Jewellery’s Circular Economy: Materialising connections through the gifting and wearing of adornments

It is something of a truism that jewellery connects people and brings them together – playing a role in marking life’s rites of passage and changing relationships – but there is less critical analysis of the mechanics by which this takes place.  This paper addresses the question of jewellery’s role in connecting networks of family and friends, by paying particular attention to its inherently social role.  It will consider the gifted nature of much traditional precious jewellery, exploring a range of jewellery practices, including selection, commissioning, purchasing, gifting, wearing, re-gifting and bequeathing with and between groups of individuals.  Investment in the artefacts themselves – in financial, social and emotional terms – and the relationships they speak of helps to bring people together and cement relationships through practices of exchange and reciprocity.   

This draws on primary research (drawn from creative workshops, interviews) carried out as part of my doctoral project, and specifically examines how jewellery worn with various degrees of regularity spans different modalities of embodied consciousness.  These modalities might include unconscious wear, in the case of jewellery that is worn so often it is barely noticed, to jewellery that stubbornly refuses wear because it retains meanings that no longer resonate with the wearer.  I argue that the practices around the gifting and reciprocal wearing of jewellery allow women to take on board the perspectives of others as they negotiate these different modalities, incorporating others’ views of themselves into their own sense of self.  In doing so, I point to the key processes whereby connections between individuals are materialised through the gifting and wear of jewellery, and articulate its highly social nature in coalescing and binding groups of invested individuals.