Minerals, Collecting, and Value across the US-Mexico Border (Tracking Globalization)
"An exciting new contribution to sociocultural anthropology, one that is strongly ethnographic and richly analyzed.... Will make a major and important contribution to the literature on how value is created." —Les W. Field, University of New Mexico"Students with little knowledge of the topic as well as scholars in this area will enjoy this book, part of the 'Tracking Globalization' series.... Highly recommended." —Choice"An outstanding ethnographic account of the extraction and international circulation of mineral specimens that is sure to be of interest to a broad readership." —Andrew Walsh, University of Western Ontario"What makes things valuable? In this imaginative study of mineral mining and collecting, Elizabeth Ferry takes us from an incidental economy in central Mexico to the high reaches of scientific and aesthetic collecting in the United States. In the first, minerals are ancillary finds in the search for ores; in the second, minerals are expensive markers of taste and erudition. In the first, a miner brings minerals to his doctor's secretary to "smooth the way," or he places them on an altar to the saints. In the second, a dealer makes his minerals "pristine" by erasing all traces of their procurement and photographing them as if floating on air. Between the two, value is remade in the production and performance of difference. There is something to learn here for all students and scholars of value, commodities, and the traffic across nations." —Anna Tsing, author of Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection