Where knowledge meets: heritage expertise at the intersection of people, perspective, and place

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research with heritage professionals in Scotland, the essay explores meetings as organizational devices for differentiating and relating various forms of epistemic, social, and material context. The account describes how the bureaucratic ideal of institutional consistency is achieved through staged encounters between the perspectives of the various people who meet, and the buildings that are the objects of their meeting. These ethnographic examples are used to develop two linked points. Firstly, it is suggested that the lens of ‘meeting’ complicates the relatively monolithic characterizations of heritage expertise evident in widely influential deconstructive critiques of heritage practice. Secondly, it is argued that heritage practitioners’ own accounts of these negotiations highlight material and spatial dimensions of bureaucratic conduct that have that have received relatively little ethnographic attention in prevalent textually orientated accounts.

Time and Relational Possibility: Cultural Anthropology in 2017

“…But in other instances, intelligibility across multiple registers is the explicit goal. We see this, for example, in a JRAI special issue on meetings (Abram ; Alexander ; Brown and Green ; Brown, Reed, and Yarrow ; Corsín Jiménez and Estalella ; Evans ; Keenan and Pottage ; Lamp ; Nielsen ; Reed ; Riles ; Strathern ; Yarrow ). As Hannah Brown, Adam Reed, and Thomas Yarrow () put it in their introduction, “meetings contain and animate social worlds outside the spatially and temporally demarcated arenas through which they take place” (11).…”

Retaining character: heritage conservation and the logic of continuity

“…Broader tensions in conservation philosophy are refracted through specific forms of expert knowledge, associated with distinct understandings of character: archaeological emphasis on materials sometimes conflicts with an architectural emphasis on form, even to the extent that both acknowledge the inter‐dependence of these elements (Yarrow ; Yarrow and Jones ). Assessments of character involve consideration of the contributions that are made by a range of potential elements, including aesthetics, function, material authenticity and physical structure.…”

“…As an ethnographic account of its practical uses, I have demonstrated how the term is elaborated, variously as material, functional and aesthetic qualities. This focus makes apparent a series of negotiations that have largely been elided from the perspective of heritage literatures bifurcated between the opposed analytic positions: of assuming these qualities to be intrinsic (and so foreclosing the negotiations integral to these acts of recognition) or of imagining the historic environment as an ‘empty signifier’ (Brumann ) onto which contemporary meanings are retrospectively projected (for a more extended discussion see Yarrow ; Yarrow and Jones ). Indeed the practical appeal of the term is partly its ability to relate and reconcile without ultimately resolving what practitioners and scholars have often taken to be axiomatically distinct: heritage in its ‘tangible’ and ‘intangible’ forms; the material manifestations of the past and the meanings associated with them.…”

How conservation matters: Ethnographic explorations of historic building renovation

“…Focusing on the nexus of home owners, building professionals and conservation experts involved in renovation practices in the UK, I seek to highlight how conservation matters in ways that existing accounts have tended to overlook. Bypassing normatively inflected interdisciplinary debates between ‘heritage enthusiasts’ and ‘heritage detractors’, I adopt a more ‘agnostic’ (Brumann, 2014; Clavir, 2009), classically ethnographic (Yarrow, 2017; Yarrow and Jones, 2014) approach, which highlights how ‘the good’ of conservation is specified and challenged in multiple ways. As has recently been noted (Brumann, 2012; Jones and Yarrow, 2013; Macdonald, 2009; Pendlebury, 2009), deconstructive critiques shed light on the discursive construction of conservation in general terms that frequently elide understanding of the specific everyday practices through which these are located.…”