Regimes of Ethical Value? Landscape, Race and Representation in the Canadian Diamond Industry

Regimes of Ethical Value?Landscape, Race and

Representation in the CanadianDiamond Industry

Kolson SchlosserDepartment of Geography, Geology and Environment, Slippery Rock University,

Slippery Rock, PA, USA;[email protected]

Abstract: Canadian diamonds are marketed as “ethical” alternatives to notorious“blood diamonds”. This paper analyzes the specific matrices through which ethicalconsumption as a discourse is being mobilized to sell diamonds. I argue that consumptionoperates as a system of social signification in which consuming subjects are positioned asmoral subjects. Moreover, I argue that historically accumulated symbolic power, in theform of imagined geographies of benevolent colonialism in the Canadian North versusthe exploitation of “dark” Africa, pristine, “white” northern landscapes, modernization viacommodity production, and national identity, creates the very field of meaning withinwhich the consuming subject is positioned. The ethicalization of Canadian diamondsalso has important normative implications both in terms of the cultural politics of ethicalconsumption and social and environmental justice in the Canadian North.

Keywords: diamonds, Canada, ethical consumption, commodity racism, flexible racism

IntroductionAn incredible beauty shines brightly in the Canadian Arctic. Diamonds exquisitely pureand clean . . . The Canadian diamond is a clear alternative to conflict African diamonds(Canadadiamonds.com 2010).

“Not steal them, Jaz,” he spat. “He gave me diamonds to take in. Terrible diamonds.Bad. He told me to make them into Canadian diamonds.”The lights in Jaz’s head were all on now – a whole roomful of them!“Did he give you blood diamonds, Gunther?”He nodded.“I know about blood diamonds from school! We were learning about human rightsabuses and how in Africa . . . ”“Then you also know that Canadian diamonds are worth much more,” he interrupted.She nodded.Racing for Diamonds (Daher 2007:76)

The two epigraphs above serve as waypoints in a story about much morethan diamonds—it is a story of the construction of moral spaces and racializedgeographies through the quotidian practices of consumption and representation.The first is a characteristic diamond industry representation of “pure and clean”

Antipode Vol. 45 No. 1 2013 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 161–179 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.00996.xC© 2012 The Author. Antipode C© 2012 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

162 Antipode

northern Canadian landscapes in juxtaposition to African “blood diamonds” in orderto add value. The second is from a young adult’s book about a Junior CanadianRanger (Jaz) who, in the midst of a dog sledding race in the Northwest Territories,manages to heroically foil a diamond smuggling plot by the Russian Mob. This paperanalyzes the relationship between the imagined geographies (Said 1978) implicit inthe above selections and the “shifting cultural politics” (Goodman 2010) of ethicalconsumption.

Discussions of “blood diamonds” or “conflict diamonds” in parts of sub-SaharanAfrica have become commonplace in both the popular media (Campbell 2004;Smillie 2010; Zoellner 2007 for example) and academic literature (Donohoe 2007;Le Billon 2008; Richards 2001; Schroeder 2010). The Canadian diamond industryhas capitalized on this by certifying their diamonds as mined, and sometimescut and polished, in Canada and thus “conflict free”, a process unrelated to theglobal Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS) designed to combat the illicitdiamond trade. They are often marketed as “fair trade” by lasering serial numbersand images of maple leaves, igloos, snow geese, or some other stereotypicallyCanadian image to their girdles (this is how the character Gunther, a Yellowknifediamond polisher in the story cited above, was supposed to make blood diamondsinto Canadian diamonds). Canada, in fact, is now the third largest producerof diamonds by value in the world, after Botswana and Russia (Perron 2008).Advertisements for Canadian diamonds typically emphasize an alleged “purity”and “whiteness” of northern Canadian landscapes that “easily resonated with thecontrasting racist imaginaries of ‘dark’ Africa” (Le Billon 2007:145), a racialized andmoralized imaginative geography that is, at least in this case, central to invocationsof consumption as a potential conduit for ethical action.

While this case study has implications for debates about “fair trade” and“ethical consumption”, in the spirit of Castree’s (2004: 22) call for “full-blooded”normative assessments of commodities, it is important first to demonstrate how themobilization of such discourses takes on cultural meaning. To do this, I focus onhow “ethical” Canadian diamonds are signified and how their signs circulate withina historically informed political economy of social differentiation, arguing that thisilluminates how the diamond industry effectively mobilizes ethical consumptiondiscourse. Specifically, this paper foregrounds the role of historically accumulateddiscourses of race, nationhood and landscape in the ethicalization of Canadiandiamonds, thus critiquing it as a combination of what McClintock (1995) calls“commodity racism” and Domosh (2006) calls “flexible racism”. As such, I show howthese discourses are mobilized to create “regimes of ethical value” by the diamondindustry, simultaneously within Canada and in contrast to so-called “dark” Africa.This dual operation is important because it helps to highlight how the production ofso-called “ethical value” is tinged with longstanding racial and spatial imaginaries.

Such theoretical issues also have implications for the ongoing literature on “ethicalconsumption” and “fair trade” policy (Barnett et al 2005; Clarke 2008; Mutersbaughand Lyon 2010) for a couple of reasons. First, the case of Canadian diamonds canillustrate a great deal about how the terms “fair trade” or “ethical consumption”are potentially appropriated by the very agents and institutions of global capitalthey originally critiqued. Put simply, whereas fair trade proponents typically see it as

C© 2012 The Author. Antipode C© 2012 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

Regimes of Ethical Value? 163

making trade fairer than it used to be, here it is being invoked to suggest trade alreadyfairer than it is somewhere else. This shift from temporal to spatial notions of equalityhas profound normative implications, if for no other reason than the atrocities of“diamond wars” in places such as Sierra Leone, Angola and the Democratic Republicof Congo are often implicitly used as a standard bearer for social and environmentaljustice in northern Canada. Second, whereas discourses of ethical consumptionare usually articulated through narratives of North–South labor solidarity or socialjustice (Bryant and Goodman 2004), and hence imply purchasing from the South todemonstrate support, here we see attempts to reverse the spatial ordering of “fairtrade” to suggest purchasing a product from the North in order to save the Southfrom itself. This shift thus reflects the self-signifying and socially ordering function ofconsumption in the first place, not to mention the “fantasy” of white national spaceas described by Hage (2000). It is also why, as Bryant and Goodman (2004) pointout, enacting social and environmental justice through consumption might worsenproblems it is said to solve.

The next section sets the theoretical tone for the paper by explaining how Icome to the expression “regime of ethical value” to describe the Canadian diamondindustry, and shows what the insights of Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Williamson, and JeanBaudrillard bring to bear on the analysis. The third section explains the analyticalfocus and methods of the paper by situating the study within contemporarydiscussions in geography about ethical consumption. The fourth section providesa geographic sketch of the Canadian diamond industry. The penultimate sectionshows how Canadian diamonds are represented differently at the production,certification and retail sectors of the diamond commodity chain, and in doing soelaborates, along with the conclusion, on the flexible and commodity racism implicitin Canadian diamond advertisements.

