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The academic study of diamonds is as multi-faceted as the precious stones themselves. Mineralogists and geographers have written about them, as have historians and economists and students of art and fashion. They each shine their light on a different aspect of this source of luminous radiance. But who would venture to describe the entire complicated worldwide system starting in the diamond mines and ending with the consumers of Western metropolises?
In The Mazzel Ritual: Culture, Customs and Crime in the Diamond Trade, Russian-Israeli cultural anthropologist and criminologist Dina Siegel follows the route of a diamond from the mines of Africa to the shops of Europe and the United States, as it passes through countless hands and places and is smuggled, stolen, cut, polished, sold, exchanged and, finally, worn as jewelry. In the course of this long and exciting journey, a wide range of people face all sorts of risks and criminality, as well as various moral and ethical judgments. Siegel describes the range of ethnic groups that are active in the diamond trade and the culture and customs that are specific to this business. She analyses the dangers and threats to the industry and aims to uncover the strategies and tactics to deal with them. Finally, this story of risk, trust and crime examines the vulnerability of diamond production and distribution to illicit and criminal activities.
This book is about the diamond business itself as well as about those involved in it. It tells the story of people who simply cannot stay away from this expensive and alluring commodity.
- Sales Rank: #3321246 in eBooks
- Published on: 2009-08-12
- Released on: 2009-08-12
- Format: Kindle eBook
From the Back Cover
The academic study of diamonds is as multi-faceted as the precious stones themselves. Mineralogists and geographers have written about them, as have historians and economists and students of art and fashion. They each shine their light on a different aspect of this source of luminous radiance. But who would venture to describe the entire complicated worldwide system starting in the diamond mines and ending with the consumers of Western metropolises?
In The Mazzel Ritual: Culture, Customs and Crime in the Diamond Trade, Russian-Israeli cultural anthropologist and criminologist Dina Siegel follows the route of a diamond from the mines of Africa to the shops of Europe and the United States, as it passes through countless hands and places and is smuggled, stolen, cut, polished, sold, exchanged and, finally, worn as jewelry. In the course of this long and exciting journey, a wide range of people face all sorts of risks and criminality, as well as various moral and ethical judgments. Siegel describes the range of ethnic groups that are active in the diamond trade and the culture and customs that are specific to this business. She analyses the dangers and threats to the industry and aims to uncover the strategies and tactics to deal with them. Finally, this story of risk, trust and crime examines the vulnerability of diamond production and distribution to illicit and criminal activities.
This book is about the diamond business itself as well as about those involved in it. It tells the story of people who simply cannot stay away from this expensive and alluring commodity.
About the Author
Dina Siegel, originally from Kishinev in the former Soviet Union, now lives and works in the Netherlands. She received her MA in Sociology and Social Anthropology from Tel-Aviv University in Israel and her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the Free University of Amsterdam, where until recently she held a position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Law. In September 2008, she became a full professor at the University of Utrecht and a professor at the Willem Pompe Institute.
Dr. Siegel’s key areas of research include global organized crime, crime and criminal justice in the former Soviet states and jewish history. Her recent study of the international diamond industry brings these various research interests together.
Publications by Dina Siegel include The Great Immigration: Russian Jews in Israel, an etnographic study of the group of over 750,000 Russian Jews who immigrated to Israel in the period between 1988 and 1996. Dr. Siegel has published several journal articles, in a.o. Springer criminology journals' Crime, Law and Social Change and Trends in Organized Crime, on post-Soviet organized crime, terrorism, human trafficking, criminal activities in the diamond sector, and on drug policies in the Netherlands.
In 2003, she edited the book Global Organized Crime. Trends and Developments with Henk van de Bunt and Damian Zaitch (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004). Her most recent book on this topic, Organized Crime: Culture, Markets and Policies, published with Springer in November 2007.
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Dutch Professor in New Study: Crime Promotes Legal Diamond Sales
By M. Gellhorn
By: Chaim Even-Zohar, diamond industry analyst and consultant
In Professor Dina Siegel's most recent academic 220-page book, titled "The Mazzel Ritual: Culture, Customs and Crime in the Diamond Trade," she vows, "To demonstrate that the diamond producers' need to maintain high and uniform prices lies at the heart of an almost consensual basis for all diamond-related criminal activity."
