Page 155 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

140 . Anthropologist on Shopping Sprees
gift-giving, there was also a distinct and profound gratification that chil-
dren experienced in being able to give something to someone else. For
them, the power to be generous was often a tremendous motivator, not
engaged with cynically or out of obligation, but one generating a pleas-
ure and satisfaction unlike that of buying something for themselves.
This is not to deny in any way that children found buying things for
themselves pleasing and satisfying. Kids loved buying things for them-
selves, and they did it more often than they bought things for others.
"It would seem that shopping has become about the only area of social
action which is defined as clearly not politicized," observes Daniel Miller
in an essay entitled "Could Shopping Ever Really Matter?" (1997, 31).
What Miller pinpoints in his essay is the long-standing and still influential
position of Left-leaning scholars (Right-leaning ones as well) which de-
fines the "mere" act of shopping as vulgar, disconnected from social rela-
tions (but somehow not disconnected from political economies), self-
referential, surfacey, and inherently apolitical or even antipolitical, a
position that he aptly characterizes as "a strange mixture of Marxism
with elite criticism of low culture" (44). Just how a socially and culturally
organized activity like shopping might be divorced from the social rela-
tions of production while remaining firmly rooted in the political econo-
my that has generated it is a question most observers have successfully
evaded for decades. More recently, however, the more obvious answer has
suggested itself, which is (of course) that shopping cannot be excised from
social and cultural relationships, and therefore neither can it be separated
from the realm of the political. Miller points out complexities similar to
those I have outlined in this chapter in a discussion of the issues surround-
ing shopping for mundane, everyday items like household disinfectant:
The atmosphere reflects a gamut of social relations. In one case a
daughter-in-law may exact revenge on a dominating mother-in-law
by her superior knowledge of changes in the market and constantly
implying that her rival's products and choices are out of date or in-
appropriate. In another context two housewives freely exchange ex-
periences of consumption in order that both should be protected
against critical comments from what is regarded as the ignorant but
malevolent world of men. The conversion of shopping knowledge
into social relations was most evident in intra-female discussion but
may become highly emotive when it is others (especially children) of
the household complaining that their expectations have been thwarted.
(Miller 1998, 41-42)