Speculating sapphires : mining, trading, and dreams that move gems across the Indian Ocean
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Imagined as expressing the entrepreneurial spirit of capitalism or reflecting its excesses, speculation is often theorized from the perspectives of bankers and investors who control global financial markets. Their practices of taking high risks with the anticipation of receiving high returns have shaped popular and scholarly understandings of speculation, yet many others who have limited access to capital and who deal with uncertainty as a feature of everyday life routinely make wagers on unpredictable futures. Theirs is not a vantage point through which speculation is often understood. This dissertation disentangles speculation from finance capital to ask: how do ordinary people take risks to pursue their dreams beyond possibilities immediately available to them, in circumstances that often lie outside their control? Speculating Sapphires seeks answers to this question through an ethnography of gem mining and trading in Sri Lanka and across the Indian Ocean, uncovering an alternative genealogy of speculation grounded in everyday worlds of work, shaped by the legacies of oceanic histories. As luxury commodities, Sri Lankan sapphires have been traded across the Indian Ocean for over a millennium; their mercantile networks continue to flow through old maritime routes to new sites of global capital. Lubricating these flows are the risky pursuits of ordinary people, from miners who work without wages for a share of gem revenue, to traders who exchange stones on credit across ethnic and religious lines with little recourse in the event of default. This ethnography seeks to understand how the speculative dreams of miners and traders shape the movement of gemstones. Its chapters follow sapphire networks from Sri Lanka's hinterland villages, where miners describe the aspirations that sustain their months of wageless work, to markets across the Indian Ocean, tracing the risky, secretive, credit-based trade of gems as they pass through the hands of gem cutters, commission agents, transnational brokers, and multi-generational family firms. Bringing within the same frame labor on land and trading across the seas, this dissertation examines the risks taken and returns sought in the subterranean depths of hinterland mines and across maritime landscapes traversed by mobile family firms, credit lines, and messages of stones bought, sold, admired, and stolen. Following these flows and the aspirations that fuel them, Speculating Sapphires reimagines speculation through ordinary forms of risk taking in labor and trade, shaped by oceanic histories and their long afterlives.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2020; ©2020 |
| Publication date | 2020; 2020 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Samarawickrema, Lokuhettige Nethra Anjana |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Thiranagama, Sharika |
| Thesis advisor | Thiranagama, Sharika |
| Thesis advisor | Hansen, Thomas Blom, 1958- |
| Thesis advisor | Machado, Pedro, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Malkki, Liisa H. (Liisa Helena) |
| Thesis advisor | Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko, 1945- |
| Degree committee member | Hansen, Thomas Blom, 1958- |
| Degree committee member | Machado, Pedro, 1970- |
| Degree committee member | Malkki, Liisa H. (Liisa Helena) |
| Degree committee member | Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko, 1945- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Anthropology. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Nethra Samarawickrema. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Anthropology. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2020. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2020 by Lokuhettige Nethra Anjana Samarawickrema
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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