Page 154 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

Anthropologist on Shopping Sprees . 139

Gift-giving was a powerful way for children to strengthen, transform,
or maintain relationships with those around them. While Cherie and
Shaquita were the only kids to spend more than half of their money on
gifts, eight of the twelve girls who came on shopping trips with me
bought a gift for someone. In contrast only one boy bought a gift, a small
porcelain picture frame decorated with flowers, which he gave to me. 4
This boy was Shaquita's brother and, looking back, I am not surprised
that it was this boy who showed this kind of concern—it fits right in with
the kinds of priorities and concerns that Shaquita showed in her own
shopping trip. The basically gendered aspect of children's gift buying fits
in well with expectations at home regarding relationships between
friends and family, where the active maintenance of relationships was
often managed by girls and women, and the accounting of material and
emotional debts brokered by them as well. This is what Michaela di
Leonardo has called "the work of kinship" (1987). Though di Leonardo
identifies this work as being primarily the province of women, children's
purchases here suggest that girls are drawn into this work early: girls
bought gifts for their mothers, younger siblings, grandmothers, and, in
one case, an infant niece. The purchases showed an intimate understand-
ing of the needs and wants of the people around them and I was especial-
ly struck that children seemed to know quite well their mothers' shoe and
clothing sizes. This sort of intimate knowledge suggests that children do
not regard their caretakers just as the givers of care and resources and
as therefore somehow able to provide for all of their own needs as
well. Rather, these girls demonstrated the degree to which they under-
stand the very human and real limitations of their caretakers' abilities
and recognized their own responsibility for acknowledging or lighten-
ing the load. Being able to arrive home after a special outing like the
shopping trips with a gift for someone else, especially for a primary care-
taker, was a way of demonstrating that kids understood that their mem-
bership in the network of kin needed to be active in order to be activated.
These gifts were an effort to reciprocate with care and caring and at the
same time allowed kids to show that they were competent in meting out
material resources in ways that served not only material ends, but social
ones as well.
Another aspect in the buying of gifts and its importance for these
children was that most of the time kids were not in the position to give
gifts of a material kind; the pleasure aroused in children through choos-
ing, buying, and giving gifts should not be taken lightly or discounted.
Although I have emphasized above the practical and tactical nature of