Abstract
AbstractIn Colombia, emerald traders often buy and sell their stones using ambiguities and contradictions, rather than certainties and agreements. In this way, they rescue the impossibility of the connection between emeralds and money so that the connection is both possible and impossible. Through an ethnographic analysis of these exchanges, in this article, I suggest that ambiguities and contradictions are, rather than failures in the emeralds‐money connection, sources for imagining and constructing novel connections. Framed in the context of Colombia's recent mining formalization, these emerald practices provide a glimpse of politics that seize the failures of standards, rather than seeking to correct them.
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