Ethical Consumption as a “Regime of Value”As mentioned above, Canadian diamonds can be thought of as a combinationof what McClintock (1995) terms “commodity racism” and Domosh (2006)terms “flexible racism”. In the former case, McClintock explicates the role ofcommodities in the creation of a white, European identity in contrast to colonial“others”. For example, not only did soap emerge in Victorian England as anicon of civilizational superiority over African colonies, from which the ingredientsfor soap derived, but also as an icon of proper, middle class domesticity; theconstruction of private space as a mirror for public character, McClintock argues,was part and parcel of the construction of national identity vis-a-vis “dark” Africa.Domosh makes a similar, though slightly different, argument, acknowledging therole of transnational commodity culture in the attempted erasure (rather thancreation) of difference through consumption. Domosh argues that the provisionof manufactured commodities to the developing world was often understood asa form of gift-giving, a gesture which articulated the national self as inherentlygood by making the “other” more like it (eg “modern”). The gendered spaces ofpublic and private life are again relevant here, as American exporters assumedthe role of the masculine producer and importing countries were assumed as


164 Antipode

feminine consumers—commodity chains, it turns out, have their own patriarchalstructures.

This dual operation of the domestic and transnational politics of identity is alsorelevant to the case of Canadian diamonds. Diamonds as symbols of devotion givenby men to women certainly pre-exist Canadian involvement in the industry. Thispatriarchy is nevertheless replicated in longstanding Canadian narratives of themodernizing influence of mining on northern aboriginal populations. This is a formof “flexible racism” that will be explained later in this paper. The depiction of white,pristine, and peaceful northern landscapes in juxtaposition to violent African “blooddiamonds” also exemplifies commodity racism, and it is the simultaneous operationof these domestic and transnational discourses that reveals the most about the moralgeographies of Canadian “ethical” diamonds.

To refer to the Canadian diamond industry in this way of course suggests thatpower relations operate through the acts of production and consumption. Thechain connecting production and consumption is notoriously complex, involvingmultiple agents and structures. In fact, Barnett et al (2011) recently take as atheoretical starting point for their analysis of ethical consumption the question ofwhether revisionist efforts should focus on individual agents or larger structures incommodity networks. Bourdieu’s (1984) theory of “habitus” is useful here in that ithelps integrate concepts of structure and agency and illustrates how various formsof social “distinction” can be reified through the social relations of consumption. Heargues that this signification of distinction is not the autonomous nor serendipitousprocess that it is sometimes characterized to be, but rather is constrained by thesocio-historical accumulation of symbolic power. “Habitus” refers, then, to an activesignification within, and constrained by, a field of symbolic and discursive power,one that in this case reflects the colonial, racist and gendered narratives mentionedabove and explored more thoroughly in the penultimate section of this paper.

Bourdieu’s (1984) theories have also informed anthropological work on the roleof consumption in the constitution of social order and hierarchy. In their study ofpre-capitalist modes of consumption, for example, Douglas and Isherwood (1979)argue that “the theory of consumption has to be a theory of culture and a theory ofsocial life” (cited in Dunn 2008:59). This construction of culture and social life via theact of exchange is approximately what Appadurai (1986) calls a “regime of value”.Following Simmel, Appadurai argues that value is not inherent in commodities, butrather results from the act of exchange, adding that the link between exchangeand value is mediated by historically and culturally specific political forms—or“regimes of value”. This notion is entirely relevant to the construction of Canadiandiamonds as ethical, as “ethical consumption” is understood in this paper tobe a regime of value, and one pinned in this case to historically and culturallyspecific understandings of race, nationhood, and gender, both within and outsideof Canada. As Goodman (2004:896) argues, the way commodities are representedand fetishized is a “fundamental part of the material-semiotic story of commoditynetworks”, and exert very real influence upon the shifting structures and meaningsof “ethical consumption” markets.

Understanding the ethicalization of Canadian diamonds requires understandingthis regime of value. Before exploring those details, however, it is necessary to



ground the analysis within a range of potential theorizations of value and exchange,and what they have to do with meaning and signification. Theoretically, Baudrillard(1998, 2001) shares with Bourdieu the notion that consumption operates as aform of signification, though he notoriously argues that signification operates likea language and as such re-articulates systems of meaning (rather than beingconditioned by them). This is in contrast to Judith Williamson’s seminal neo-Marxist investigation of advertising in Decoding Advertisements (1978), which seessignification in terms of the construction of “false consciousness”. Williamson givesas an example the making of diamonds into symbols of love, devotion and ultimatelysocial class. Thus, as consumers shift these meanings onto themselves, the diamondas “sign” becomes a superstructural marker for class. Her analysis is essentiallyneo-Marxist, at least to the extent that she posits the sign as an ideologicalveneer designed to obscure the real source of value—labor.1 The resulting “falseconsciousness” has been roundly critiqued (see Guthman 2009), but regardless ofwhether consumers of diamonds are falsely conscious or not, Williamson’s argumentdoes acknowledge the role of symbolic power in creating the referent system withinwhich signification occurs. Also, semiology, as Williamson uses it, is still an importanttool for deconstructing that ideological veneer of class-qua-commodity.

Thus, in any case value is abstracted from exchange, but within specific normative,historical and cultural regimes—regimes of value. This posits a role for consumption,along with production, in the creation of “the cultural position and understandingsof . . . social subjects” (Dunn 2008:4). Baudrillard (1998), for instance, arguesthat diamond as sign results when the signifier of “diamond” ceases to denotethe material diamond, and begins, instead, to connote “diamondness” and itsdiscursively attendant properties. And because the meaning of signs is basedon a structure of difference, per Baudrillard, consumption operates as part of asystem of social regulation in which consumers, rather than buying utility, articulatethemselves within that structure of difference through the commodity.

Baudrillard’s (2001) classic example of social signification through consumptionis that consumers are signifying their proper, middle class domesticity through thepurchase of a washing machine, a dryer, a refrigerator, etc, or that they are creatingthemselves as “rational” individuals through their economic choices between mildlydifferent variations of washing machines, dryers, and refrigerators. Thus, the creationof consumer subjectivities in the first place is about social difference; if the self is arational and discerning combatant in the marketplace contest, then the other, someother, is not; if the self is properly ethical in the marketplace, the other is unethical.Owning a diamond does not simply mean one is catching up with the Jones’s, ina Veblenian sense, but that one is distancing oneself from somebody else, for somereason, and thus we have Baudrillard’s (1981) argument that consumption bothlike and as a language, is itself implicated in the structuring of society. In the caseof Canadian diamonds, this involves the (re)construction of “white Canada” and“dark Africa”, as well as spatializations of the consuming North as the theatre of thesolution.

