In Colombia, emerald traders often buy and sell their stones using ambiguities and contradictions, rather than certainties and agreements. In this way, they rescue the impossibility of the connection between emeralds and money so that the connection is both possible and impossible. Through an ethnographic analysis of these exchanges, in this article, I suggest that ambiguities and contradictions are, rather than failures in the emeralds-money connection, sources for imagining and constructing novel connections. Framed in the context of Colombia's recent mining formalization, these emerald practices provide a glimpse of politics that seize the failures of standards, rather than seeking to correct them.

中文翻译：

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哥伦比亚的珍贵之处：哥伦比亚矿产的正规化寄生形式

在哥伦比亚，祖母绿贸易商经常使用含糊不清和矛盾的方式来买卖宝石，而不是确定性和协议。他们通过这种方式拯救了祖母绿和金钱之间的不可能性，使这种联系既可能又不可能。通过对这些交流的民族志分析，在本文中，我认为，祖母绿与金钱之间的联系的模糊性和矛盾性并不是失败，而是想象和构建新颖联系的源泉。在哥伦比亚最近采矿业正规化的背景下，这些祖母绿实践让我们得以一窥政治抓住标准的缺陷，而不是寻求纠正它们。