In her introduction, as a matter of (scientific?) fact, she declares, "diamonds are criminal stones but, for one reason or another, neither anthropologists nor criminologists have done much study on their killing power." So, according to Professor Siegel, not just all, some or most of us are criminal, but the very lovely and quite innocent stone itself has been condemned an identical fate.
Diamonds inherently criminal? What the hell is the book all about, I wondered. Professor Siegel gives the reply on the very same page: "My aim is to describe a global organization that has created its own social world, its own legality, its own markets and its own ways of maintaining the value of its product, while dealing with competitors and collaborating with states and state agencies. I also try to analyze how this worldwide organization deals with the continuous threat of various types of crime."
Wow, I immediately looked for familiar names. The professor collected the data for this study during 2002-2008. Writes Professor Siegel: "I visited several official diamond offices and clubs, where I memorized or wrote down everything I heard and saw. My informants provided me with details I did not immediately understand or did not pay attention to in the beginning. My Hebrew was of great use in collecting interesting information, because I could often listen in on conversations without being noticed. I would sit around places where diamantaires were negotiating or discussing various subjects and was able to listen and observe for hours without drawing attention to myself or interrupting the course of events."
Eavesdropping? Getting yourself into a bourse hall or restaurant just to sit for hours and make notes on everything you hear? Maybe, for the sake of accuracy, silently tape-recording? You bet. Professor Siegel continues: "the notebook (or tape-recorder) served as an anthropological tool par excellence to record every possible detail gained from observation or communication."
This is probably a well-established anthropological research method when observing lost civilizations in the jungles of Brazil, but this kind of "undercover" research shouldn't be needed for a respected professor walking around the Pelikaanstraat or Schupstraat.
I wondered how she interviewed her informants. Would she just walk up to key industry players and blurt out "I want to know about your involvement in crimes!"? The book gives the answer. "I told my contacts that I was studying diamond traders in general, without emphasizing crime or competition as my main focus. It allowed me to find out what my contacts thought about certain crime-related aspects, the role of crime in their daily experience......"
Antwerp seems to hold a special attraction to this criminologist. Last year, the prolific Professor Siegel produced "Diamonds and Organized Crime: The Case of Antwerp," a chapter in the study titled "Organized Crime: Culture, Markets and Policies." The first time I "discovered" her existence came from an article on "The Jewish Community and the Antwerp Diamond Sector in a Historical Perspective," published seven years ago. Where did this purely historical piece appear? You'll never guess: it's in the Dutch "Magazine for Criminology."
Let's go back to her most recent near-gem. To protect her informants, the many hundreds of quotes in her book remain unattributed. However, there is one exception: "For more than two years I visited the Rapaport site every morning. I never met or talked with Rapaport face-to-face, but he was probably my best informant, without even being aware of it."
She did talk, she claims, with the managing director of the Israel Diamond Exchange and his deputy. However, they, after checking their 2005 and 2006 diaries, denied ever having talked to her - unless, of course, she used a different name? Was she working undercover?
In all fairness, Professor Siegel's study on the diamond industry itself is quite thorough; the research (mostly from endless quotes from other books) is not badly collated at all (for an outsider). She pieced together a quite credible story on the entire history of the industry up to a few years ago. Of course, her conclusions are often faulty, as are many of the interpretations. For instance, she says that in 2000, Rio Tinto was encouraged by Supplier of Choice to market independently, to name just one oddity.
There is nothing basically wrong with many of the book's industry-related facts, especially when relying on other publications. What I take exception to, however, is their presentation of these facts, her very weird way of interpreting and the making of blanket-generalizations. What also raises eyebrows is the continuous unattributed and uncheckable badmouthing by diamantaires of their own business, highlighting the lack of trust, the lack of future, etc.
I found this very weird and somewhat unlikely.
The author quotes an unnamed Indian diamantaire who assails those who object to having underage girls working in Surat factories. "Where should they go? To the street, to the brothels?" he allegedly said. The massive parade of undocumented statements by informants undermines the credibility and authority of the study.
I have published an annual "diamond pipeline" since 1989. Professor Siegel introduced a revised version. The conventional diamond value chain (pipeline) is expanded to "include smugglers, illegal traders and underground bankers. It also includes government officials, security, customs and police." She fails to put figures on the earnings of these stakeholders. I would have loved to see their added value.