It can—and should—be objected, however, that if consumption structures socialposition (rather than being structured by it), why does it do so in ways convenientto capital far beyond sales of diamonds? Pitched as ethical substitutes, after all,


166 Antipode

Canadian diamonds work to flatter northern consumers and imbibe concerns overthe ethics of capitalism into the discourse of rational market behavior, both ofwhich are reasons to be skeptical of the consumer sovereignty often attributedto Baudrillard. But Baudrillard’s (1981) early work, before he became associatedwith floating signifiers and the like, shares some overlap with Williamson’s (1978)argument that advertisements “appellate” their viewers by constructing them as thealready-knowing, autonomous subject which pre-exists and examines the object forsale in the visual framework of the advertisement.

While the theoretical distance between Williamson’s and Baudrillard’s accounts ofconsumption is hardly incommensurable,2 it is Bourdieu’s (1984) theory of “habitus”that most effectively bridges it, and thus provides the theoretical impetus forthis paper. In his study of racism and multiculturalism in Australia, Hage (2000)points out that Bourdieu effectively fuses discourse and practice by stressing thatthe meanings people create are informed by what social practices and positionsthose meanings endorse. In Hage’s (2000) case, people expressed racism or toutedmulticulturalism because doing so allowed a fantasy of a “white” national spacein which immigrants were seen as objects of governance. In the present case,consumers are appellated into the historically informed systems of significationbased on race, landscape and nationhood to be explored throughout the remainderof this paper. But more importantly, the marketing of Canadian diamonds (andpotentially the consumption of them) as practice allows consumers to imagineethical (North America) and unethical (Africa) national spaces, and perhaps to feelthat by “voting in the marketplace”, they are practicing their own governanceof the global economy. It is this co-constructive relationship between consumersand the discursive frameworks within which they operate that can best be describedas the “habitus” of the ethical consumer.

Thinking about the construction of Canadian diamonds as ethical in terms ofBourdieu’s “habitus” helps show how the discourse of ethical consumption (at leastas it is applied to gemstones) might be used by capital to deflect any real change.The diamond industry here is doing something much more complicated than simply“branding” ethics. In this case at least, ethical consumption, to the extent thatit operates as part of a social system of individualization and differentiation, ispotentially what Carrier (2007:2) calls “conspicuous consumption of the EthicalBrand”.

Geographies of Ethical ConsumptionEthical consumption has been critiqued in geography and other fields (Barnettet al 2011; Hughes 2005; McEwan and Bek 2009; Raynolds et al 2007), albeit indifferent ways. Looked at in a positive light, ethical consumption is seen by someas a particular form of “commodity culture” (Jackson 1999). Such analyses oftenposit ethical consumption as exemplifying, contra Polanyi (1944), the continuedembedding of markets within the moral fabric of society (Jackson, Ward and Russell2009). Others see them as a classically Polanyian social movement to resist theextraction of markets from moral considerations, by re-embedding them as such(Jaffee 2007). Clarke et al (2007), for example, describe ethical consumption as



a form of collective political action designed not to operate through individualmarketplace decisions of more informed consumers, but to enable tangible politicaloutcomes for consumers who are sympathetic to fair trade causes. Work in this veinhas also often focused on specific actors within specific institutions promoting someof the more progressive versions of fair trade available.

In contrast, Guthman (2009) argues that labeling and certification need to berecognized as part of a larger process of commoditization. Rather than inscribingsocial or moral values into the market place, such mechanisms arguably furtherfetishize market structure as the panacea for social ills and position the consumeras responsible for social change, potentially obscuring the role of much larger andmore influential corporate agents (in our case, DeBeers, Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton,Harry Winston Diamonds, etc). Commoditization in this sense means that consumeranxiety is being harnessed towards the reification of market logic as a panacea forsocial ills, rather than challenging the amoral assumptions of neoliberalism, and isa process arguably driven by “regulatory mechanisms that capture moral concernand turn it into something akin to rent” (Guthman 2009:202). Likewise, otherssee cultural or moral economy approaches towards understanding consumption aslacking normative strength (Castree 2004) or analytical “teeth” (Rosati 2007:559).

Research in this latter vein, perhaps because of its basis in geographic literature oncommoditization (eg Castree 2003, 2004; Heynen et al 2007; Prudham 2007), hastended to focus on the mobilization of ethical consumption rhetoric for marketingpurposes. Along these lines, Goodman (2010) suggests that semiotic analyses of“fair” or “ethical” commodities can help show the specific matrices through whichthe cultural politics of ethical consumption have shifted. As others have put it,they can illustrate the processes by which industries “commodify—and disarm—dissenting voices, recruiting issues of women’s empowerment, environmentalsustainability, and racial equality into the service of product promotion, thusreducing social justice to the freedom to choose between products” (Zukinand Maguire 2004:183), or, in more blunt terms, how fair trade principles are“bastardized” (Barrientos et al 2007:57) through mainstream retailing.

To the extent that this paper follows in this latter research vein, it highlightsa specific case study of the mobilization of ethical consumption discourse to selldiamonds, and the systems of meaning and power which allow this mobilizationto make sense to people, rather than a theorization of what ethical consumptioninherently is or is not. For that reason, it takes as a point of analysis the websites,brochures, and other promotional literature of the Canadian diamond industry,from mining companies, to government certifiers, to retailers. It is also buttressed bystakeholder interviews and archival research at the Prince of Wales Heritage center,both conducted in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories (NWT) during the summer of2009. Thus, this research focuses on what Rose (2001:16) calls the “site(s) of theimage itself” in addition to the “site(s) of production”, as opposed to the sites atwhich audiences view them.

This focus on what these textual and visual materials say about the cultural andpolitical context from which they emerge, rather than on how they are interpretedby consumers, is also countenanced by the theoretical discussion of the precedingsection. First, in recognition of the fact that the discerning, rational consumer is a


168 Antipode

neoliberal abstraction, and following Trentmann’s (2006) argument that consumersubjectivities are historically contingent in the first place, this analysis follows recenttrends in geography to analyze consumption as social phenomena rather thanconsumers per se (Clarke 2008). Second, by consumption as social phenomenaI refer not to the aggregate of individual acts of exchange, but to the “field ofpower” (Bourdieu 1984) or “referent system” (Williamson 1978) which prefiguresthe possible range of significations that can result from those acts of exchange.Following Miller (1997), texts are in many ways snapshots of the context of theirproduction. Miller also recognizes that while consumers may interpret texts andimages in different ways, the cultural and historical context of their productioncan still promote some interpretations over others. This is partly because, asBourdieu (1984) argues, the producers of such materials themselves do not operateautonomously, but are influenced by previous discourses and meanings. In thiscase, the commodity and flexible racism characteristic of the Canadian diamondindustry reflect civilizational, national, racial and technological discourses of bothCanadian domestic and international politics. While my methods in this studyundoubtedly have limitations, the texts and images under study here can be seenas “crystallizations of moments in [the] time and space” (Miller 1997:78) of thesediscourses. That is, even if these methods cannot tell us much about individualinterpretation, they can tell us about the cultural intelligibility of the advertisementsat a broader level of abstraction.

