(2013) Wearing gold, owning gold: the multiple meanings of gold jewelry

Wearing Gold, Owning Gold The Multiple Meanings of Gold Jewelry Annelies Moors University of Amsterdam When I started fieldwork on the Israeli-occupied West Bank in the later 1980s, focusing on shifts in women’s access to property in the Nablus region, I was struck by Palestinian women’s engagements with gold jewelry. Nothing had prepared me for the importance of gold in their lives. Anthropological introductory texts on the Middle East, such as Bates and Rassam (1983) and Eickelman (1989), hardly referred to it. More contemporary writings on the Middle East, including those focusing specifically on women, also paid scant attention to gold. While Middle Eastern jewelry has been discussed in the field of material culture, these publications by and large focus on what has been labelled as ‘customary jewelry’, and, more specifically, on silver items, such as Bedouin women’s facial jewelry and head dresses. Moreover, such items of jewelry are usually presented as separate from the women owning and wearing them. In the following, in contrast, I focus on the multiple ways in which Palestinian women relate to gold jewelry. Such an absence of academic interest in gold jewelry is remarkable because it is hard to overstate the importance of gold jewelry in this region. The Middle East is a large consumer of gold and most of this gold, delivered in the form of kilo bars, is used locally to manufacture jewelry.1 Many cities in the Middle East have a special section in the market designated for gold stores, which display huge numbers of golden bracelets, necklaces, pendants, earrings, belts, rings and other items in their shop windows. The large majority of these stores sell gold only. Shops selling other kinds of jewelry, such as silver pieces or ornaments with precious stones, are far fewer and are often located elsewhere. Whereas some parts of the markets are mainly frequented by Etnofoor, Gold, volume 25, issue 1, 2013, pp. 79-89 men, this is not so in the case of the gold market. There, women are present in large numbers as well, often in small groups and sometimes accompanied by male relatives. These women actively engage in the buying and selling of gold jewelry. In the Middle East, both wearing gold and owning gold are, to a considerable extent, a woman’s affair. It is visibly present on their bodies: the more spectacular items are worn at festive occasions, some of which are women-only events, while other pieces, such as necklaces, earrings, rings and bracelets are also worn regularly in everyday life.2 Whereas the size of their possessions may vary greatly, many women obtain some pieces of gold jewelry when they marry. According to Islamic law a marriage is a contract that includes a dower, which the groom needs to hand over to the bride at the moment of marriage.3 As Islamic law does not recognize marriage in community of property, the dower is the property of the bride herself, she is free to use it as she wishes; neither her husband nor her father nor other kin can claim it. Social practice may, of course, diverge from legal doctrine, but even if the bride does not receive the full amount registered for her, women commonly receives at least part of their dower in the form of gold jewelry.4 They often also receive additional smaller gifts of gold from their husband at the time of the engagement, and from their family and kin when they marry. In this contribution I analyze the multiple meanings of wearing gold in the Nablus region, and the major transformations that have taken place in women’s relationship to gold, roughly between 1920 and 1990, with a brief note on later developments.5 Gold jewelry is a particularly interesting material form, as it connects what are often seen as separate fields: the world of global finance, economic security, and investment on the one hand, and that of adornments, kinship relations, notions of self and forms of belonging, on the other hand. In order to analyze the work gold jewelry does for women, both the material forms and the economic value of particular kinds of jewelry need to be discussed, as well as the ways in which these relate to transformations in kinship and gender relations. The multiple meanings of gold jewelry can only be understood if the dynamic relations between things and persons, economy and kinship, and women and the family are taken into account. My analysis is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Nablus region, both in Nablus town, in one of the refugee camps at the outskirts of the city, and in a village to the east. Fieldwork included topical life story research as well as archival research in the shari’a courts on the registration of marriage contracts. Most of the material for this contribution was collected in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with brief periods of fieldwork conducted thereafter, most recently in 2012. A brief note on gold jewelry Gold is a material that has a prime value in many cultural contexts. It has a number of properties that make it widely attractive. It is bright (reflecting light efficiently), does not tarnish (oxidize), is highly durable and is rare (Renfrew 1986: 149). It is also a relatively soft and highly ductile metal, that is easy to stretch into a wire. For use in jewelry gold is usually alloyed with other metals, such as copper or silver, to make it harder. 