Illusions in Stone dir. by Brian Brazeal (review)

There are no doubt people—and some of them, anthropologists—for whom gems exercise neither overt fascination nor covert desire, neither scholarly intent nor aesthetic stimulation, neither revulsion at the barbarities associated with their mining nor disgust with the excesses of the affluent who alone can afford the best specimens. I admit I am not one of those people, and in fact all of the aforementioned reactions, discrete yet mixed up like the thick Colombian stew ajiaco, are part of how I think about gems. Brian Brazeal is also a scholar for whom gems provoke this complex mixture of contradictory emotions and honed research interests. As the director and producer of this superb film, he aims those many points of inquiry at a stone whose character is among the most profoundly and simultaneously attractive and revolting—the emerald.

The 58-minute film follows the contours of the model of multi-sited ethnography described and advocated by George Marcus's "Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-sited Ethnography" (1995). Brazeal's footage moves (in order) from Brazil to India, from there to Zambia, and then on to Tel Aviv and New York City. The last third of the film takes place in Bogotá and Boyacá province, Colombia, where the finest stones in the world are mined and have been mined both before and since the Spanish conquest of the 16th century.

The film's title, "Illusions in Stone," as a running theme, reprises repeatedly. "Illusion" evokes the representational world in which humans live, populated by complex interactions between language, symbol, and multi-dimensional cultural constructions. In this film, the illusions revolve primarily around the lived meanings of the cultural construction of wealth, as that concept is experienced very differently by the interlocutors of a highly stratified and unequal global production and trading system. As the film's optic moves from site to site, the different levels of illusion are narrated by Brazeal's interlocutors and shown in visually striking and beautiful cinematographic scripting. The alternating lush and barren landscapes, rural isolation and urban intensity are matched by a remarkable soundtrack that includes sacred Jain music, Colombian vallenatos, and new Zambian beats. This is a beautifully crafted film characterized by high production quality all around.

For gems in general, and emeralds quite specifically, the illusion is all about wealth. The impoverished miners in Brazil, Zambia, and Colombia go back to the grinding, dangerous, degrading, and hopeless work of mining every day under the illusion that they might, against all odds, strike it rich with a fabulous stone, or better yet a rich vein of stones. The illusion is sustained by repeated statements made by individuals in all three countries about the metaphysical characteristics of both gems and the search for them. Greed, as both miners and gem traders assert, sabotages the possibility of getting lucky. The miners, in particular, declaim that the stones possess their own fate as sentient beings, and that, moreover, it is faith in God that makes it possible for miners to intersect with the fate of a particular emerald. These statements are treated as credulous, yet are declared adjacent to the ongoing theme of illusion. Brazeal does not editorialize, but allows his interlocutors to elaborate on such apparent contradictions—illusion and faith, suffering of people, and sentience of stones—as veins of life as complexly unique as the emeralds themselves. Indeed, the unique qualities of each emerald and the impossibility of objective assessment across stones is another ongoing narrative stated as fact in all six countries.

For the buyer of the rough stone, the person who will cut and facet the stone, the illusion is sustained by the vast difference between what they pay the miner and how much they can potentially sell a stone for, provided someone sees great beauty and possibility in it. A cutter-polisher will pay a good price if s...