“As if without wanting to”. Insinuations and indeterminacy in encounters between esmeralderos and emeralds in Colombia

Abstract

In the context of formalization of mining in Colombia, artisanal miners, traders, and emerald carvers often emphasize indeterminacy in their encounters with emeralds and their qualities. Instead of stalking to extract, planning to carve, or fixing to sell, they privilege the unpredictability of these encounters. What they do is to design specific insinuations from which interruptive encounters can indeterminately emerge. In their words, emeralds must be sought, carved, and sold “as if without wanting to”. In this paper, I propose to understand these insinuations as linguistic and nonlinguistic practices that esmeralderos use to encounter with the emeralds and create indeterminacy as a theory of their world that besiege politic-economic thought of mining formalization. I propose that “as if without wanting to” gives us the possibility of an indeterminate thought constituted by interruptions and surprises. I call this thought, whose nature I try to emulate in the very structure of the article, pensamiento esmeralda.