80 The gold content of such alloys is measured in carats, with pure gold designated as 24 carat. As a material asset, gold jewelry is connected to the central place of gold in the world economy and the international monetary system. Whereas historically gold was a precious metal that only the wealthy could afford to hold, by the mid-nineteenth century, the gold rushes in California and Australia increased the supply of gold substantially.6 Gold received a further boost when the major trading nations adopted the gold standard during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. While it was not always possible to maintain this system under conditions of war and economic depression, the Bretton Woods agreement reintroduced the gold standard in 1944, albeit in a modified form.7 By the early 1970s, however, the large gap between the official gold price and that on the free market led to the collapse of this system: between 1971 and 1973 the gold price rapidly rose from $ 38 to $ 123 per troy ounce, with the price of gold peaking at $ 666 in 1980, as the effect of the oil crisis, inflation and political instability. In the late 1990s, the decisions of a number of central banks to sell part of their gold holdings led to the decline of the gold price, reaching a low of $ 254 in 1997. After a slow rise, the financial crisis of 2007-8 and the subsequent  debt crisis accelerated the price increase tremendously, with the world market price reaching $ 1813 in 2011.8 Some economists have argued that other forms of investment are more profitable, as investing in gold does not provide interest. However, the economic rationale in particular times and places depends on what alternative forms of storing wealth are available. In countries where access to banks and stock markets is problematic, where inflation must always be anticipated, and where people’s trust in state institutions is low, holding one’s reserves in the form of gold may also be a sensible thing to do in economic terms (on Palestine see Harris 1988). Moreover, under conditions of political instability, gold has the additional benefit of being easy to transport, and having maximum liquidity and a very high international acceptance. At the same time gold jewelry is not only an important source of economic security and a means to store wealth. As a form of adornment, it is also worn and displayed on the body. It produces a particular public presence, that which includes claims to status, notions of the self, forms of identification, and socialities. In the Nablus region, and in the Middle East more generally, where women receive most of their gold when they marry, gold jewelry is both a commodity (or rather, with its specific money-gold nexus, a super-commodity) and part and parcel of a ‘gift economy’ that is characterized by the lack of separation between persons and things.9 In the following, I will briefly analyse the different types of gold that women in the Nablus region distinguish, their rationale to engage with particular kinds of gold, how their preferences have changed through time, and how wearing specific kinds of gold jewelry produce particular notions of womanhood. Baladî gold: economic value and the display of marital and kin relations Most of the gold jewelry worn in the Nablus region is called baladî. This term is a complex notion that refers to the local, the indigenous and the authentic, and 81 stands in opposition to the foreign and the imported.10 The main characteristic of such baladî gold, which is always 21 or 22 carat, is that it embodies economic value. As jewellers pointed out, a major concern of women who come to buy gold is how much they will lose when they sell it again. They are, of course, well aware of the fact that what they will eventually receive is largely determined by the daily world gold price. Their question, then, refers to the additional costs involved, such as the costs of design and labour, as well as taxes and import duties. In the case of baladî gold such predictable losses are limited, often between three and ten per cent. Baladî gold, which has a long-standing presence in the Nablus region, comes in a variety of relatively standardized forms and shapes.11 At first, the gold jewelry that village women in the Nablus region acquired was mainly in the form of Ottoman, and to a lesser extent, British gold coins (lîrât dhahab). They would attach these coins onto a cloth ribbon and wear them as a necklace (qilâda dhahab). The value of the coins, which are facsimiles of official coins (‘fake coins’), is determined by their gold content (usually 22 carat) and their exact weight. Such coins were a very convenient way of holding