Clarity, Cut, and Culture: The Many Meanings of Diamonds by Susan Falls (review)

In this excellent, new contribution to research on the diamond industry, consumer behavior, and the social lives of things, Susan Falls addresses the “many meanings of diamonds.” Specifically, she focuses on how people make such meanings—in ways that are almost always idiosyncratic, often poetic, and only somewhat influenced by social conventions, DeBeers’s advertising, and other over-credited usual suspects. Drawing from ethnographic research at key sites within the industry, as well as from extensive interviews with people for whom diamonds are meaningful in one way or another, Falls considers diamonds through semiotic lenses that serve to broaden, rather than narrow, our attention. While Clarity, Cut, and Culture certainly addresses what diamonds mean to various consumers (and especially to the select group of informants interviewed), its most important contributions lie in its detailed accounting of how people make things like diamonds meaningful.

The first chapter, “From Rock to Gem,” addresses the history and current state of the global diamond industry. Not surprisingly, Falls focuses especially on DeBeers, and in particular on the factors that have contributed to the company’s rise and ongoing success: its integration of production with marketing and sales, the systems by which it has maintained control over the markets it serves, and, most recently, its shifting position in the face of new competitors and growing global concerns over the sourcing of diamonds. As suits a book on the meanings of diamonds, however, Falls offers more than a description of how diamonds move from sources to consumers. She also highlights the significant materiality of diamonds, discussing, for example, the “extraordinary features” (41) of these stones that are at least partly responsible for making them such good things for people to think with (i.e., they are durable and reflect light in ways that make them sparkle). Not that such inherent properties lead people to think of diamonds uniformly, however. Here, as in the chapters that follow, Falls is especially sensitive to the idiosyncratic ways in which people make different meanings with what are ostensibly the same raw materials. Thus, the sparkle that some might celebrate as “‘festive,’ ‘flirty,’ ‘attractive,’ ‘pretty,’ and ‘exciting,’” might well be identified by others as “gaudy” or “too showy” (43).

Diamond consumers are not the only ones who create difference out of what is materially much the same. In Chapter 2, “Valuing Diamonds,” Falls addresses a set of key processes in the global diamond industry by discussing the work of trained experts who “maneuver the seemingly similar into a hierarchy of value” (57) by grading and certifying diamonds before consumers ever see them. Based in part on research carried out at the Gemological Institute of America, at which she participated in a course on diamond grading, Falls reveals how grading and certifying are highly structured and seemingly objective processes, which rely on specialist terms and technologies. Once again, though, Falls draws attention to the idiosyncrasies of consumers who, however much they might be encouraged by marketers and retailers to take on the terms and assurances of industry experts, are destined to evaluate diamonds in their own distinctive ways.

Although countless popular and scholarly sources (see, e.g., Epstein 1982, Westwood 2002, Hart 2002) have critically addressed the marketing of diamonds, none that I have seen addresses the important matter of consumer subjectivity as well as Falls does here. We are, by now, all familiar with the effectiveness of DeBeers’s “diamonds are forever” campaign. But how do the people we imagine to occupy the consumer slot—not just those who buy for themselves, but also the givers, receivers, and/or inheritors of diamond jewelry—actually respond to diamond marketing? In Chapter 3, “A Diamond is Forever,” Falls reveals how consumers of diamond messaging are anything but occupants of neat niches or the “passive absorbers” (78) of imposed meanings. Her findings indicate that while consumers may habitually deem diamonds to have the meanings that marketers communicate, individuals who buy, give, receive, and inherit diamonds...