The logics of frugality: Reproducing tastes of necessity among affluent climate change activists

In Bourdieu's sociological classic Distinction, he theorized tastes of necessity (in contrast to tastes of luxury) as an habitualized working-class propensity toward consumption practices deduced from constrained economic conditions. These practices also had the capacity to self-perpetuate in the absence of their conditions of generation. This taste/practice may also be called frugality. I encountered this phenomenon in a qualitative analysis of N = 28 interviews with affluent climate change activists in the Washington, DC, area. Though frugality was only practiced by a minority of research participants, it was generally scripted as a motivational component in their climate change activism and imbued with deep meaning and narrative detail. Respondents also referred to an intertwined range of logics of frugality: forced, thrifty, waste-not, environmental, cheap, oppositional and more…. This analysis expands Bourdieu's insights. There is evidence of an embodied and intergenerational frugality: a frugal habitus/disposition-an echo of once constrained economic conditions. Though frugality may be a practice of some affluent climate change activists, its capacity to reduce human impacts on the environment is questionable and deserves more attention. I also call for a greater acknowledgement and affirmation of frugality and its practitioners.