Title: Precious Matter: Science, Place, and the Making of Value

Speaker: Alice LIN Ping-hsiu, Department of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Zoom Meeting: ID 765-199-345
https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/765199345

Time: 1:00-2:30 pm

Abstract:

What makes a stone a “gem”? And what qualities of a gem are deemed valuable by people? This talk is a chapter-in-progress that brings together the voices of people who engage in the buying, selling, and certifying of gems, and the study of gems across two important nodes for its trade from South to Southeast Asia. Working from people’s stories, debates, discussions and imaginative engagements, the talk shows that the gem value is not constructed at free will but subject to historical processes of extractive colonial projects, markets, and science. In the interest of exploring what forms of cultural valuation and a history of geosciences would look like in the same analytic frame, the talk foregrounds the importance of tracing the genealogy of gemology alongside notions of place in the production of value. However tenuously held these ideas may be, the commodity and material culture of gems become compelling components to the wider, cultural, social, and economic fields in which they circulate.

Ping-hsiu Alice Lin is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong