Page 134 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

Anthropologist on Shopping Sprees . 119

sistent efforts to draw me into social interaction with them. I could not
remain apart from the shopping but was almost continually required by
children to be an active and opinionated participant. This was, for them,
an integral part of the shopping dynamic: social relationships. This dis-
cussion I had with Cherie as she wondered whether to buy a cap gun was
typical in many ways (though Cherie's wit was particularly quick):

Oooh, $2.99. Should I get it?
You like it?
I'm asking you.
Do you like that?
Kind of.
What would you do with it?
Murder my brother [a mischievous grin].
The children who went shopping represent a varied group of friends,
siblings, cousins, and classmates because I found myself being asked to
take sisters, cousins, and friends along as well. I viewed these requests as
important information in and of itself and in response chose not to insist
that children shop individually with me. When they asked me, I allowed
them to go in pairs or even small groups. Kids were also remarkably
adept at ensuring that I could not refuse these requests, which were usu-
ally made by girls. More than once, when I arrived at a girl's house to
take her out shopping she would run up to me saying, "My friend [sis-
ter, cousin] is staying with me, can she come, too?"
In most cases children were caught up in thinking about family mem-
bers and caretakers even while shopping alone with me, and these absent
people exerted a force on children's shopping trips that was in many re-
spects far more powerful than my own influence. 2 Several kids spoke of
having been told by mothers and grandmothers to be sure to buy one
thing or another. To my surprise, they never attempted to enlist me in
surreptitiously derailing those instructions. Likewise, other children,
after having made one practical purchase or another, would remark with
great satisfaction and anticipation, "My mommy is going to be so happy
that I bought this!" From the outset, then, the effort to understand these
children's consumption was not possible if I insisted on considering their
choices as being generated out of self-interest and personal desire—the
starting point for so much theory on consumption in general and shop-
ping in particular. The process of consumption was for these children