A Cultural Artifact - Jennifer Dempsey's Necklace

Jennifer suggested to me that her necklace would be a good artifact for our exercise.

"It has a story behind it," she said as Professor Wible was handing out Xerox copies of the exercise, and I immediately started to make some assumptions about what that story might be.

It's a necklace, I thought; it's probably either a gift, or a memento from a place she visited. I jotted it down in my little blue spiral notebook and started taking note of necklace's appearance. It's a pearl set in the bottom a figure-8-shaped frame, "for the eight Hawaiian islands." The pearl and setting hang on a long, thin silver chain, coming to a "V" in the middle of her chest, close to her heart.

"So what's the story with the necklace?" I asked her.

"It's from a trip to Hawaii," she responded. "My boyfriend got a big accident settlement and paid for my plane ticket and everything." I quickly underlined 'from a place she visited' in my notes, and admired myself for a second for being clever enough to infer that before she told me.

"I got it at a place where they let you pick the oyster and get the pearl out of it."

"Did your boyfriend buy it?" I asked, waiting for confirmation that it might also have been a gift.

"Well, I paid half," she said, and tugged on the chain on each side of the pearl, bringing the setting closer to her neck.

I asked her about its sentimental value, and she responded, "Well, we're not together anymore, so not all that much sentimental value. I would be upset if I lost it because I might not ever go back to Hawaii again... There are probably a bunch of other people with the same necklace, but I guess the pearl is one-of-a-kind. It's one-of-a-kind to me."

I asked her more about the place where she got the pearl.

"Yeah," she said, grinning, "they let you pick out the oyster--there's this ritual where you wave a stick and stuff." I was amused and curious about how the transaction actually occurs, and I asked her about how someone actually picks a good oyster.

"I tried to pick a big one... that was hairy," she said, and I couldn't hold back a big grin.

Laughing, I asked her, "Hairy?"

"The lady there said you want to pick a 'big hairy one'--I guess it was mold or moss or something--because they have the best pearls."

The experience she shared seemed genuinely memorable, and the necklace is truly a cultural artifact. It's a product of Hawaii's island culture, made special both by the ritual of retrieving the pearl and the context of a special trip. Thousands of miles east of Hawaii, the necklace still maintains its personal and sentimental value to Jennifer.