Page 133 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

1 1 8 . Anthropologist on Shopping Sprees

of waiting for something obviously significant to happen in the course of
the everyday.
The methodology of the shopping trips was simple: I provided the
children with twenty dollars each and said they could spend it where
they liked, on whatever they liked. I conducted twenty-three shopping
trips in all, one of which was incomplete. (Most of the following discus-
sion focuses on twenty completed shopping trips, excluding two excur-
sions with teenage girls.) Taking place toward the end of two years of
field research, the trips were not particularly natural in that they did not
replicate or even attempt to replicate the kind of experience that kids
might have with adults within their own social spheres. As a result, I
cannot make the argument that these trips are an indication of how such
children really do spend their money when they have it, but the strength
of the patterns that do emerge provides a firm basis for understanding
some of the social and cultural dynamics at work in these children's
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lives. The basic facts of the shopping trips did not mesh with children's
everyday experiences in any case, since most caretakers did not give
their children money and then take kids on a shopping trip where the
child was free to dictate just about everything: when and where to shop,
when and where to eat, when to leave. As Kiana explained to me in her
poetic and whimsical way when I asked her to explain to me how her
experience with me was different from her usual shopping excursions:

When you're with a grown-up, boy, it's different. "No, stay here. No, no you
wait until I get out of the store." I don't like that. I like it when I go with
people who just let me be freely in the store to buy whatever I want to buy.
How was it today?
Terrific. Yeah.
How do you feel?
I feel good. Because usually when I come from shopping I'm tired, but I'm
not today because it's different. . . but you see, you let me be freely—so
that's how it's different.
In letting Kiana "be freely" I did not represent or exercise the kind of
adult authority familiar to these children: I was not a mother, aunt,
teacher, or older sibling. My dogged refusal to curb their often rambunc-
tious behavior, despite severe temptation on my part, made me even less
credible as a grown-up, if the disapproving looks of shop clerks and other
adults were any indicator. Although my initial intention was to trail be-
hind kids, seeing what they did, this plan was thwarted by children's con-