The Canadian Diamond IndustryCanada’s first mine, called the Ekati mine, began production in 1998 and is ownedby international mining conglomerate BHP Billiton. Canada’s second mine, theDiavik mine, began production in 2003 and is 60% owned by another miningconglomerate, Rio Tinto, and 40% owned by Harry Winston Diamond Corporation,a partner company of the famous jewelry retailer. A third mine, the Snap Lake mine,began production in 2008 and is owned by DeBeers Canada. While these threemines are clustered within about 300 km east and northeast of Yellowknife, NWT,the fourth and newest mine, called the Victor mine, exists just west of the James Bayin northern Ontario, near the village of Attawapiskat, and is also owned by DeBeersCanada.3

Diamonds from the Ekati, Diavik and Snap Lake mines are shipped first toYellowknife where they are sorted and evaluated for royalty purposes. The diamondsare then shipped either to Toronto, London or Antwerp in order to be evaluated forcutting and polishing purposes. They are then shipped to any of several locationsthroughout the world, though often Armenia, Tel Aviv, Mumbai, or numerouslocations in East and Southeast Asia, to be cut, polished and mounted to jewelry.Roughly half of the gemstone diamonds in the world are retailed in the United States(Zoellner 2007).

The Government of the Northwest Territories (GNWT) has attempted to retain thesecondary sector of the industry locally by subsidizing cutting and polishing firmsin the NWT. As part of their leasing agreements, mining companies are requiredto make 10% of their rough diamond production available to local manufacturers,



which have struggled to stay in business even with these subsidies. For example,a rough diamond from the Diavik mine would travel to Yellowknife first, then toLondon, and up to 10% of the time would be shipped back to Yellowknife to be cutand polished. The GNWT would monitor the sale of diamonds from London backto Yellowknife, and in order to be guaranteed access to this 10% of rough diamondproduction, Yellowknife manufacturers must agree to have their product certifiedunder the GNWT’s diamond certification program. This program is administeredby the Division of Industry, Tourism and Investment (DITI), which then sells thecertificate “up the chain” to the diamond wholesalers and jewelry retailers, inthis case either Polar Ice Diamonds or Polar Bear Diamonds. DITI also producespromotional material, for the use of retailers, advertising not only this process, but,according to a DITI official, advertising the Canadian North itself (exemplifying, asdiscussed above, the influence of cultural and historical influence at the point ofproduction of images and texts, see Bourdieu 1984).

In this case certification guarantees only that the diamond was mined, cutand polished in the NWT. However, because its certification is focused mostly oncommodity chain transparency, and takes ethical production as a given, the GNWT’scertification scheme approximates what Mutersbaugh and Lyon (2010:29) classify as“2nd party” certification, in which accredited reviewers (in this case governmental)certify industry-defined standards, as opposed to “3rd party” certification, in whichindependent reviewers certify products with reference to a separate standard ofsocial or environmental goals.

BHP Billiton, however, owns the CanadaMark hallmark, under which it certifiesdiamonds from the Ekati mine as Canadian, regardless of where they are cutand polished. CanadaMark diamonds are lasered with a tracking number, whichcan be entered into CanadaMark’s website, and a CanadaMark logo. CanadaMarkdiamonds are marketed under several brand names both in Canada and abroad,such as Maple Leaf Diamonds, Canadia Diamonds, and Eskimo Diamonds. Thiscertifies the diamond’s origin, not the transparency of its lifecycle as a commodityor its comparability to any third party ethical standard. Also, in a manner similarto the case of the gemstone Tanzanite as pointed out by Schroeder (2010), suchschemes potentially conflate the security or transparency of a commodity chain withthe ethics of it.

In addition to certifying the origin and/or travels of Canadian diamonds, DITI’s andCanadaMark’s heavy reliance on the symbolic imagery of northern Canada—pristinelandscapes, charismatic megafauna, etc—often blurs the distinction betweencertifying the political or ethical content of the diamonds or certifying their physicalquality (in other words, whether calling a diamond “pure” means without intrusions4

or free of histories of bloodshed is left vague). Direct reference to blood diamondsand human rights abuses in Africa is much more common in the retail sector. It couldbe argued that to the extent that CanadaMark advertises the “Canadianness” of thediamond more than fair trade per se, it exemplifies a form of consumer nationalismmore than fair trade. However, I would argue that because the cultural logic of suchadvertisements hinges on a coding of Canadian national space as white, ethical,and tolerant, the nationalist discourse implicit in CanadaMark’s scheme serves as aproxy for “ethical consumption”.


170 Antipode

The sheer number of Canadian diamond retailers is too vast to describe in anydetail here, but the retailers Brilliant Earth, Igloo Diamonds and The Ethical DiamondRing Co provide characteristic examples. Brilliant Earth is both a standard jewelrystore and an online retailer. It emphasizes the transparency of its sourcing networks,advertising mostly Canadian diamonds, but also Namibian diamonds and recycledgold. In that sense it is not itself a certifier of fair trade diamonds, but ratherrelies upon and advertises the systems described above (though also claims tocontribute 5% of profits to conflict diamond related charities). Igloo Diamonds isan online retailer that only sells Canadian diamonds, hence the use of the imageof an igloo. Along with an image of a snowy hillside, its homepage describes itscontributions to the UN-affiliated “Adopt-a-Minefield” campaign (Igloo Diamonds2010): “At Igloo Diamonds R© , we sell Canadian diamonds that better the world.Where landmines once devastated lives, crops now grow and children play. Yourdiamond gets the credit and the cleared-plot certificate.” Thus, retailers often focusmore on charitable contributions than any form of certification separate from DITI’sand CanadaMark’s schemes. The Ethical Diamond Ring Co is a retailer based inBirmingham, UK and claims to self-audit its diamond suppliers to be certain itcomplies with KPCS standards. Thus its invocation of “fair trade” refers not toCanadian certification systems but to the KPCS, which jewelers in signatory countriessuch as the UK are legally required to comply with anyway. Interestingly, The EthicalDiamond Ring Co argues that even non-conflict diamonds increase the exchangevalue of all diamonds, potentially encouraging illicit diamond smuggling elsewhere.It consequently established ConflictNeutral.com, designed as a registry throughwhich other retailers can demonstrate that a percentage of their sales are donatedto conflict diamond related NGOs.5 In all three of these examples, retailers makedirect appeals to consumers’ concerns about sourcing. It is also noteworthy thatthere are those within the ethical jewelry trade (interviewed for this research) whodirectly maintain that efforts to develop certification schemes for diamonds beyondthe KPCS have historically been little more than marketing schemes.

The environmental and socioeconomic impacts of Canadian diamond mining arerelevant, but will be discussed only briefly at this point for a couple of reasons.One reason is that the long-term environmental impacts of diamond mining inthe tundra environments of the NWT and the muskeg environments of northernOntario are not yet fully understood.6 While the socioeconomic impacts are betterknown, a full review of them is beyond the scope of this paper. Moreover, one of thereasons an investigation of the application of fair or ethical trade labels is necessary,as stated at the outset of this paper, is that one of its effects is to make materiallivelihoods seem like the natural and logical measuring stick against which “ethical”production is understood, thus defining social and environmental justice in northernCanada as anything better than West Africa. If that is the case, then a focus on thesocioeconomic conditions of diamond production might only serve the ends of thisrelational view of ethics.

