Page 132 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

5.

Anthropologist Takes Inner-City

Children on Shopping Sprees

When I asked Davy if he would like to go on a shopping trip with me, he
tilted his head to the side, smiling, and looked at me without speaking
for several moments. He seemed to want to speak, but couldn't. We sat,
me hunkered up in a fifth-grade-sized chair, my knees knocking up
against the underside of a fifth-grade-sized table in the reading corner of
Davy's classroom. "Yeah," he said, his almost-changing voice creaky and
thin, his tone rising to make his answer sound more like a question. He
looked away and then peeked back at me, as if he had a suspicion that I
would disappear while his head was turned. "Yeah."
By far, most of my research was conducted in a participant-observer
mode in homes, at school, and in the neighborhood. This work was cen-
tral to documenting and understanding the consumer lives of African
American children in New Haven, because it immersed me in children's
daily lives. However, I also needed to get a close, concentrated look at
these children's spending and shopping, precisely in order to understand
how the rest of what I was seeing and doing was enmeshed with aspects
of consumption. I knew that hanging around with kids might never get
me to the corner store with them, much less into the mall, food court, or
some secret consumer site. Here, I decided to construct my own oppor-
tunities and take children on shopping trips. My aim was to guarantee
that I would be able to watch each child shopping, to see which stores
they wanted to go to, to see what they bought, and to watch the process
of evaluating merchandise, dealing with other shoppers, and negotiat-
ing the particular forms of public space presented by malls and stores.
These events were conceived of and designed as a foil to the happen-
stance of more regular participant observation, controlled and control-
lable (though not experimental), and, frankly, as a relief from the anxiety

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