Maintenance, ethnography and heritage transformations - A Heritage Transformations workshop

In the workshop we discuss Thomas Yarrow’s paper together, which is about conservation practices of historic buildings, and is based on conversations and observations with different people involved. He places this case within the heritage studies paradigm. What I think is a great angle to add to work like this is the ‘maintenance and repair studies’ approach. Sharon Mattern (2018) gives an easy-to-read introduction (with pictures!) of that body of research and introduces some interesting art as well. It is not terribly complicated: the main premise of maintenance studies is that if we give importance to things like big infrastructure, we should pay attention to the maintenance practices and the people who keep it working. If you have only time to read one of the texts, I’d suggest Yarrow’s.

These two papers can be a starting point for our discussion, which could go a few different ways depending on your interests and approaches to the texts. Some questions to keep in mind when preparing for this meeting are:

• In Yarrow’s text the focus is on conservation. What other interactions do people have with heritage that can be considered to either contribute to maintenance or transformation or both? Thinking about visitors to heritage sites, editors of scholarly editions…
• What is the relationship between heritage transformation, maintenance and decay? In practice, policy, law?
• How to include intangible heritage in this discussion?

Reading:

Yarrow, T. (2019). How conservation matters: Ethnographic explorations of historic building renovation. Journal of Material Culture, 24(1), 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183518769111

Mattern, S. (2018), “Maintenance and Care”, Places Journal, doi: 10.22269/181120.

To attend the workshop, sign up here: https://doit.medfarm.uu.se/bin/kurt3/kurt/85594

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