Conservation is a nexus of people, ideas, interests and forms of professional practice that come together to create the complex and shifting object that is the historic environment, argues Tom Yarrow in a less familiar take on the practice recently explored in IHBC’s membership journal, Context.
Tom Yarrow replies to a range of queries as follows:
Traditionally ethnography was associated with the study of ‘tribal’ people, particularly influenced by the work of Bronislaw Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands at the beginning of the 20th century. His approach relied heavily on the idea of ‘participant observation’, that is, learning about social practice through taking part in those practices; doing things with people and trying to understand what it is they think they are up to.
More recently the approach has been used to understand a much broader range of social phenomena…
I use ethnographic approaches to try to understand the various ways in which conservation figures in people’s everyday lives, whether as an ideology, a personal conviction, a form of professional practice or even, for some, as a problem to be resisted…
… I have employed this general approach to explore conservation as a social arena – a nexus of people, ideas, interests and forms of professional practice. My research is oriented by the overarching question of how this all comes together to create the complex and shifting object that is ‘the historic environment’. I am interested in the everyday practice of what this involves, whether for conservation professionals of various kinds, or for others who may share or dispute the value of these approaches. I am particularly interested in the way that some broadly shared principles are made sense of in quite different ways.
For instance, even within a national heritage agency such as Historic Environment Scotland, a focus of some of my research, shared policies and principles intersect with some distinctive professional commitments and traditions of practice. A stone mason and an archaeologist will both be interested in authenticity, but whereas the former might stress how this is grounded by adherence to the principles and traditions of masonry, the latter might give more emphasis to the importance of material continuity. This is just one of many instances in which a shared focus on continuity leads to some very different assessments of what this practically implies…
More generally I aim to highlight the sometimes overlapping, often divergent, assumptions…
This approach builds on a much broader literature that sees heritage as a process, rather than an object… My own work (often in collaboration with others) is partly distinctive in its attention to the social practices of conservation professionals and the role they variously play in making that object.
… My work is more about conservation than for it, which is to say that my primary aim is to try to explain this as a social practice, rather than to answer the more applied question of how it could be done ‘better’…
…Some of the conservation professionals I have worked with tell me they find my descriptions useful: helping them to reflect on the assumptions that are embedded in their daily interactions to the point where they become too familiar to recognise; highlighting the specific ways in which their own approaches may diverge with others, for instance in giving different attention to materials, aesthetics or traditions of practice as sources of value; helping them to see where others were coming from, and how and why they disagreed; highlighting how very practical interventions involve values and choices, even where these sometimes become invisible through routine or professional habit. I am not an expert in this field but I hope that through my descriptions I can hold up a kind of mirror in which people can see their work in a slightly different light.
… I think it is important to highlight how technological considerations necessarily relate to social ones, insofar as technologies are used (or not) by people… The following conclusions are partly informed by that broader discussion, as well as my own research in this area.
One finding is that energy use is not the same as energy efficiency… Put simply, people use and inhabit old buildings in different ways to new ones, and may tolerate different levels of ‘comfort’…
… homeowners, builders and architects come from different backgrounds, have different values, and often appreciate historic buildings in ways that may, or may not, coincide with how conservation professionals value these buildings. It is important for heritage professionals to understand their understandings of authenticity, character and environmental responsibility, as much as there is a need for expert-led advice and education.
… many occupants express a very genuine ethical desire to ‘do what is right’. However, there are many ‘single-issue messages’ and… Rather than assume energy as a ‘problem’ for historic buildings or vice versa… it might be more accurate to think of these as different regulatory and value systems that collide…
For references and full text see the Context Archive
