“I Never Looked into a Diamond”

During multisite fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2019, across two wholesale trading hubs in the midstream pipeline of the diamond industry (Antwerp and Mumbai), diamond brokers voiced a confounding claim: they know nothing about the diamonds they broker. I argue that this reveals a core contradiction of diamond brokers: their trustworthiness depends upon their ignorance of a diamond’s value to be deemed an impartial third actor to the transaction, while their utility as a search function depends upon their knowledge of diamonds to connect buyers and sellers in the market. In the current regime of pricing transparency, standardized diamond certificates, a pricing index, and e-commerce websites now instantly reveal diamond grades and prices, upending the necessary fiction of ignorance upon which brokers rely. These technologies are not mechanistically replacing the role of human middlemen, but rather are revealing the very structural instabilities and ideological contradictions at the heart of brokerage.