gold bullion in ‘small denominations’, it was easy to sell them one by one if need be and very small losses were incurred when doing so.12 In Nablus city, gold jewelry was also worn in other shapes and sizes. Rather than wearing a coin necklace, or in addition to wearing these and other necklaces, urban women often wore their gold in the form of different types of gold bracelets, such as the solid, heavy ‘twisted wire’ (mabrûma), ‘pear’ (injâsa) or ‘snake’ (hayâya) bracelets, which were usually acquired in pairs, and the lighter sahab, which were often bought in a set of six. Starting in the late 1960s, these gold bracelets became more popular in the rural areas as well. The value of these bracelets, which were quite standardized, but with some variations in style, was also determined largely by weight; the gold content was invariably 21 carat. Through time, different styles of bracelets became available on the gold market, such as those consisting of gold coins, or with small gold bars attached between two golden chains. The kinds of bracelets mentioned above also evolved, with more sophisticated models appearing on the market. While from an economic point of view gold coins remained the best investment, the losses incurred when selling these bracelets also remained limited. Figure 2: Gold shop in Nablus selling mainly 21 carat gold jewelry (showing the more sophisticated qilâda necklaces and a pair of twisted wire and snake bracelets). Photo by the author. 82 Whereas economic value is central to baladî gold, wearing such gold coins and bracelets also involves the public display of specific social relations. As women receive by far the most of this baladî gold as part of their dower – either buying it from the money paid as dower or receiving it directly as dower – wearing this kind of gold is often seen as a statement about the status of the groom as well as about marital and kinship relations. When a woman wears a lot of baladî gold, it is evident that the groom’s side has been willing and able to spend a considerable sum of money on the bride. It is simultaneously a claim about the groom’s financial status and about his respect for the bride and her family. Until the late 1950s, when it was still common in the rural areas for the bride’s father to pocket part of the dower himself, displaying baladî gold could also be read as a statement about the relation of a woman to her father. The baladî gold on the woman’s body indicated that he was willing and able to spend generously on his daughter, an expression of his financial means as well as of his generosity. More recently, it has become increasingly common for fathers and other close kin to provide a woman with additional gold as wedding gifts. Baladî gold, then, not only embodies economic value, functioning as a source of economic security; it also presents the quality of marital and kin relations to the world at large. The above has highlighted that women acquire most of their baladî gold when they marry. There are, however, two other ways of acquiring gold that require brief mention here. One of these is receiving gold jewelry through inheritance or pre-mortem gifts. While women often refrain from claiming their shares in agricultural land, real estate, residential houses, shops and other forms of productive property, gold jewelry is to some extent an exception. This is not only so because gold jewelry is easier to divide, especially if held as coins, but especially because it is inherited from women, in particular mothers. In fact, it is relatively common for a woman to give her daughters, especially a daughter who may have postponed her own marriage in order to support and take care of her mother, some of her gold jewelry pre-mortem. The other case concerns women from poorer families who work in relatively well-paying jobs, for instance as teachers in the Gulf States. They regularly hold their savings in 21 carat baladî gold. Yet, rather than wearing this gold and displaying it for others to see, they may keep it hidden, saving it for their wedding. While paying the dower is the husband’s responsibility, these more mature women anticipate that they may need to support their future husband with the costs of marriage. One way to do so is by presenting the gold they had bought themselves as a dower gift from their husband. In this case, then, the marriage-gold nexus is reversed. Rather than women acquiring gold through the dower, women’s ownership of gold jewelry may facilitate a particular marriage. Italian gold: claiming modernity From the 1960s on, two new interconnected trends related to the dower-gold nexus emerged. Rather than registering a large amount of money as prompt dower, in some marriage contracts only a token amount was written down, such as one Jordanian Dinar. Registering such a dower did not, however, result in brides’ exclusion from gold jewelry. They usually received gifts 83 similar in value to what they would have obtained, had a set high dower been recorded in the marriage contract. The crucial difference is