The Object of Conservation

Cultural heritage elicits strong reactions, from quasi-religious awe to dismissal as feel-good history, but these are rarely based on familiarity with the actual complexities of caring for the past. This thoughtfully crafted account takes a big step towards understanding the practice of conservation. It is a trailblazer in the ethnographic study of heritage conservation and will also inspire those interested in the anthropology of public bureaucracies, professional expertise and ethical virtue. ~Christoph Brumann, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany. Conservation is a puzzle - riven with compromise, contingency, negotiation and uncertainty. In this remarkable book, the authors bring the reader along to stand next to conservation professionals and listen in as they go about their daily deliberations about how to care well. We gain a privileged understanding of the inside story, and the specific skills - from applied craft to policy interpretation - that go into producing the apparently stable objects we usually only know from the outside in. ~Caitlin DeSilvey, University of Exeter, UK. Through their ethnography, Jones and Yarrow explore the work of conservation - focusing simultaneously on the relations between differently situated actors and on how those different actors treat the material objects they are charged with curating. The Object of Conservation is exactly what's needed to get beyond the debate between positivist and relativist approaches to heritage. ~Richard Handler, University of Virginia, USA This is an insightful study of conservation and the various 'matters of concern' and 'matters of care' that emerge in its versatile webs of practice. Meticulous, ethnographically rich and analytically innovative, the book shows how conservation and heritage professionals shape conservation objects and how, in return, they get shaped by the profound engagements with these unpredictable and politically complex objects. ~Albena Yaneva, University of Manchester, UK