Fool's Gold: Tapping into Luxury
Fabricating Authenticity - Jason W.M. Ellsworth
Ping-hsiu Alice Lin [+]
Harvard University
Ping-hsiu Alice Lin (PhD CUHK) is a sociocultural anthropologist with interests in commodities, labor and artisanship, geosciences, and extractive industries in South and Southeast Asia. Her in-progress manuscript examines the ways in which movement, labor, and imperial histories transform minerals into precious stones in the borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan, demonstrating how ideas related to value in minerals circulate among trade hubs in Asia. Lin is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Anthropology Department at Harvard University. In July 2025, she will start as an assistant professor in the department. Between 2021 and 2023 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.
Description
Building on Cotter’s argument, Lin uses her own ethnographic research on the supply chain of luxurious precious stones to argue that luxury, just as notions of authenticity, cannot be understood independently of material factors, social stratification or historical change. Lin shows how modern aesthetic shopping malls are designed to center consumerist practice in a fashion that reinserts the “authentic” into the shopping experience.