Allow me a personal note: for almost 30 years, I have written about the diamond industry almost every day - and almost every night. I have tens of thousands of magazine pages, newsletters, websites, books, reports and studies to show for my efforts. I am so diamond-focused that if you were to mention Shubert or Beethoven to me, I would probably ask how many carats they produced and whether they were DTC Sightholders.
I don't need a Dutch professor to tell me that like in any economic activity, our industry has its share of crooks and thieves. But they are on the fringes; their relevancy is marginal. These activities undermine consumer confidence and the proper functioning of the trade. There is nothing wrong with an anthropologist or criminologist writing about crime in our industry. If that is what makes Professor Siegel happy and secures her next promotion in the Criminology Department, I am all for it. But don't take those operating on the fringes and claim them to be at the heart of the worldwide diamond organization. They are not. Period.
When Professor Siegel writes "diamonds and crime are often viewed as synonyms, as shown in different examples in the previous chapters," this rubs me the wrong way. It makes me want to yell: "hey, lady, wait a minute! All whores may be women, but not all women are whores. And they certainly are not synonymous."
I may not be the best judge of the criminological or anthropological values of the book. There may be some merits in Professor Siegel's stated purpose "to present and try to analyze specific cases of crime in the diamond world, to explain their logic, and to make an attempt to create a theoretical framework for analysis of different facets of diamond-related crimes." However, too many of her basic assumptions are baseless. States the professor: "I argue that crime is an inevitable part of the diamond social world and that it has a clear instrumental role in the increase of value of diamonds." She totally fails to make her case.
It is almost boring how often the words "criminal" and "illegal" are inserted in virtually every paragraph or sentence of the book. Nothing is exempt. No one is sacred. For instance, when mentioning one of the historical founders of the Israeli industry, the mayor of Netanya in 1939, Professor Siegel finds it necessary to note that some "associate him with corruption practices, precisely torpedoing the development of the diamond industry in Israel."
There is a whole chapter titled "Diamonds and Mafia: Criminal Networks and Illicit Markets," which reads like a Google search-engine delivery of all main stories on robberies in Israel, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, on the Georgian and Russian Mafia, Italians, Nigerians, Ghanaians and more. She includes terrorist figures Victor Bout and Fouad Abbas, criminals like Martin Frankel, the Genovese Crime Family and this goes on - ad nauseam.
It does seem, however, that Professor Siegel got some legal advice herself when writing about De Beers. In the part subheaded "Illegal Activities of De Beers," she introduces the concept of "the family business," which "in criminology is also associated with criminal business. The family structure is often referred to in the literature as an `organized crime family'," she writes.
After making comparisons with many known criminal families, she concludes that the Oppenheimer family relations are not comparable "to concepts such as Sicilian famiglia or Mafia brotherhood." Playing it safe, the professor wholeheartedly writes that "with the exception of an incident with `cartel-forming' mentioned above, De Beers is not associated with any criminal or illicit activities in the economic sphere." No other participant in the diamond pipeline received such a clean bill of health in her book. Cartel-forming? An "Incident?"
Many parts of the book are based on "old" information. The 2004 $10 million fine paid in settling the General Electric price-fixing case in the United States was mentioned; the 2006 $250 million class-action settlement didn't make the book. Indeed, the book often seems like a compilation of parts published (or written) a long time ago without updating them before sending the final product to the printers in 2009.
The book lists hundreds of instances where outsiders - people totally unrelated to the diamond business - commit diamond-related crimes. The professor explores their motivation. One doesn't need to be a professor to determine that easily moveable, easily hidden, high-volume items may attract criminal clientele. My apprehension centers on the members of the business and on her core argument that crime is an integral part of the functioning of the diamond world. Apparently, if you believe the professor, without crime - there would be no diamond business.
In the diamond pipeline, as presented in her book, the criminal activity is not uniform at each level. Professor Siegel identified the production (mining) level as particularly vulnerable. "In all these [mining] countries control of production and prevention of competition is the most important task of the diamond industry. The most efficient strategy is creation of its own laws and exclusion of those who may become a threat. Thousands of people are viewed today as illegal or even criminal, because they do not have a license or any other `official' way to be connected to the formal diamond organization," writes the author. She is almost suggesting that mining countries err in issuing regulations, ignoring that ownership of mineral resources is normally vested in states.
