Page 25 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

10 . Consumption in Context

through which these confrontations are mediated (Rutz and Orlove
1988).
Barbie can serve as an example here. There are cases of feminist ac-
tivists undertaking guerrilla warfare and switching talking Barbie voice-
boxes with those of G.I. Joe (Rand 1995,159); a woman who has under-
gone dozens of surgeries in order to actually become a living Barbie
(Lord 1994); a man who both enacts and soothes his grief over his part-
ner's death from AIDS by creating huge and complex Barbie people-
scapes in his home (Stern 1998); and, as Asia and Natalia noted at this
chapter's outset, children who vocally challenge the validity of the world
Barbie inhabits and represents. These few selected examples of the ways
in which some people have used Barbie in their own lives is more than
suggestive of the range of consumer engagements possible with mass-
produced commodities. But one could hardly argue that making G.I. Joe
say such Barbie-esque phrases as "Sometimes math is hard" is likely to
change any girl's experience in an actual math class (unless perhaps she
brought that G.I. Joe with her into the classroom). Similarly, while I offer
an appreciation and even a celebration of Asia and Natalia's critique of
Barbie, I remain unconvinced that their awareness of Barbie's faults—
from their point of view—will lead to substantive change in the larger so-
cial problems upon which their awareness alights.
As ethnographers have moved into examining consumers as well as
such industries as advertising, television, and marketing, it has become
increasingly evident that consumption is at once a hegemonic force de-
serving of condemnation and a realm in which people exercise consider-
able power and creativity. In an ethnography of shopping among resi-
dents in a North London neighborhood, Miller explores the way in
which shopping can be used for a variety of social purposes, among
them expressing love for kin, playing out courtship, attempting to edu-
cate children, or giving oneself a "treat" (Miller 1998). In developing a
theory of shopping that ultimately views this activity as a form of ritual
sacrifice, Miller purposefully puts shopping onto traditional anthropo-
logical ground, viewing this much-maligned activity as a modern form
of ritual within which are contained profound social themes and impera-
tives. In a very different vein, Arlene Davila (forthcoming) shows (in the
case of the Hispanic marketing industry) the construction of media im-
ages, creation of ad campaigns, and the emergence of ethnic markets as a
deeply complex political process that cannot be understood simply as the
brainchild of scheming advertisers and greedy corporations. Rather, in
this case, marketers themselves, as well as the market they seek to define,
are mutually shaped by the vagaries of immigration, U.S. racial hierar-