Page 10 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

Preface . ix
The neatly stacked, discrete sociospatial categories of the Evans-
Pritchard diagram came to mind as I began reflecting upon the research
and fieldwork that are this book's foundation. Conducting fieldwork in
New Haven, Connecticut, where I grew up, I was both anthropologist
and native, both a local resident and a representative of the "govern-
ment operating from various centers" (courtesy of a grant from the Na-
tional Science Foundation). There were several of Evans-Pritchard's socio-
spatial categories in which I operated at once, as did those I knew in
Newhallville, the neighborhood where I conducted my research. As a re-
sult, there was no clear or delineated way to characterize some pure na-
tive point of view, or an anthropological one. Even in naming this a
work of native anthropology, such a label only applied from certain van-
tage points. The fact that I grew up in New Haven did not make me a
native of my field site, a poor and working-class black neighborhood
very different from the middle-class, predominantly white neighbor-
hoods where I spent my childhood. However, having grown up in middle-
class white neighborhoods does not mean that I had a privileged child-
hood, and I am not white; my status as a "native" of such a privileged
place is shaky. I went home to do my fieldwork, but I did not do an
ethnography of my own home, except in the most general sense.
This book is primarily about the world of ten-year-old poor and
working-class black children in Newhallville, and their entanglements
with the world of consumption. While it is a world that has been little
described and poorly understood by those outside of it, I do not believe
that there is much benefit in speaking about or thinking of that world as
being cut off and isolated, as being "another" America. Since childhood,
I have been astounded by the kind of racial and social segregation that
can be seen in New Haven, a city that appears to be divvied up into dis-
parate, mutually unintelligible worlds. At the same time, I have been sus-
picious about the degree to which these worlds truly are strangers to each
other and wondered about the frequency with which borders are actually
crossed. Certainly, my own crossing into the world of Newhallville al-
lowed me to experience personally the degree to which the separateness
between communities in New Haven is a collectively maintained social
barrier, but one that is not so impossible to traverse.
To a degree, my own journey into and involvement with the world in
which these children live and grow is pertinent to the ethnography that
follows. It is not, however, the primary object of my attention. My aim in
prefacing this book with a discussion of my own positioning is to get these
issues out of the way so that they do not distract or confuse readers later