In short, however, mining communities do benefit from jobs and economicactivity, and First Nations benefit in terms of cash payments, scholarships and hiringquotas delivered through the Impact Benefit Agreements (IBAs) negotiated directlywith mining companies7 (Crate 2006; Gibson 2008). However, the proliferation



of diamonds has brought with it many of the social problems characteristic ofmining-dependent communities. In Yellowknife, for instance, housing prices andcrime have risen drastically over the past 12 years (Statistics Quarterly 2009). The2-week on, 2-week off schedule of mine employees has also been stressful on someaboriginal families (Crate 2006). There is also concern among the elders of the28 aboriginal communities in the NWT that aboriginal culture is being lost due toeconomic and mineral development (Andrews 2004), arguably as the new miningeconomy has introduced previously unseen social hierarchies and neoliberalizedforms of identity.

Landscape, Race and RepresentationOn its website, the retailer Arctic Sparkle links an image of a pristine, white iceberg(a place where no diamond would ever be found) with fair trade, stating: “Ourmission: to supply fair trade and conflict free diamonds mined in a way that isenvironmentally friendly, by people fairly compensated both in terms of salary andworking conditions” (Arctic Sparkle 2010). If seen in Williamson’s (1978) terms,it could be suggested that in purchasing an Arctic Sparkle diamond consumerssignify themselves as ethical, as perhaps having a pristine, unsoiled conscience. Tosome extent they might be, but in the remainder of this paper I will complicateand extend that argument by describing the referent systems which make thatsignification possible.

As discussed above, after all, that transference of sign onto self is neither simplenor unmediated, but rather operates within a historically constituted “habitus”(Bourdieu 1984). In his tracing of modern advertising to Locke’s Second Treatise,Coleman (2006) cites Williamson’s (1978) explanation of how the space of theadvertisement creates a framework within which consumers are “appellated” asalready-subjects. But how does this framework, this system of social positionality ofsubjects and commodities, take on meaning? Why does it work? Coleman arguesthat the referent system through which this signification is mediated is in factLocke’s notion of a trans-historical America, which served as a blank state ofnature upon which free individuals were said to fulfill their Biblical destinies viathe commodification of nature. Thus, Coleman argues, advertisement is madeintelligible and effective in the context of historical narratives of America’s becoming:colonial exploitation of nature is in fact the referent system through whichconsumers position themselves as homo-economicus. While Coleman’s linkagebetween advertisement and Locke should be qualified as geographically specific, itis nevertheless useful for what follows because the relationship between consumersand Canadian diamond advertisements is mediated through tropes of colonialrationalization of nature, benevolent first contact with aboriginals, contemporarymulticulturalism, and northern landscapes as quintessentially Canadian.

Post-colonialist literature has long since illustrated the power of originalistnarratives of exploration, technocratic rationalization, and colonial beneficence(Braun 2000; Gregory 2001; McClintock 1995; Zeller 2009). These themes areprominent in industry-wide lore about geologist Charles Fipke’s original discoveryof diamonds in the NWT in 1991. Narratives of his discovery typically take this form:


172 Antipode

down to his last cents and surviving on only his wits and perseverance, Fipke soldjust enough “penny stock” to his friends and neighbors to keep his operation afloat,and braved the harsh and unforgiving Canadian North, until, in the last instance,he outwitted the DeBeers empire and secured a diamond supply for Canada. Hisdiscovery ultimately became what is now the Ekati mine. Consider, for example, thisexplanation from the website for Maple Leaf Diamonds, a CanadaMark brand (andthus BHP Billiton’s advertisement):

The monumental task of locating these diamonds represents one of the greatestachievements in the history of diamond exploration. In 1991, after more than a decadeof exhaustive exploration under extreme conditions, Canadian geologist Charles Fipkeculminated his heroic quest for diamonds with his discovery of what is today the EkatiMine in the Northwest Territories. As a result of this and subsequent discoveries, Canadahas become the third largest supplier of gem quality diamonds in the world . . . TheEkati Mine adheres to some of the world’s strictest environmental standards . . . Theresult is some of the world’s cleanest, most beautiful diamonds, mined in a socially andenvironmentally responsible manner (Mapleleafdiamonds.com 2010).

Such narratives are predictably enshrouded in colonial overtones, and haveat their center the exploring, scientifically rational subject, who brings superiorgeologic knowledge to bear upon a supposedly unwritten landscape in order toextract value from it, and whose efforts only then create economic opportunities forFirst Nations populations. Such depictions are hardly new (see Stern 2007), and re-cast longstanding Canadian originalist mythologies of harmonious English, French,First Nations and Inuit encounters. The myth of beneficent Canadian colonialism ofthe North is well known to take its purchase in contrast to the brutality of Americanwestward expansion, and has been important to the construction of Canadiannational identity (Shadian 2007). Such myths have been widely critiqued bothbecause they obscure real dominations of northern peoples throughout Canada’shistory (Bednasek and Godlewska 2009; Usher 2003) and because the casting oftolerance and multiculturalism as a sort of gift granted to aboriginal populations isitself a form of domination (Mackey 2002). The latter is the case to the extent that itcreates the very political realm within which multiple cultures are said to be equallyexpressing themselves (Baldwin 2009a; Sandilands 1999).

I argue that this political realm (popularly cast as a the Canadian cultural mosaic),by setting the Canadian sovereign as either the context within which, or the coreagainst which, various aboriginal, Francophone or Metis find their identity andrealize their autonomy, creates the spatialized referent system that renders Canadiandiamond advertisements culturally meaningful. Just as Locke’s notion of Americaas field of commodifiable resources through which Americans-to-be realize theirautonomy (Coleman 2006) gives cultural meaning to advertising, the mythos ofthe modernized North through commodity extraction provides the discursive framewithin which the appellated viewer understands himself or herself as moral. Tothe extent that this is based upon a projection of “sameness” with or compassiontowards the “other” that can extend only from a hegemonic position, Canadiandiamond advertisements can be seen as a form of what Domosh (2006) calls “flexibleracism”, at least within Canada.



The racial semiotics of this discursive frame are thus inextricably tied to thenarratives discussed above. For example, DITI idealizes how, because of diamondmining, “aboriginal tradition thrives in communities built on a rich fur trade”(Certifiedarcticdiamonds.com 2009). This is based on popular tropes in pro-miningquarters of Yellowknife that the diamond industry saved aboriginal communitiesfrom the collapse of the fur trade. Through narratives of Fipke’s heroic explorations,DITI’s website posits, then, the white, male, calculating explorer who rationalizes thelandscape and incorporates aboriginal communities into his own neoliberal logic.While on its surface the construction of the North as a space of production forsouthern consumers might appear to reverse the roles of “masculine producer” and“feminine consumer” characteristic of flexibly racist commodity chains (Domosh2006), what is key here is the assumption that the ability to modernize, develop,and to enter the masculine sphere of production in the first place is a gift providedto the North. A promotional DVD commissioned by DITI, for example, describesEira Thomas, a 24-year-old geologist credited with “discovering” the Diavik Mine,as “the only woman in the world who wears diamonds from a mine she discovered”(Miller 2005, italics in original), a description which posits the giver of the gift ofmodernity (Thomas) as also the receiver of its benefits.

