Winnowing (Practices)

"Winnowing is a personal, cultural, and environmental examination of our American relationship with material goods and our behavior as consumers. Suzanne Matson includes her own "winnowing log," a 15-day account of her reflections put into practice as she tries to reduce the number of things in her home.

She analyzes ownership through the lenses of "need," "want," and "attachment," separating utility from aspirational desire and from the emotions that accrue to objects as conduits to memory. The management of goods becomes gendered when the author takes up the cultural history of housekeeping, and what was encoded in the "science" of Home Economics as a means of social control.

Household goods accrue through legacy, requiring ongoing curation of familial collections.

The proliferation of mass-produced goods burdens not only our storage space but the environmental balance of the planet, and this environmental precarity ironically could be the cause of losing our possessions from increasingly frequent and destructive weather events.

Matson compares the idea of material impermanence in Stoic philosophy, Buddhism, and Christianity, acknowledging that total renunciation of things is beyond most people's goals or abilities, but that reducing what we own, carry, and tend clears space for spiritual lightness, aesthetic pleasure, and freedom of movement"-- Provided by publisher.