"A criminal act has to be defined through social and cultural processes that are in themselves played out separate from the essence of the act itself," quotes Professor Siegel from criminological literature. "The act of replacing or transferring (hidden) diamonds is not an act of illegal smuggling until someone defines it as such, or until the criminalization of the act takes place in discourse. It is these cultural discourses that both designate any particular act as criminal" says the professor.
She explains that until somebody with power or somebody who takes the right upon himself to decide that smuggling or digging without permission is a criminal act, the act may be perceived as natural, rightful, or even a taken-for-granted activity. "The criminalization process then is that cultural process whereby those with power come to define and shape dominant forms of social life and give them specific meanings," she writes.
This may sound intellectually sensible and almost axiomatic. The realization that an illegal digger is illegal just because someone made a law requiring licensing is but one of the many "profound" insights in the book. In my opinion, this study is wasted reading for anyone not compelled to read the book for credit on the road to an anthropology degree.
On page 200, the final paragraph in the book says it all. "I argue that crime is an inevitable part of a diamond world. It is deeply rooted, has a different meaning and is even socially accepted in this world. It has its function in keeping and promoting the value of stones, the solidarity of the people involved, and the mystery of the diamond's image."
Oddly enough, however, the author seems to have developed a deep affection for the criminal industry and its criminalproduct. Whatever my reservations may be, the professor is clearly not hostile to any one of us. Sometimes it seems that, in her eyes, also the very concept of crime is not necessarily negative - or, more precisely, it may have positive connotations.
Just read (and re-read) the following quotation carefully and draw your own conclusion: "But the criminals are not the only ones who benefit from diamond-related crimes. As already mentioned, various NGOs and the diamond organization itself profits from the attention that these crimes receive. The construction of the mysterious attractive power of diamonds as an object of crime is also perhaps the best advertisement on the legal market."
Wow! I think that De Beers ought to hire her right away. If the mafia loves diamonds, your wife certainly also deserves a stone or two. It might get us out of the recession.
I cannot judge whether Professor Siegel's "Mazzel Ritual" makes any contribution to the literature in her own academic fields. From our perspective, under the guise of academic freedom, intellectual pursuit, or whatever, a few million people associated with our industry are being slandered wholesale - slandered by a supposedly highly ethical professor who takes pride in eavesdropping and in gaining trust and entry by introducing herself merely as an academic studying the diamond trade.
Years of study led this professor to conclude that crime is needed to promote the value of our stones; crime is needed to maintain the solidarity of the value chain. Crime is something that is socially accepted by each and every one of us. It is hard to believe that for any field of study this book will have any redeeming value. And, sadly, on top of it all, it makes for an utterly boring read. It won't become a bestseller.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Brilliant book about sparkling stones
By H. G. Van Bunt
Prof. Dr. Henk van de Bunt, Erasmus School of Law, Department of Criminology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Professor Dina Siegel wrote a fascinating book about the diamond world. Using ethnographic methods of social research, such as observations, participant observation and open and semi-structured interviews she got first-hand information all over the world. In addition she used advanced methods such as multi-site and multi-level mobile ethnography and compared and enriched her data with a wide range of literature.
The author touches upon important and sensitive issues, such as traditional trust relationships in the post-modern rapidly changing diamond industry; local problems of the so-called 'conflict diamonds' which get global solutions; consumerism; the value of beauty and power; and the culture of crime. Siegel, following many prominent social scientists, correctly argues that crime is a part of our life and cannot be excluded from social analysis. This book is, however not purely criminological, it discusses the diamond pipeline from mines to consumer in historical and cultural perspective. It is colorful and rich, the reader can easily imagine the poor low-ranked miners, trying to hide the found diamond, or diamond traders shaking their hands and pronouncing the magic word of 'mazzel'. The book radiates sympathy and admiration for the diamond people. Siegel allows them to tell their stories, their jokes and their concerns.
The book is provoking, breaking taboos and not comfortable for everyone. Readers of this book will be confronted with 'inconvenient truths'. Some readers will become angry, others will admire it. Nobody will remain indifferent. I belong to the admirers. The book is an important contribution to social science, offering an interesting fresh view on the dim world of the sparkling stones. This book is a must not only for people interested in the diamond world, but also for those interested in the dynamics of globalization and the secrets of diamond power.
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