Such old and worn stories also intersect with social constructions of wild,pristine and Edenic natures in colonial settings (Gregory 2001), as reflected inDITI’s description of Canadian diamonds as “pure and beautiful as the Arcticitself” (Certifiedarcticdiamonds.com 2009). These sorts of constructions of idyllic,timeless and peaceful rural spaces have often reflected anxieties about urbanimmigration (Panelli et al 2009). Baldwin (2004, 2009a) convincingly argues that ina Canadian context they also derive from the performative coupling of wildernessand multiculturalism. Imaginations of the northern wilderness as permanent, pre-human, pristine and unyielding in the face of foreign immigration into Canadianurban areas position whiteness as the “core” identity around which multiculturalismrevolves. In other words, the discursive and political field within which multiplecultures are said to be struggling to find themselves is also structured by tropes ofthe permanence of wilderness in the face of demographic change. In some waysit exemplifies the “white nation” fantasy described by Hage (2000), in which evenardent proponents of multiculturalism were complicit in presuming a national space(Australia, in Hage’s case) in which whites govern and non-whites are governed(even if tolerantly). I argue that the added value of the “ethical” label is enabledwithin this discursive field.

GNWT-certified diamonds are branded as either Polar Ice or Polar Bear diamonds.The former typically relies on images of iceberg’s and DITI’s “as pure and beautifulas the Arctic itself” slogan. The latter diamonds have an outline of a polar bear laser-inscribed to their girdles and come with a “birth certificate” on which is depicted twocuddling polar bears. A Christmas brochure for Polar Bear diamonds positions a polarbear playfully in a sleigh (Polarbeardiamond.com 2010), while an advertisement inThe Globe and Mail (2006) shows one bear kissing another. Though retailers ofthese diamonds frequently make direct reference to blood diamonds, DITI, PolarIce and Polar Bear diamonds rarely make any such direct reference. They do notneed to, however, because of the starkness of the contrast between the whiteness


174 Antipode

and seeming innocence of such advertisements and historically ingrained notions ofthe “dark” African continent. The commodity racism (McClintock 1995) is simplyimplied, not explicit.

Retailers of Canadian diamonds tend to be much more explicit about people andtheir ethical relationships. Eskimo Diamonds, for example, is part of BHP Billiton’sCanadaMark hallmark, and uses a caricature of the Eskimo despite the fact thatthe term Eskimo is often considered pejorative, and many of the populations mostaffected by mining are in fact Athabascan, not Inuit. Nevertheless, the figure ofthe environmentally ethical aboriginal appears prominently on Eskimo Diamonds’website (Eskimodiamonds.com 2009):

The Canadian Eskimo culture is characterized by a close relationship with the naturalworld. Life depends on an intimate knowledge and understanding of nature, and asa result the Eskimos recognize fewer barriers between themselves and animals, plants,rivers and mountain [sic] around them . . . The same respect and ethics are used inmining every Eskimo diamond. Thus, what is unique to the flourishing diamond industryin Canada is the sense of moral responsibility with which all operations are studied,planned and carried out.

The above selection is clearly replete with problematic simplifications of anaboriginal relationship with nature, much of which is now well covered inacademic literature (Braun 2002; Conklin and Graham 1995; Mackey 2002, forexample). In appealing to “Eskimo culture” as part of that Canadian culturalmosaic, Eskimodiamonds invites consumers to understand themselves either as themorally superior Canadian, or as the consumer that enables this moral superioritythrough their purchasing power. The invitation to express one’s “sense of moralresponsibility”, to see one’s self as somewhat like those noble Eskimos, is partof the signifying system through which consumers can position and differentiatethemselves within the narrative of the Canadian multicultural polity. This alsoinvolves complex moral geographies (Massey 2004) because it operates in a culturalsystem that is far from closed. Consumers are not only signified within the systemas ethical through an equivalence with the environmentally ethical Eskimo, butthrough the implicit disassociation with Africa.

Other examples are much more explicit about this. The online retailerCanadadiamonds.com, for instance, claims that “the Canadian diamond is aclear alternative to conflict African diamonds” (Canadadiamonds.com 2010), whileChicago-based Leber Jewelers, Inc adds either “conflict-free” or “country of origin”as a “fifth C” (after the industry’s traditional four Cs of carat, cut, color and clarity).The latter also describes the premium they want consumers to place on the ethicaldimensions of its product: “Just as many customers want to know more about thefarm where their food was grown or the factory where their clothes were made, theycan gain satisfaction in knowing where their diamond was born” (Leber Jewelers,Inc 2009). The fact that fair trade here refers to other fair trade sectors rather thanconditions on the ground in either Canada or Africa underscores how self-referentialthe signifier of “fair trade” has become in this case.

Brilliant Earth, Igloo Diamonds and The Ethical Diamond Ring Co, as describedpreviously, all also suggest expressing concern for Africans by, ironically, not buying



from them. Simple internet searches can bring up retailers of Canadian diamondstoo myriad to recount here, but which draw on virtually identical themes (and oftenuse material clearly sourced either from DITI or CanadaMark). The representationof a morally superior Canadian North in contrast to African blood diamonds castsnorthern Canada as a form of what Baldwin (2009b) calls a “white ethnoscape”. Thisremains the case even when Canadian aboriginals (even if misrepresented as Eskimo)are included, because the normative equivalence drawn between consumers andnorthern aboriginals reflects the position of social dominance from which it is drawn(Baldwin 2009b).

More than simply another example of “othering” (Said 1978), this is also anexample of “commodity racism” (McClintock 1995) in the sense that it reiteratesglobalized racial identity. But the signification of consumers as more or less ethical isnot the serendipitous process characterized by floating signifiers that it is sometimesmisunderstood to be. While consumers are signifying their moral subjectivities, theyare doing so through historically informed representational systems, thus reflectingBourdieu’s (1984) “habitus”.

ConclusionMobilizing ethical consumption discourse in this way exemplifies the use of spaceto increase exchange value, and how that exchange value reflects the racializedtransnational identities from which it evolves. That is, ethical consumption can beseen here as part of a “regime of value” in the sense that the abstraction of valuefrom exchange is mediated through historically and culturally contingent socialframes, in this case historical narratives of the cultural mosaic as a “gift” givento Canadian aboriginals, discourses of pure and pristine northern landscapes as thesymbolic “core” of Canada, tropes of the betterment of aboriginals through resourceextraction and commodification, and Africa understood as “other”. These discoursesof development and modernization through the extensions of the commodityrelationship have been described in this paper as an example of “flexible racism”(Domosh 2006) in that they purport to collapse distinction by incorporating the“other” into the fold of modernity.

