Page 9 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

viii . Preface

alone at night is suspect. However, the woman was telling me to watch
out for myself, and despite my being bundled up in the latest fashion
among black kids in the early 1990s—a Starter down coat—no one was
likely to mistake me for a kid from the 'Ville. Despite the dangers present
in Newhallville—the drive-by shootings, the drug gangs, the break-ins—
Newhallville is a neighborhood where most times of the day people are
sitting on their stoops, looking out their windows, or scanning the side-
walks as they drive their cars. It is a neighborhood where people on the
street are visible, watched, and often not only recognized but also pro-
tected. In contrast, in New Haven's middle-class neighborhoods, people
are rarely on the street and certainly do not sit on their porches all after-
noon watching people pass by or peek out their curtains to keep an eye
on what's going on. What this woman was saying to me was that because
no one is watching, really, in the middle-class neighborhood, no one is
watching out for a lone woman walking home at night either. Anything
could happen. In Newhallville, even though it seemed like a more dan-
gerous neighborhood, this was less likely simply because so many people
were always around and looking out.
E. E. Evans-Pritchard's classic ethnography The Nuer contains a dia-
gram entitled "Nuer Socio-Spatial Categories." Looking something like
a semicircular rainbow, the diagram depicts these sociospatial categories
as a series of nested hemispheres. The smallest sociospatial category,
"the hut," sits at the center of these, surrounded by layers of increasing
size and scope until, finally, the largest and most overarching category is
reached: "the government operating from various centers." Although
this rendering of an indigenous worldview includes no mention of the
anthropologist (the implication being that the anthropologist is not part
of the native world), in practice most ethnographers are directly or in-
directly visitors from "the government operating from various centers."
(In Evans-Pritchard's case, this was literally true, since he had been hired
by the British colonial government in Sudan to learn about the Nuer,
their lives, and political organization.) Generated in an era when the
lines between native and anthropologist could be clearly drawn and
conceptualized, Evans-Pritchard's layered scheme of categories, with its
formal purity and graphic clarity, might be seen to represent modernist
anthropology more generally. Today, with the insistence on multivocality,
on the changing and flexible nature of identity, and with the increasing
slippage between anthropologist and native, the hope and confidence
embodied in the diagram seem overly simplistic as a representation of
complex, changing worlds.