Doctoral Dissertation Research: Crystallizing Value: Mining and Market Making

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This project investigates how material objects, which may or may not have practical utility, come to have commercial value as commodities. To highlight the processes involved, the researcher will focus on an object whose significance has changed over time. This will clarify which features are inherent in the object and which are added through marketing and consumer cultures. Quartz crystals mined in Brazil were once marketed to the United States for their piezoelectric properties and highly valued for their use in World War Two military radio equipment. Over the past 70 years, the quartz market has shifted from producing for the military to producing for semiprecious gemstone markets. The research asks how this transformation in meaning has come about and what causative factors and agents are involved. Findings from this research will have relevance to multiple commodities that are traded internationally as well as to the general theoretical question of how value is created and sustained. The research will be conducted by University of California, Irvine, doctoral student Josef Wieland, who is supervised by Dr. William M. Maurer. Wieland will base his study in the mineral-rich state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, the epicenter of Brazil's mining industries. This is an appropriate research setting given that this region has remained the world's largest producer of many strategic mineral resources for nearly 100 years. The investigator's goal is to determine what factors in Brazil and the United States generate what types of economic, cultural, and social value in the commodity networks, and how these factors affect global quartz markets more broadly. To measure value transformation the researcher will track quartz as it passes from mines to consumers. He will conduct interviews with the producers, processors, wholesalers, trade show venders, and consumers who comprise the quartz commodity chain that stretches from rural Brazilian mines through international markets to North American sales points and consumers. He also will carry out observations at different sites in the commodity chain and do archival research on the quartz industry in Brazil over the past century. By examining the extent to which local environmental policy, social history, and global demand impact mineral values, findings from this research will provide insight into the factors that create and sustain value as well as those that promote the stabilization of mineral markets. Stable access to mineral resources will likely be among the most salient national security and socio-ecological issues of the twenty-first century.