The regimes of value that allow the ethicalization of Canadian diamonds to beculturally meaningful in the first place, then, is based on the social distinctionof subjects within the commodity relationship. The appellation of consumerswithin this relationship is ultimately limited to the “different possible positions insocial space and, consequently, bound up with systems of disposition (habitus)characteristic of the different classes and class practice” (Bourdieu 1984:6), whichcan be seen as consequences of the historically accumulated power of thediscourses mentioned above. However, these systems of disposition, or “habitus”,not only situate consumers within the so-called Canadian mosaic, but alsorelative to Africa. The advertisement of Canadian diamonds as ethical alternativesfurther enables discourses of timeless, unyielding, “white” natures at the core ofmodern Canada by positioning them against glossed-over, limited (and sometimesunspoken) understandings of “conflict diamonds” in parts of sub-Saharan Africa,thus exemplifying “commodity racism” (McClintock 1995).


176 Antipode

While the verity of any sort of ethical consumption as an alternative to mainstreamcapitalism is a matter of debate, the key point for this paper is that this dual operationof national and transnational identity politics, articulated through consumption, isa central component of the diamond industry’s mobilization of the very criticismsmade against it to sell more diamonds. Moreover, ethical consumption deployedin this way increasingly defers to a self-congratulatory system of identification. Thiscontributes to the construction of unhelpful moral geographies, which potentiallyobscure important social justice issues within Canada, naturalize class and race-based consumerism, and redeploy the same structures of global capital fair tradewas meant to inveigh against in the first place. It is, in other words, an ironiccelebration of “not slavery and genocide” structured vis-a-vis the notorious “blooddiamond”.

AcknowledgementsI would like to thank Kevin O’Reilly, The Canadian Embassy in Washington, DC, Rachel Pain, allinformants, and two anonymous reviewers for their help in the production of this manuscript.

Endnotes1 In other words, as long as class is defined in terms of one’s ability or inability to own adiamond ring (in the present example), it is not defined in terms of who buys the labor fromwhom in order to produce diamond rings and accumulate wealth from the sale of them.2 In fact Baudrillard’s early work was intended as a complement to Marxism, rather than arebuttal as it has traditionally been cast (Poster 2001).3 A smaller mine in Nunavut called the Jericho mine went out of business in 2008. There arealso plenty of potential diamond mines in southern NWT and northern Saskatchewan, whichare being delayed primarily because of the current economic recession (as of this writing).4 All non-synthetic diamonds have a unique pattern of intrusions—diamonds with fewerintrusions are considered more valuable.5 Examples would be Global Witness (the resource-conflict-oriented NGO often credited withbringing the conflict diamond issue to international attention), the International Red Cross,the International Land Rights Fund, Diamonds for Africa, and international diamond guruMartin Rapaport’s Fair Trade Diamond and Jewelry Association, the latter of which seeksto create fair trade African diamonds. None of the above are directly related to Canadiandiamonds.6 Though for different viewpoints on this, see Smith et al (2005), Hitch (2006), andEnvironmental Monitoring Advisory Board Annual Report (2009/2010).7 IBAs are also controversial—hailed as innovative and empowering resource governancemechanisms by some and as disempowering by others; see Bielawski (2003) and Fiddler andHitch (2007) for details.

ReferencesAndrews T (2004) “The land is like a book”: Cultural landscape management in the

Northwest Territories, Canada. In I Krupnik, R Mason and T Horton (eds) NorthernEthnographic Landscapes: Perspectives from Circumpolar Nations (pp 301–322). Washington,DC: Smithsonian Institution

Appadurai A (1986) Introduction: Commodities and the politics of value. In A Appadurai(ed) The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (pp 3–63). Cambridge:Cambridge University Press

Arctic Sparkle (2010) http://www.arcticsparkle.com (last accessed 30 March 2010)



Baldwin A (2004) An ethics of connection: Social-nature in Canada’s boreal forest. Ethics,Place and Environment 7(3):185–194

Baldwin A (2009a) The white geography of Lawren Stewart Harris: Whiteness and theperformative coupling of wilderness and multiculturalism in Canada. Environment andPlanning A 41:529–544

Baldwin A (2009b) Ethnoscaping Canada’s boreal forest: Liberal whiteness and its disafilliationfrom colonial space. The Canadian Geographer 53(4):427–443

Barnett C, Cloke P, Clarke N and Malpass A (2005) Consuming ethics: Articulating the subjectsand spaces of ethical consumption. Antipode 37(1):23–45

Barnett C, Cloke P, Clarke N, and Malpass A (2011) Globalizing Responsibility: The PoliticalRationalities of Ethical Consumption. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell

Barrientos S, Conroy M and Jones E (2007) Northern social movements and fair trade. InL Raynolds, D Murray and J Wilkinson (eds) Fair Trade: The Challenges of TransformingGlobalization (pp 51–62). New York: Routledge

Baudrillard J (1981) For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. St Louis: Telos PressBaudrillard J (1998) The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: SageBaudrillard J (2001) The system of objects. In M Poster (ed) Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings

(pp 13–31). Stanford: Stanford University PressBednasek C and Godlewska A (2009) The influence of betterment discourses on Canadian

Aboriginal peoples in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The CanadianGeographer 53(4):444–461

Bielawski E (2003) Rogue Diamonds: Northern Riches on Dene Land. Vancouver: Douglas andMcIntyre

Bourdieu P (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press

Braun B (2000) Producing vertical territoriality: Geology and governmentality in late-VictorianCanada. Ecumene 7:7–46

Braun B (2002) The Intemperate Rainforest: Nature, Culture, and Power on Canada’s West Coast.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Bryant R and Goodman G (2004) Consuming narratives: The political ecology of “alternative”consumption. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29:344–366

Campbell G (2004) Blood Diamonds. Boulder: Westview PressCanadadiamonds.com (2010) http://canadadiamonds.com/canadian_diamond_story.htm

(last accessed 14 June 2010)Carrier J (2007) Ethical consumption. Anthropology Today 23(4):1–2Castree N (2003) Commodifying what nature? Progress in Human Geography 27(3):273–297Castree N (2004) The geographical lives of commodities: Problems of analysis and critique.

Social and Cultural Geography 5(1):21–35Certifiedarcticdiamonds.com (2009) http://www.certifiedarcticdiamond.com/ (last accessed

9 July 2009)Clarke N (2008) From ethical consumerism to political consumption. Geography Compass

2(6):1870–1884Clarke N, Barnett C, Cloke P and Malpass A (2007) Globalising the consumer: Doing politics

in an ethical register. Political Geography 26:231–249Coleman F (2006) The origins of advertising discourse: Locke, landscape and America. Ethics,

Place and Environment 9(1):101–124Conklin B and Graham L (1995) The shifting middle ground: Amazonian Indians and eco-

politics. American Anthropologist 97(4):695–710Crate S (2006) Cows, Kin and Globalization: An Ethnography of Sustainability. New York:

Rowman and LittlefieldDaher A (2007) Racing for Diamonds. Victoria: OrcaDomosh M (2006) American Commodities in an Age of Empire. New York: RoutledgeDonohoe M (2007) Flowers, diamonds and gold: The destructive public health, human rights,

and environmental consequences of symbols of love. Human Rights Quarterly 29:164–182Douglas M and Isherwood B (1979) The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of

