This article examines the qualitative dimensions invoked and procured by smugglers, traders, and agitators in events of transporting and trading diamonds in Angola. The experience of qualities generally attributed to diamonds is exhibited and embodied in indexical and iconic relation to organized semiotic qualisigns of speed and slowness, secure and insecure bodies, mobility and immobility. In other words, ‘qualia’ orient objects and people by displaying a connection to the experience of diamonds’ qualities of visibility and hiddenness, and allow in turn for the articulation of disparate social processes implicating both the materiality of carbon-based stones and the social relations inscribed in the labor of extraction and exchange.
AghaA (2011) Commodity registers. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 21(1): 22–53.
2.
AppaduraiA(1986) Introduction: Commodities and the politics of value. In: AppaduraiA (eds) The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3–63.
3.
AustenR(1993) The moral economy of witchcraft. In: ComaroffJComaroffJ (eds) Modernity of its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
4.
BenjaminW (1973) Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London/New York: Verso.
5.
BloombergD (2006) Won’t Forgive… Can’t Forget: The Story of Jacques Graubart. Oxfordshire: Writersworld.
6.
BrutonE (1971) Diamonds. London: Chilton Book Co.
7.
Buck-MorssS (1986) The flaneur, the sandwichman and the whore: The politics of loitering. New German Critique. 39: 99–140.
8.
ClevelandT (2008) Rock solid: African laborers on the diamond mines of the Companhia de Diamantes de Angola (Diamang), 1917–1975. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Minnesota.
9.
CollierBL (1968) 3 Murders bring fear to gem area. The New York Times. 19 November.
10.
FoucaultM (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books.
11.
GellA(1977) Magic, perfume, dream. In: LewisI (eds) Symbols and Sentiments: Cross-Cultural Studies in Symbolism. London: Academic Press.
12.
GraeberD (2001) Toward an Anthropological Theory of Culture: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave.
13.
HartM (2001) A Journey to the Heart of an Obsession. New York: Walker & Company.
14.
KeaneW (2003) Semiotics and the social analysis of material things. Language and Communication. 23: 409–425.
15.
KockelmanP (2006) A semiotic ontology of the commodity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 16(1): 76–102.
16.
KurinR (2007) Hope Diamond: The Legendary History of a Cursed Gem. New York: Harper Paperbacks.
17.
MarxK (1976) [1867]) Capital, A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1.London: Penguin Books.
18.
MascoJ (2006) The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
19.
MasuzawaT (2000) Troubles with materiality: The ghost of fetishism in the nineteenth-century. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 42(2): 242–267.
20.
MaussM (1990) The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
21.
MisserFOlivierV (1997) Les Gemmocraties. L’Economie politique du diamant Africain. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer.
22.
MunnN (1986) The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
23.
ParryJBlochM(1989) Introduction: Money and the morality of exchange. In: ParryJBlochM (eds) Money and the Morality of Exchange. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–32.
24.
StallybrassP(1998) Marx’s coat. In: SpyerP (eds) Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces. New York: Routledge, pp. 183–207.
25.
WestHSandersT(2003) Power revealed and concealed in the new world order. In: WestHSandersT (eds) Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 1–37.
