| Summary: | This dissertation offers an ethnographic and historical account of diamond trading and corporate mining in diamond-rich Lunda, northeast Angola, based on research conducted with miners and corporate managers, diamond evaluators and ritual experts, state officials and security agents, diggers and geophysicists. Building out from archival research and extended fieldwork in mining compounds and trading houses (2008-2011), this dissertation details the social and cultural underpinnings of Angola's regime of diamond extraction in two related ways: the first pertains to value and the contest over technologies and economies of revelation. At the turnover between rock and commodity, diamonds are significantly loaded vehicles of value, allowing for capital, state, market, or the corporate to be mobilized, transgressed, and made empirically investigable as culturally configured social action. From riverbeds to trading rooms, Lunda encapsulates a node of action and reflection calibrated by the fruits of its laborers---uncut rough stones---and the experience of materiality, physically and socially embodied labor, and the meaning and imaginings of the broader global economy.
The second intervention is geared toward the securitization of social and political life in Lunda. Historically, the introduction of the closed compound in South Africa's diamond mines marked the beginning of a heightened regulation of the workforce, soon prevalent in labor-intensive mining sites across Southern Africa. Today, 'enclaves' of mineral extraction subtracted from public use have come to epitomize the postcolonial predicament of corporate extraction along with the discretionary powers of private militarized forces. My research in Lunda, however, demonstrates how the organization of security in Lunda is deeply enmeshed in a cross-cultural economy of secrecy and social control. In my suggestion, `security' holds the potential to reinforce and undermine social and labor relations, and is a relevant category mobilized in the exercise of law and capital circulation. By positing a one-sided imposition of discipline and violence, or leaving unchecked the pervasive interplay of social, familiar, and economic ties between corporate institutions, their agents, and other social actors, we fail to consider this complex order of social and cultural relations. In this, my contribution challenges the iconic predicament of postcolonial spaces of mineral extraction, said to be enclaved and detached from local contexts. Rather than kept at bay, I suggest that institutions of sovereignty and organized capital are contentiously embedded in local economies, inhabiting---while seeking to dislodge---the social and cultural features of place through a disputed experience of law and security. In this nexus of practices, values, and institutions signified by the political node of State-corporate power, moreover, this dissertation renders visible the concrete linkages of capital circulation by making the case for how cultural practice permeates corporate bureaucracies and its structures of power, inasmuch as the accumulation of capital is contingent to history and bodily praxis.
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