Consumption. London: Routledge


178 Antipode

Dunn R (2008) Identifying Consumption. Philadelphia: Temple University PressEnvironmental Monitoring Advisory Board Annual Report (2009/2010) http://www.

emab.ca/pdfs/EMABAnnualRepot2010.pdf (last accessed 17 March 2011)Eskimodiamonds.com (2009) http://eskimodiamonds.com (last accessed 10 July 2009)Fiddler C and Hitch M (2007) Impact and benefit agreements: A contentious issue for

environmental and aboriginal justice. Environments Journal 35(2):49–69Gibson V (2008) “Negotiated spaces: Work, home and relationships in the Dene Diamond

economy.” Unpublished PhD thesis, University of WaterlooGoodman M (2004) Reading fair trade: Political ecological imaginary and the moral economy

of fair trade foods. Political Geography 23:891–915Goodman M (2010) The mirror of consumption: Celebritization, developmental consumption

and the shifting cultural politics of fair trade. Geoforum 41:104–116Gregory D (2001) (Post)Colonialism and the production of nature. In N Castree and B Braun

(eds) Social Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics (pp 84–111). Oxford: BlackwellGuthman J (2009) Unveiling the unveiling: Commodity chains, commodity fetishism, and the

“value” of voluntary, ethical food labels. In J Bair (ed) Frontiers of Commodity Chain Research(pp 190–206). Stanford: Stanford University Press

Hage, G (2000) White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. NewYork: Routledge

Heynen N, McCarthy J, Prudham S and Robbins P (eds) (2007) Neoliberal Environments.London: Routledge

Hitch M (2006) “Impact and benefit agreements and the political ecology of mineraldevelopment in Nunavut.” Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Waterloo

Hughes A (2005) Geographies of exchange and circulation: Alternative trading spaces.Progress in Human Geography 29:496–504

Igloo Diamonds (2010) http://www.diamonds.ca/index.html (last accessed 30 March 2010)Jackson P (1999) Commodity cultures: The traffic in things. Transactions of the Institute of

British Geographers 24:95–108Jackson P, Ward N and Russell P (2009) Moral economies of food and geographies of

responsibility. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34:12–24Jaffee D (2007) Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability and Survival. Berkeley: University

of California PressLeber Jewelers, Inc (2009) http://www.leberjeweler.com/diamonds/conflict_free.php3 (last

accessed 13 December 2009)Le Billon P (2007) Fatal transactions: Conflict diamonds and the (anti)terrorist consumer.

In D Gregory and A Pred (eds) Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence (pp133–152). New York: Routledge

Le Billon P (2008) Diamond wars? Conflict diamonds and geographies of resource wars.Annals of the Association of American Geographers 98(2):345–372

Mackey E (2002) The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada.Toronto: University of Toronto Press

Mapleleafdiamonds.com (2010) http://www.mapleleafdiamonds.com/mld/index.html (lastaccessed 23 March 2010)

Massey D (2004) Geographies of responsibility. Geografiska Annaler 86B(1): 5–18McClintock A (1995) Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New

York: RoutledgeMcEwan C and Bek D (2009) The political economy of alternative trade: Social and

environmental certification in the South African wine industry. Journal of Rural Studies25:255–266

Miller G (1997) Contextualizing texts: Studying organizational texts. In G Miller and R Dingwal(eds) Context and Method in Qualitative Research (pp 77–91). London: Sage

Miller M (2005) Queens of Diamonds: The Story of Diamond Discoveries in Canada. Yellowknife,NWT: Government of the Northwest Territories, Division of Industry, Tourism andInvestment

Mutersbaugh T and Lyon S (2010) Transparency and democracy in certified ethicalcommodity networks. Geoforum 41:27–32



Panelli R, Hubbard P, Coombes B and Suchet-Pearson S (2009) De-centring white ruralities:Ethnic diversity, racialisation and indigenous countrysides. Journal of Rural Studies 25:355–364

Perron L (2008) Diamonds. http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/smm-mms/busi-indu/cmy-amc/2008revu/pdf/dia-dia-eng.pdf (last accessed 22 June 2010)

Polanyi K (1944) The Great Transformation. Boston: BeaconPolarbeardiamond.com (2010) www.polarbeardiamond.com (last accessed 2 July 2010)Poster M (2001) Introduction. In M Poster (ed) Jean Baudrillard. Selected Writings (pp 1–12).

Stanford, CA: Stanford University PressPrudham S (2007) The fictions of autonomous invention: Accumulation by dispossession,

commodification and life patents in Canada. Antipode 39(3):406–429Raynolds L, Murray D and Wilkinson J (eds) (2007) Fair Trade. The Challenges of Transforming

Globalization. New York: RoutledgeRichards P (2001) Are “forest” wars in Africa resource conflicts? The case of Sierra Leone. In N

Peluso and M Watts (eds) Violent Environments (pp 65–82). Ithaca, NY: Cornell UniversityPress

Rosati C (2007) MTV: 360◦ of the industrial production of culture. Transactions of the Instituteof British Geographers 32:556–575

Rose G (2001) Visual Methodologies. London: SageSaid E (1978) Orientalism. New York: Vintage BooksSandilands C (1999) Domestic politics: Multiculturalism, wilderness and the desire for Canada.

Space and Culture 4:169–189Schroeder R (2010) Tanzanite as conflict gem: Certifying a secure commodity chain in

Tanzania. Geoforum 41:56–65Shadian J (2007) In search of an identity Canada looks north. The American Review of Canadian

Studies 37(3):323–353Smillie I (2010) Blood on the Stone: Greed, Corruption and War in the Global Diamond Trade.

New York: Anthem PressSmith A, Virgil J, Panayi D and Armstrong A (2005) Effects of a diamond mind on tundra

breeding birds. Arctic 58(3):295–304Statistics Quarterly (2009) http://www.stats.gov.nt.ca/Statinfo/Generalstats/statsquarterly/

sqmar09.pdf (last accessed 6 August 2009)Stern P (2007) Hunting for hydrocarbons: Representations of indigeneity in reporting on the

new Mackenzie Valley Gas Pipeline. The American Review of Canadian Studies 37(4):417–442The Globe and Mail (2006) Advertisement. 4 JanuaryTrentmann F (2006) The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern

World. Oxford: BergUsher P (2003) Environment, race and nation reconsidered: Reflections on aboriginal land

claims in Canada. Canadian Geographer 47(4):365–382Williamson J (1978) Decoding Advertisements. Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. New York:

Marion BoyarsZeller S (2009) Inventing Canada: Early Victorian Science and the Idea of a Transcontinental

Nation. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University PressZoellner T (2007) The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and

Desire. New York: St Martin’s PressZukin S and Maguire J (2004) Consumers and consumption. Annual Review of Sociology

30:173–197


Regimes of Ethical Value? Landscape, Race and Representation in the Canadian Diamond Industry

Documents

Transcript of Regimes of Ethical Value? Landscape, Race and Representation in the Canadian Diamond Industry