My work as an anthropologist is aimed at enlarging our understanding of the ways in which poor and working class kids of color engage with consumption — and to challenge popular stereotypes. But turning the tables is also important. For about six months, I have been working on a journal of my own consumer life, which I’m calling “My Life with Things.” This week, you’ll see five entries from that journal. The project is highly personal, but it has a purpose that goes beyond self-documentation. As someone who has long studied consumption and is deeply critical of it, I’m painfully aware of my own deep ties to the world of consumption. Ultimately, it is my hope that this intensive self-observation can serve as a springboard for further exploring contemporary commodity consumption in all its aspects.

Tuesday, 16 Jul 2002

LOS ANGELES, Calif.

When I go to Haiti, I usually stay with Florencia Pierre and her family. Florencia is one of about seven people who make up Haiti’s middle class. A particularly fierce woman in her forties from the island of La Gonave, Florencia comes from a large family and seems, through her hard work, to support a network of about 10 or 12 people. She’s a dancer, choreographer, and community activist, as well as working on and off for a Spanish nongovernmental organization. (NGOs have entirely different pay scales for “natives” vs. outsiders. Americans, Europeans, and Latin Americans working in Haiti for NGOs earn maybe $80,000 a year if they’re the head of a program, plus a housing allowance. Haitians working for NGOs might earn a tenth of that.)

Florencia has just finished the first stages of building a house outside of Petionville, and I’ve never seen it. But her old apartment in Petionville, which is often described as an upscale suburb of Port au Prince, had three small rooms and a bathroom, a total of about 500 square feet. Usually, about seven people lived there at a time. There was running water three times a week, which had to be collected in big barrels and any small container that were around. I calculated that we had about 200 gallons of water per week to use for our every bathing, toilet, and dishwashing need. I think that my family of three in the U.S. uses two or three times that much per day, and we don’t flush the toilet when we pee.

Intermittent electricity; a jerry-rigged refrigerator with a freezer at about fridge temperature and the fridge section somewhat lukewarm; no working telephone. (Today, most Haitians who can afford it just get a cell phone, because to get a phone line in your home takes several years and quite a few bribes — and even then, service is awful. Cell phones, by contrast, are quite reliable.) Bucket baths in cool water. No air conditioning. No fan. This, in Haiti, is living large for most people, who haven’t made it to the ranks of the Morally Repugnant Elite.

When I’m in Haiti, I don’t mind living that way. Amazingly, I find that I don’t even really miss all my stuff: my VCR, cable TV, built-in gas cooktop, washing machine and dryer. This is what’s so schizo: I like living without all the luxuries while I’m away, but when I’m at home I start obsessing about Chinese silk rugs and $400 vacuum cleaners. There’s something quite liberating about cutting the ties to all my crap, even just for a few weeks. Somehow, it makes me feel more human, more alive.

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? It’s not the job of people living in the Third World to make me appreciate my life. What a disgusting idea. And yet, in a very real way, that is the biggest and longest lasting impact of the time I’ve spent in Cuba, Haiti, Peru, and elsewhere. The experience is fundamentally liberating: to go for a period of time with just a little bit of my normal complement of crap (one small suitcase, say) and to be perfectly happy. To not watch television hardly at all. To not go shopping as entertainment. In other words, to magically suspend normal commodity capitalist First World obsessions. To replace that with the realness of living poor. To use other people’s poverty as an antidote to my own alienation.

This is terrible, but it happens. The commodity is us. And because we are such earnest Americans, we think that everybody just wants to be our friend. Once we figure out that the fact that we’re rich is relevant, we feel, well, offended. We feel we’re not being treated like people. And yet we’re not really ready to face up to the ways in which we’re already touring other people’s lives for our own pleasure and satisfaction.

Now, there’s no doubt that it can be frustrating to be treated like a walking dollar bill — but in a way, isn’t that better than the alternative, which is all the occulted, mystified, fetishized dealings that we have all the time, in which we mistake things for social relationships? At least it’s honest. But we really hate having to factor the crass money stuff into our dealings with our friends. I’m not saying that Florencia treats me in that crass way, because she really doesn’t. But there’s still this truth: I’m rich, she’s not, and I can give her lots of stuff because I’m feeling generous, and if we’re good friends, she’s the one I will decide to be generous to, not someone else.

I’ve got friends higher up the food chain who choose to be generous to me, and I appreciate their generosity and I like to think that I cultivate and value my friendship with them utterly apart from their ability to give me stuff — but if I really face up to it, that’s only partly true. So when I arrive at Florencia’s on one of my trips, I’ve always got my rather small duffel bag packed with all my stuff, and then a huge suitcase stuffed with all kinds of things for her. Maybe it’s even a way of demonstrating my richness, my wealth, my privilege. I get enormous pleasure out of being generous to her, spending money to buy things for her and her family that I wouldn’t get for myself — but here I am in my 1,350 square-foot home with running water and electricity 24/7, and somehow, all these clothes that are basically new but I don’t wear them anymore.

In Cuba with Isaias Rojas, director of the company Ban Rra Rra, one of Cuba’s best folklore troupes.

This past March, I spent a week in Cuba studying folkloric dance. In Cuba, we lived like kings and queens — $25 a day for a converted convent room with a Monet-blue ceiling and marble tiled bathrooms (the nuns never had it so good), smoking Cohibas and sipping rum in the evenings, that all-Fidel-all-the-time channel soothing us from the television downstairs in the lobby. My Haitian friend Florencia has a daughter, Djenane, who is a student at Cuba’s International School for Sports and Physical Education. Djenane gets 100 pesos per month for spending money — about $4. So in one night, I spent all the money she has for five months. Of course, the U.S. is a rich country and it’s expensive to live here; what can you get in the U.S. for twenty-five bucks? Certainly not a charming room in an old convent where you feel transported, elated, special. Breakfast included.