that women no longer received these items as their legal entitlement, but rather as a gift ‘voluntarily’ provided by the groom. As such, the token dower indicated above all that the bride and her family could afford to fully trust the groom and forego legal guarantees. Registering the dower in this novel way was ‘invented’ by the urban modernizing elite. It rapidly became a more common practice in those better-off families where women were well educated, especially if they were themselves professionally employed. Gradually, some families from the middle and lower classes, and from the rural areas, also started to participate in this trend. For them, however, this could be a risky thing to do. If the groom’s gifts did not live up to expectations, no legal redress would be possible. During the same period, a new type of gold jewelry appeared in the market, called ‘Italian gold’. At first, these items of jewelry were imported from Italy, while later they were also produced on the West Bank. One of the upscale jewelry stores in Nablus began to specialize in Italian gold, while other stores would hold some of these items for sale. Italian gold is easily recognizable, as it is 18 carat and has a different colour; it is lighter and less yellow. These smaller, lighter and more exclusive pieces of jewelry look very different from the more standardized, solid and heavy pieces of baladî gold. In fact, women often referred to Italian gold as ‘small pieces’, or môdêlât. Because of its greater hardness, it could be turned into a much wider variety of models and fashions. A substantially larger part of the price of Italian gold was made up of labour and design costs as well as import duties. Selling this gold, women would incur a considerable loss; jewellers mentioned amounts of between 30 and 50 per cent. Hence, it was far less valuable as an investment. Women’s lines of argumentation about why they prefer Italian gold rather than baladî gold are similar to the reasons they give for registering a token dower. On the one hand, it may be considered a claim to status; a means to show the world that one does not need gold jewelry as a means of economic security and can forego financial guarantees upon marriage. At their weddings these women would often combine necklaces and bracelets of Italian gold with diamond-set items, such as rings with a three carat solitaire, that are also a much greater economic risk than baladî gold. Especially professional women who defined themselves selfconsciously as ‘modern’ considered heavy baladî gold bracelets old-fashioned, something that might still be important for uneducated and rural women, but would not fit with their status as well-educated professionals. Moreover, they linked baladî gold with those forms of arranged marriages that left little space for young women to express their preferences. In contrast, they associated Italian gold with the kind of companionate marriages they themselves preferred. These pieces of jewelry were seen a personalized gifts, rather than as easily exchangeable items characterized by their economic value. Lower middle-class women, in contrast, who had also started to register a token dower, sometimes also because their family expected to receive more valuable gifts than if a set amount was written down in the marriage contract, were more careful with respect to the kinds of gold they acquired. Whereas they also liked receiving some small pieces of Italian 84 gold, they would consider it far too risky to forego baladî gold and made sure that much of what they received was in the format of the heavy 21 carat gold bracelets. Emerging Gulf gold and other new trends If in the late 1980s Italian gold also spread beyond elite circles and professionally employed women, a decade later this trend seems to have halted. More recently Italian gold has lost much of its popularity. Stores only carry a few of such items, and the upscale jewelry shop that had specialized in this type of gold has closed its doors. In a situation of greater economic precarity, especially those with few other resources have come to realize that Italian gold provides little economic security. Young rural women have again started to wear coin necklaces (the qilâda dhahab), but in more sophisticated formats. These often consist of eight to twelve smaller coins with one large coin in the middle, set in nicely decorated frames. Instead of being sewn on a cloth ribbon, as had been common in their grandmothers’ times, these coins are now attached to a gold chain. Next to such a return to baladî gold, even if in more sophisticated formats, another type of gold has also become increasingly popular; named gold ‘from the Gulf ’. This ties in with international developments that indicate a shift away from ‘Italian gold’ and a turn to ‘Indian and Gulf gold’. Whereas from the 1950s and 1960s, Italy had become one of the most important centres for gold jewelry production worldwide, in the 2000s, exports from emerging economies like China and India grew rapidly. At the same time, the