ABSTRACT
This chapter plays with the pearl as a palimpsest of the nacreous – its layers of tears, how it tears. Although vibrant matter, materiality, photography and waste are very prescient in our times, pearls and pearlescence have been strangely neglected. Christopher Pinney and Benjamin Schmidt discuss the ‘stickiness’ and the sheen used by European artists of the late Enlightenment in their portrayal of still life objects including the oyster and its shell where the pearl might be. The most (in)famous necklace of the nineteenth century, the Baroda chain is believed to have contained up to 350 pearls of the finest quality from the Persian Gulf. It is unclear whether he wore the pearls by choice or whether he was forced by the British given that he had been imprisoned for some time. Taussig plays with cocaine and labour and shamanism as central to the subaltern-cartel economies of Colombia and Bolivia.
