This article traces the making of a techno-legal apparatus to regulate a new object: the "cultured" pearl. In the early 1920s, round pearls cultivated on Japanese farms provoked alarm within the Paris association whose members traded more pearls than anywhere in Europe. Despite their claims to be connoisseurs of surfaces, anti-cultivation pearl dealers in Paris asserted that a pearl's identity could only be ascertained by examining its inner structure. By mid-decade, dedicated pearl testing laboratories appeared and supported French court rulings about what to call the products of Japanese pearl cultivation in relation to "natural" pearls. The meanings of nature and culture were not fixed, but transformed in the 1920s, amid legal and technical efforts to know la perle japonaise inside out.
...More
Book
Julia Martínez;
Adrian Vickers;
(2015)
The Pearl Frontier: Indonesian Labor and Indigenous Encounters in Australia's Northern Trading Network
(/isis/citation/CBB168147946/)
Book
Eckart, Wolfgang Uw;
(2006)
Man, Medicine, and the State: The Human Body as an Object of Government Sponsored Medical Research in the 20th Century
(/isis/citation/CBB001033855/)
Book
Kaiser, David;
(2005)
Pedagogy and The Practice of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
(/isis/citation/CBB000550490/)
Book
James Uden;
(2022)
Worlds of Knowledge in Women’s Travel Writing
(/isis/citation/CBB070453785/)
Book
Parshall, Karen Hunger;
Rice, Adrian C.;
(2002)
Mathematics Unbound: The Evolution of an International Mathematical Research Community, 1800--1945
(/isis/citation/CBB000201249/)
Article
Kalba, Laura Anne;
(2012)
Blue Roses and Yellow Violets: Flowers and the Cultivation of Color in Nineteenth-Century France
(/isis/citation/CBB001320016/)
Book
Blanchard, Pascal;
(2008)
Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires
(/isis/citation/CBB001033417/)
Article
Kawashima, Keiko;
(2012)
Deux savants japonais et la famille Curie, Nobuo Yamada et Toshiko Yuasa
(/isis/citation/CBB001421112/)
Article
Thomas Jepsen;
(2014)
Reversing the whispering galley of Dionysius: A short history of electronic surveillance in the U.S.
(/isis/citation/CBB443893857/)
Book
Armando Gervasoni;
(2023)
Il Vajont e le responsabilità dei manager
(/isis/citation/CBB344259824/)
Chapter
Elizabeth A. Buchanan;
Lipinski, T. A.;
(1999)
The "girl next door" in virtual play space: victim, or vixen, or invisible?
(/isis/citation/CBB718854553/)
Book
Josephson, Paul R.;
(2005)
Resources Under Regimes: Technology, Environment, and the State
(/isis/citation/CBB000501457/)
Book
Brian Hochman;
(2022)
The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States
(/isis/citation/CBB775086796/)
Book
Burks, Alice Rowe;
(2003)
Who Invented the Computer? The Legal Battle That Changed Computing History
(/isis/citation/CBB000302354/)
Article
Jørgensen, Finn Arne;
(2013)
Green Citizenship at the Recycling Junction: Consumers and Infrastructures for the Recycling of Packaging in Twentieth-Century Norway
(/isis/citation/CBB001201571/)
Article
Debjani Bhattacharya;
(2016)
Manufactured Landscapes: Law and Hydraulics in the Bengal Delta
(/isis/citation/CBB449174182/)
Article
J. Moran;
(2006)
Crossing the road in Britain, 1931–1976
(/isis/citation/CBB295806014/)
Book
Seth C. Oranburg;
(2022)
A History of Financial Technology and Regulation: From American Incorporation to Cryptocurrency and Crowdfunding
(/isis/citation/CBB191217193/)
Article
Swanson, Kara W.;
(2009)
The Emergence of the Professional Patent Practitioner
(/isis/citation/CBB000951932/)
Article
Anne-Marie Coles;
(2021)
Emergence of a techno-legal specialty: Animal tests to assess chemical safety in the UK, 1945–1960
(/isis/citation/CBB493149696/)
Be the first to comment!