"Images of diamonds appear everywhere in American culture. And everyone who has a diamond has a story to tell about it. Our stories about diamonds not only reveal what we do with these tiny stones, but also suggest how we create value, meaning, and identity through our interactions with material culture in general.Things become meaningful through our interactions with them, but how do people go about making meaning? What can we learn from an ethnography about the production of identity, creation of kinship, and use of diamonds in understanding selves and social relationships? By what means do people positioned within a globalized political-economy and a compelling universe of advertising interact locally with these tiny polished rocks?This book draws on 12 months of fieldwork with diamond consumers in New York City as well as an analysis of the iconic De Beers campaign that promised romance, status, and glamour to anyone who bought a diamond to show that this thematic pool is just one resource among many that diamond owners draw upon to engage with their own stones. The volume highlights the important roles that memory, context, and circumstance also play in shaping how people interpret and then use objects in making personal worlds. It shows that besides operating as subjects in an ad-burdened universe, consumers are highly creative, idiosyncratic, and theatrical agents"--

This book offers an overview of the key debates in the burgeoning anthropological literature on resource extraction. Resources play a crucial role in the contemporary economy and society, are required in the production of a vast range of consumer products and are at the core of geopolitical strategies and environmental concerns for the future of humanity. Scholars have widely debated the economic and sociological aspects of resource management in our societies, offering interesting and useful abstractions. However, anthropologists offer different and fresh perspectives – sometimes complementary and at other times alternative to these abstractions – based on field researches conducted in close contact with those actors (individuals as well as groups and institutions) that manipulate, anticipate, fight for, or resist the extractive processes in many creative ways. Thus, while addressing questions such as: "What characterizes the anthropology of resource extraction?", "What topics in the context of resource extraction have anthropologists studied?", and "What approaches and insights have emerged from this?", this book synthesizes and analyses a range of anthropological debates about the ways in which different actors extract, use, manage, and think about resources. This comprehensive volume will serve as a key reading for scholars and students within the social sciences working on resource extraction and those with an interest in natural resources, environment, capitalism, and globalization. It will also be a useful resource for practitioners within mining and development.

A priceless inheritance leads an imperfect family on a life-changing pursuit of the truth in a “compassionate, thoughtful, and surprisingly moving” novel (Booklist). Estranged siblings Beck, Ashley and Jake Miller are forced to reunite when their eccentric matriarch, Helen, passes away. But in between airing old resentments, they find a secret inheritance hidden among her possessions: the Florentine Diamond, a 137-carat yellow gemstone that went missing from the Austrian Empire a century ago. Desperate to learn how one of the world’s most elusive diamonds ended up in Helen’s bedroom, the Millers suddenly realize how little they know about their grandmother. As they race to determine whether they are the rightful heirs to the diamond and the fortune it promises, they uncover a past more tragic and powerful than they ever could have imagined. Inspired by the true story of the real, still-missing Florentine Diamond, The Imperfects illuminates the sacrifices we make for family, and how discovering our past can be the key to a better the future.

In Search of Lost Futures asks how imaginations might be activated through practices of autoethnography, multimodality, and deep interdisciplinarity—each of which has the power to break down methodological silos, cultivate novel research sensibilities, and inspire researchers to question what is known about ethnographic process, representation, reflexivity, audience, and intervention within and beyond the academy. By blurring the boundaries between the past, present, and future; between absence and presence; between the possible and the impossible; and between fantasy and reality, In Search of Lost Futures pushes the boundaries of ethnographic engagement. It reveals how researchers on the cutting edge of the discipline are studying absence and grief and employing street performance, museum exhibit, anticipation, or simulated reality to research and intervene in the possible, the impossible, and the uncertain.

Women have shared breast milk for eons, but in White Gold, Susan Falls shows how the meanings of capitalism, technology, motherhood, and risk can be understood against the backdrop of an emerging practice in which donors and recipients of breast milk are connected through social media in the southern United States. Drawing on her own experience as a participant, Falls describes the sharing community. She also presents narratives from donors, doulas, medical professionals, and recipients to provide a holistic ethnographic account. Situating her subject within cross-cultural comparisons of historically shifting attitudes about breast milk, Falls shows how sharing "white gold"--seen as a scarce, valuable, even mysterious substance--is a mode of enacting parenthood, gender, and political values. Though breast milk is increasingly being commodified, Falls argues that sharing is a powerful and empowering practice. Far from uniform, participants may be like-minded about parenting but not other issues, so their acquaintanceships add new textures to the body politic. In this interdisciplinary account, White Gold shows how sharing simultaneously reproduces the capitalist values that it disrupts while encouraging community-making between strangers.

The essays in this volume address the question: what does it mean to understand the contemporary moment in light of the 1930s? In the aftermath of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and facing a dramatic rise of right wing, authoritarian politics across the globe, the events of the 1930s have acquired a renewed relevance. Contributions from a diverse, interdisciplinary group of scholars address the relationship between these historical moments in various geographical contexts, from Asia-Pacific to Europe to the Americas, while probing an array of thematic questions—the meaning of populism and fascism, the contradictions of constitutional liberalism and “militant democracy,” long cycles and crisis tendencies in capitalism, the gendering and racialization of right wing movements, and the cultural and class politics of emancipatory struggles. Uncovering continuity as well as change and repetition in the midst of transition, Back to the 30s? enriches our ability to use the past to evaluate the challenges, dangers, and promises of the present.

In 2007, Canada became the third largest producer of diamonds in the world. Primarily mined on the edge of the Arctic, these diamonds are said to bring economic development and opportunity to nearby Indigenous communities. In Under Pressure, anthropologist Lindsay A. Bell examines the effects of diamond mining on an increasingly diverse northern population. Through an ethnographic focus on everyday life in Hay River, a multi-ethnic town in the Northwest Territories, this book illustrates the different ways Indigenous, settler, and immigrant northerners navigate the opportunities and obstacles created by large-scale resource development. By situating contemporary diamond mines within the long history of extraction in the region, Bell describes the social, cultural, and economic pressures that shape the people in this Northern community. In contrast to many polarizing accounts that deem mining as either good or bad, Under Pressure uses diamonds as an anthropological prism to consider larger issues related to Arctic extraction, globalization, Indigenous rights, and ethical consumption.