United Arab Emirates was becoming one of the fastest growing importers (De Marchi et al. forthcoming). In the Nablus region, ‘Gulf gold’ began to appear in the markets in the later 1980s, the ‘Indian set’ (taqm hindî) becoming increasingly popular amongst the urban middle and lower middle classes. Made of 21 carat gold, such a set consisted of a necklace, earrings, and sometimes bracelets, which were elaborately decorated. This made this type of gold aesthetically more attractive to younger women than the heavier baladî gold but it was also more expensive in terms of labour costs. However, the additional costs were still considerably less than in the case of Italian gold. This type of gold jewelry was called ‘Indian’ because much of the gold jewelry in Dubai is either imported from India, or made in Dubai by artisans who had migrated from India (see also Vora 2011). At first this type of gold jewelry was brought to the West Bank from the Gulf region by, for example, labour migrants working in Dubai; later it was also produced locally. Such locally produced items became more popular as they often weighed less and hence were less costly than those imported from Dubai. This became especially important with the very rapid increase in the price of gold on the world market in recent years. Particular political moments have also engendered specific ways of dealing with gold. A very small number of women had occasionally expressed their dislike of high dowers and gold jewelry for ideological reasons, considering it a means to reproduce social inequality, as men with few economic resources would have a hard time coming up with the sums of money necessary to cover all marriage costs, including the dower. But it was especially during the first intifada (1987-1993), that 85 Figure 3: One of the few shops in Nablus selling goldplated jewelry. Photo by the author. had changed, with the hope of the first intifada turned into the political and economic despair that characterized the second intifada (2000-2005). Political activism had turned from a positive qualification into a major risk factor (at the very least carrying the threat of imprisonment). In the context of a steadily deteriorating economic situation, and increased social and political fragmentation, it became far more difficult to disregard the material aspects of marriage ( Johnson et al. 2009). At the same time, world gold prices have increased tremendously. The combination of such high prices and the economic difficulties many people are facing has resulted in two new phenomena that struck me during my last visit in 2012. The first is the appearance of 21 carat baladî gold bracelets that weigh far less than one would expect on the basis of their appearance, as they are not made of solid gold, but are hollow inside. Secondly, a small number of stores has emerged that sell ‘Russian gold’. In spite of its name, what is commonly called ‘Russian gold’ is not gold, but goldplated jewelry, which only costs a fraction of what similar pieces of gold jewelry would fetch (see also Hogan 2010). To underline this, the few stores that sell such gold-plated jewelry explicitly state on their shop window ‘this is not gold’. some women actually refused to buy or receive gold. At that particular moment, when political activism had become highly valued in prospective husbands, some young women, especially in progressive, left-leaning political circles would forego any type of gold jewelry, indicating a strong disinterest in the material side of marriage. A good ten years later, however, the situation 86 Conclusion In the Nablus region, as elsewhere in the Middle East, gold jewelry is both an economic resource for women, and a means to present a certain status, with women’s access to gold strongly structured through kin relations and marriage. Yet, as the above also indicates, not all gold jewelry works in the same way. While for many women the materiality of gold is still important as a source of economic security, especially if they have no other means of sustenance, its function as a consumption good has become more prominent. This is evident when tracing the new formats of gold jewelry that have appeared in the market. A main rupture with gold as an economic resource was the appearance of 18 carat Italian gold. Rather than a source of security, this Italian gold was first and foremost a means of distinction to present oneself as a modern woman who could afford to buy ornaments that did not function well to store wealth. A side effect of the emergence of such ‘modern gold’ was that, at least in the eyes of some, baladî gold became old-fashioned. The turn to consumptive forms of gold has, however, remained ambiguous and contested. For those who found Italian gold too risky and baladî gold too out of sync with modernity, ‘Gulf gold’ became an alternative option that brought together some of the economic value of 21 carat gold with an aesthetics that resonated with the economic success and the modernity of the Gulf States. At the same time, baladî gold was also