Clarity, Cut, and Culture: The Many Meanings of Diamonds

1. From Rock to Gem

— 27 1 FROM ROCK TO GEM— Anthropology and Value Once they are cut and polished, diamonds are quite valuable—especially considering how small they are. But how do we get from “just a rock” to “such a gem”? Where does a diamond’s value come from? How is its value defined, produced, and recognized? What is “value” anyway? Moving beyond economic models of value that hinge upon exchange, anthropological theories of value consider a broad array of variables such as labor, use, sentimentality, morality, semiotics, and more. The anthropological lens is multivalent, even kaleidoscopic. As Paul Eiss and David Pederson (2008, 283) point out, “from Smith and Ricardo to Marx and Mauss, and by way of Simmel and Saussure, the category has been used in varied ways to illuminate ethical, economic, aesthetic, logical, linguistic, and political dimensions of human life. . . . The value of value may lie in its ability to elucidate and move across boundaries of many kinds.” Value is, thus, a foundational category, and deserving of exploration across all domains of activity and experience. Many anthropological theories start with Marx and develop “value” in ways that attend to some aspect of labor, use, or exchange with regard to contemporary capitalism. David Graeber, in Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (2001), for example, combines theoretical innovations by Marcel 28 — From Rock to Gem Mauss and Roy Bhaskar to argue for value as a form of creative action. Contributors to Fred Meyers’s (2002) edited volume, Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture, challenge the implications of Annette Weiner’s (1992) theory of inalienability within a capitalist context, utilizing Arjun Appadurai’s demonstration that objects take on different meanings as they move through different cultural contexts (Appadurai 1986). These texts show us that value can be used as a theoretical lens to transcend the restrictions of binary categories (like production vs. consumption, or gift vs. commodity), and that value can provide an analytic device to address how groups of people might be linked by their interaction with a set of goods even when separated by time or space. Using value in this way usually requires, however, a sustained consideration of historical context. And just as different notions of value appear in theory, there are many iterations of “value” in the vernacular of the everyday. It is a term whose meaning at once expands and dissolves upon closer inspection; even as a concept, value is never inert. Its force is felt across every domain of social life—from the political and economic to the aesthetic, the religious, the scientific, the semantic, the moral, and the personal. Insofar as subjective value, or meaning, takes place in a cultural context in which many forms of value and valuation are operative, any study of value must consider a range of questions concerning the forms, sociality, and production of value. What are the relationships among various forms of value, and how might one form of value be translated into the terms of another? How does the notion of intrinsic value operate? Are there forms of value that are epiphenomenal to others—and if so, what is the nature of these secondary forms? How might value serve as a source of social action? Are there hegemonic forms of value in different social activities, and how are they produced and maintained? If there are gatekeepers of value, who are they and how are they established? How might cultural agents seek to shape or wield the standards of value to their own purposes? How do historical and discursive constructs restrict or enable alternative semioses? And finally, how do conceptions of value within anthropology From Rock to Gem — 29 itself reflect larger disciplinary issues, as well as direct research? I will return to these questions at the conclusion of our adventure into the value of diamonds, a journey that begins now with the story of how these rocks became gems. This is a good place to start because besides being impressively serendipitous, it helps explain how the industry choreographs diamonds’ value and provides a backdrop against which consumption takes place. Romance, Status, and Glamour The association of diamonds with romance, status and glamour is, actually , relatively recent. And you might be surprised to learn that diamonds were not always for women. It was only in mid-fifteenth-century France that King Charles VII, defying sumptuary laws prohibiting women from...