Page 135 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

120 . Anthropologist on Shopping Sprees

based quite overtly on a complex and sometimes convoluted web of
social relationships—especially to kin, but also including each other,
friends, myself, and those they came into contact with while they shopped,
as well as occasional imaginary figures.
Through their shopping excursions, kids were engaging with their
families, neighborhoods, city, and culture rather than exiting from those
social entanglements. Children used shopping as a way to create rela-
tionships and, rather than being self-contained packages of information,
the shopping trips were a passage into the entire lives of these children. 3
These shopping trips represent a convergence point of social, cultural,
economic, and political processes through which children continually
navigate. Understanding them ethnographically requires connecting the
purchases to children's larger worlds. Although Davy bought only two
items when he went shopping with me, those purchases are revealing
when understood in the larger ethnographic context, and in the circum-
stances of his everyday life.

Shopping Excursions
Davy
There is stark and apparent simplicity to Davy's purchases when pre-
sented in tabular form (see table 5.1). The items, their prices, and the
place where they were bought are not all that surprising: this was a ten-
year-old boy on a shopping spree. But what Davy bought cannot speak
on its own about his personal concerns and motivations, or the circum-
stances and forces shaping them. Why walkie-talkies? Why Toys-R-Us?
Understanding the things Davy bought takes us into his life at school, at
home, and in New Haven.
Davy had arrived in Lucy Asian's classroom in the middle of the
school year. The oldest of four children, Davy came from a home
fraught with difficulties. Sometimes he would come to school and sleep
all morning, and when asked what was wrong would answer that his

Table 5.1. Davy's Purchases

Item Price Store
1 set walkie-talkies $12.99 Toys-R-Us
batteries $ 4.29 Toys-R-Us