What is Regional Jewelry?

Regional jewelry could be considered an opposite to generic, mass-produced jewelry. That is, it incorporates elements which may be termed local, tribal, ethnic or even pre-industrial. These local elements are either materials or designs or both.

For example, a jade Buddha necklace utilizes a material which is commonly associated with the Orient (jade) and religious iconography which similarly relates to the Orient.

We should, of course, refer to regional jewelries - plural rather than singular - as there is a multitude of regional jewelry throughout geographical and historical. With regards to geography we have jewelry which is regional at the continental level, at the national level, at an ethnic or religious level and at a clan - or tribal - level. And with regards to history, regional jewelry is most commonly identified with pre-industrialization.

With mass-media and globalization, the industrialized world has seemingly reached a consensus about what constitutes "High Street" jewelry. While high-street jewelry may use tribal motifs and elements, it is necessarily post-regional.

That is to say, that it is mostly areas that are relatively untouched by globalization which still produce regional jewelry. By its nature, regional and tribal jewelry is often made with different - and more diverse - materials than modern jewelry given the simplicity of pre-industrial technology.

As such, we find regional jewelry made of materials which are not exclusively made of valuable materials - for example, gold and diamond - but rather readily available materials such as shell, bone, wood etc. Of course, such materials indicate the earliest examples of jewelry.

Gemstones, which require more sophisticated technology to produce, have been used in regional jewelry: in the case of the Chinese, alluded to (above) with their use of jade; the ancient Egyptians with their use of lapis; Aztecs and turquoise; Romans and carnelian.

Today regional jewelry - as with regional culture - has a struggle to survive in an age of mass-media and globalization. As tools and technologies become homogenous we may reasonably expect an increasing uniformity of accoutrement and culture.

tribal jewelry
tribal jewelry