There has never been a better season to sell the family silver, or rather gold. There was a time not so long ago when you went into a shop actually to buy gold. It’s a fascinating reversal of roles that jewellers have now become the customers and their clients the sellers.

Bit of a sweeping statement perhaps, but it’s there all over the television ads and the notices put up by jewellers across the country: ‘We buy gold’. Rather a boon for thieves and especially burglars, who find a ready and fairly anonymous market for the products of their dirty labour. As for money laundering, let’s not go there.

I’m told that most of what the shops buy is hoarded or sold abroad at a slim but not-insignificant profit. For sellers, the logic seems to be that given the high international price of gold, it’s wise to sell now.

There are two questions here. The first concerns timing. Is it indeed so clever to sell now? One assumes the price of gold is at an all-time high, but what if it keeps shooting up? That’s one no one can really answer and certainly not myself or the many sellers who find themselves playing a game they scarcely understand.

The second question is, why sell at all? This is probably more interesting since it raises a number of further questions about the cultural significance of jewellery and gold.

The first time I came across the idea of gold as a form of wealth and investment was while doing fieldwork in India. Gold is quite unavoidable in that country, both in the shape of the heavy ornaments worn by women and in the windows of thousands of jewellery shops. Indian towns and cities are renowned for the displays of their zaveris (jewellers). Zaveri Bazaar in Mumbai is particularly breathtaking.

I found myself getting interested in gold partly because I was studying a group of people who had left Pakistan as Hindu refugees in 1948. My informants were fond of describing how women had smuggled jewellery under their saris, and how the ploy had been a godsend to so many families who would otherwise have lost all their wealth.

Which reminded me of how when the Mamluks fought Napoleon’s troops, many of them carried their jewellery under their armour as insurance against the consequences of defeat, a type of liquid mobile capital that would enable the survivor to restart in business wherever his adventures took him. And of how in 1918 the women members of the Russian Imperial family were the last to give in to the Bolshevik bullets, reason being the masses of jewellery they wore under their clothes.

This then was part of the reasoning behind the rows of zaveris; gold is a type of liquid, easily-transportable, and universal currency. In the Indian context it is also a ‘bank belonging to women’, as anthropologist Helen Ward put it. Gold is passed on as dowry and/or inheritance from generation to generation, and is controlled in some measure by the women who own and wear it.

My own informants were very reluctant to say whether or not they might eventually sell (an object is an investment only if one is prepared to sell, in principle). Ward’s were more forthcoming. At least among the people she worked with, gold was indeed sold as a last-ditch resource.

A couple of years ago I assigned some students the task of finding out about gold in Malta. Was it also a case of a bank belonging to women, and if so, how did it function? It turned out people were quite prepared to talk.

The gaudiest spot was what demographers call the ‘Inner Harbour Area’, roughly making up Valletta, the Three Cities, and their immediate neighbours. It was there that my students came across stories of fili and other baubles.

I just love fili, those rows of plain bangles in solid gold so beloved of the women of the working class towns. I think they look and sound stunning. I say ‘sound’ because they convert gestures into multi-sensory actions. As she gesticulates, the wearer also punctuates the air with the jingle of her fili. Splendid.

Not that aesthetics is their only logic. Women get fili (and other vernacular forms of gold jewellery – gran spinat, for example, or barbazzal) as dowry. They might also set aside some money, or maybe buy them on credit arrangements with local jewellers. In times of need they will go to the Monte di Pietà and pawn their gold for ready cash.

So yes, a bank, and one that relies on a long-term security to address short-term needs. As they say, ‘mara tridha ħajta deheb’ (‘a woman will have her gold’) But there’s more.

Jewellery tends to be thought of as a family resource, built and reshaped over the generations. It carries implications of family history and doesn’t really belong to any one individual.

As the watch advert goes, “You never actually own a Patek Philippe; you merely look after it for the next generation.”

Readers might want to try out a little experiment by going through their collections, no matter how humble, and sketching out the family connections for each item. A novel way of drawing up family trees, shall we say, and ones in which women figure prominently.

This then is the thing with gold. On one hand it’s as close as it gets to money. In this sense its value is set by universal standards and easily transcends individual situations.

On the other, it’s caught up in a whole tissue of personal memories and family histories. Solid investment maybe, but one for which liquidity comes at an emotional price.

Or maybe not, if all the adverts are to be believed. It may well be that the value of gold is falling even as it shoots up, so to say.

This may have something to do with changing ideas about the family as a long-term economic resource, or maybe even a developing economic and financial independence for women. (Who needs fili when you can have a bank account?)

Whatever the reason, the phenomenon of people selling their gold for essentially unneeded cash (it’s not as if most sellers are starving) is well worth thinking about.

mafalzon@hotmail.com