In Argentina’s Gran Chaco, Indigenous Guaraní households ensure their subsistence through the skillful management of wages, patronage, and welfare. This chapter explores the extent to which thrift and anti-thrift characterize Guaraní engagements with resource flows. In a context marked by unemployment and a dwindling frontier economy, the chapter shows the gendered social relations through which resources are elicited, sourced, managed and spent. The Guaraní case demonstrates how the boundaries between thrift and anti-thrift are blurred in everyday life and illustrates how the different scales and temporalities of resource flows articulate households, settlements, extractive economies, and democratic politics
