‘Immanence vs. provenance’ was a highlight presentation delivered at the 2013 ‘European Conference on the Social Sciences’ organised by the International Academic Forum (IAFOR). Oakley used the analytical tool of complexity – as defined by John Law and Anne-Marie Mol – to interrogate the Fairtrade and Fairmined Gold campaign and explain the mounting problems it faced following its launch in 2011.
Oakley focused on the incommensurability of two fundamental aspects of Fairtrade and Fairmined gold: the ‘immanence’ of gold as an elemental substance, status symbol and store of wealth, and the ‘provenance’ inherent in Fairtrade certification. His paper explained how immanence is embedded in the practices of industrial gold refining, fine jewellery manufacturing and the international gold trading markets and how this feature threatens to compromise any system reliant on the history of individual masses of material.
The paper drew on four years of field research amongst jewellers and fair trade activists in the UK, during which time the Fairtrade and Fairmined gold programme was created and launched by Fairtrade International and the Alliance for Responsible Mining.