adapted to new tastes. Those buying, selling and wearing this kind of gold jewelry opted for bracelets that had more elaborate designs, and for upgraded versions of coin necklaces with the coins in nicely elaborated holding frames attached to a gold chain. Moreover, individual women may also hold different kinds of gold, as they appreciate the economic security of baladî gold, while considering other kinds of gold jewelry as more attractive to wear. The above indicates that the limited attention anthropologists have paid to gold jewelry sits in a tense relation to its importance in the everyday lives of women in the Middle East. In addition, a focus on gold jewelry challenges the boundaries between economy and kinship, persons and things, and substance and form. Bringing together ‘gold’ and ‘jewelry’, it functions simultaneously as an economic asset, providing material security, and is displayed on women’s bodies, producing claims to social as well as kinship status. The adoption of particular styles of gold jewelry – both in terms of its specific materiality (carat content) and aesthetics (baladî, Italian or Gulf ) – affects and is affected by kinship, class and gender relations in highly dynamic ways. E-mail: A.C.A.E.Moors@uva.nl 87 Notes 1 Green (1980: 191) estimates that in some years 25 per cent of all gold coming on the market was destined for the Middle East. 2 There are many hadiths that state that it is prohibited for Muslim men to wear gold, for instance, ‘Gold and silk has been permitted for the females of my Ummah [community, AM], and forbidden to the males.’ Sunan an-Nasa’i 5148 (book 48, the book of adornments, hadith 109). See http://sunnah.com/ nasai/48#109, last accessed 13 April 2013. 3 Very few non-Muslim Palestinians live in the Nablus region. Jansen (1993) indicates that gold jewelry is also important for Christian women in the Middle East. 4 As I have argued elsewhere, anthropologists have not only paid scant attention to gold jewelry, but they have also largely overlooked how the dower may function as a potential source of women’s access to property. Whereas marriage payments have been a central trope in classical anthropology, much of this work, at least in case of the Middle East, is not based on ethnographic research. For a critique of such work, in particular the lack of an awareness of how these payments are gendered, see Moors (1995: 148ff ). 5 This article draws heavily on earlier publications. Moors (1995) discusses women´s access to property, while Moors (1998) and (2003) focus more specifically on gold jewelry. 6 Simultaneously, the process of mass-producing particular forms of jewelry, like chains, started with the introduction of machine-production. See World Gold Council (1997). 7 The value of various currencies was fixed in terms of gold, but only the US dollar remained convertible (at US$ 35 per troy ounce = 31.1 grams). 8 These prices are based on monthly averages per troy ounce. If daily prices would have been used, the fluctuations would have 9 10 11 12 been even greater. See The World Gold Council, www.gold.org/ investment/statistics/gold_price_chart/, accessed 13 April 2013. Although the price in 2011 seems an all-time high, this needs to be corrected for inflation. In taking issue with the distinction between things that are commodities and those that are not, Appadurai (1986: 13) emphasizes that things may be one and/or the other at various moments during their life-cycle. The term baladî is, for instance, also used for food that is locally produced. Until at least the 1920s, silver jewelry was more widely available in Palestine, especially in the rural areas (Weir 1989: 194). The extent to which gold jewelry was in use before the twentieth century is not easy to judge. Various authors employing archival material in writing on property relations in Ottoman times mention gold jewelry (e.g. Tucker 1988 for Jabal Nablus). In countries such as Yemen and Oman, silver remained widely popular well into the 1970s. Countries such as Syria, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia produce large amounts of such coins. The great increase in gold coin production in Saudi Arabia in the late 1970s is explained in part by the fact that migrant laborers (and pilgrims) bought such coins as a secure way to take their savings back home (Weston 1983: 58). 88 References Appadurai, Arjun (ed.) 1986 The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bates, Daniel and Amal Rassam 1983 Peoples and Cultures of the Middle East. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. De Marchi, Valentina, Joonkoo Lee and Gary Gereffi 2013 Globalization, Recession and the Internationalization of Industrial Districts: Experiences from the Italian Gold Jewellery Industry. European Planning Studies 1-19. Eickelman, Dale 1989 The Middle East: An Anthropological Approach, second edition. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Green, Timothy 1980 Changing Patterns in the Middle East Gold Market. 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