on everyday consumption in Chilean households. On this basis, it introduces the concept of a shared logic of ‘care in consumption’, characterised by attention to and concern for resource use as the key logics through which mundane consumption is organised.

Keywords: Mundane consumption; Care; Saving; Environmental change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035310500
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781035310517.00039 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:22245_24

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Sweeney ().