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"This book portrays the lives and work of 10 architects who comprise the Millar Howard Workshop architectural firm based in the Cotswolds in the United Kingdom. Focusing on their activities and their work environment, Yarrow's book is narrative driven, full of stories of anxiety, exhilaration, hope, idealism, friendship, conflict and its resolution, and the many personal commitments that propel the acts of creativity essential to good architecture and design. Taking up recent calls to "personalise the expert," the book contains insights into architectural and design practice, situating these in relation to broader themes including creativity, ethical self-formation and organisational practice. Through ethnographic descriptions of everyday working life, the book reveals the complex and contradictory imperatives that shape architectural design, and highlights the negotiations involved in efforts to resolve these. These accounts demonstrate how ideas are imaginatively produced through shifting configurations of people, materials, tools and places. Rather than deconstructing understandings of creative individuality, the account traces how this is understood and enacted through practices that are shaped by, even as they question the ideal"--

Is 'development' the answer for positive social change or a cynical western strategy for perpetuating inequality? Moving beyond an increasingly entrenched debate about the role of NGOs, this book reveals the practices and social relations through which ideas of development are concretely enacted.

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.

This article examines the contested ways in which the international development concept of "indigenous knowledge" has been used and understood by a variety of actors within Ghana including both Ghanaian and non‐Ghanaian development workers, chiefs, and members of beneficiary communities. While an ostensibly simplistic opposition between "indigenous" and "western" knowledge underscores this discourse, I argue that it has acted to frame a number of complex and geographically specific debates concerning the respective roles of chiefs and elites in the development of the country. The article also explores how the assumed incommensurability of these knowledge systems creates the need for various kinds of "mediation" and "translation" in which both chiefs and development workers foreground a "dual" identity. Against the prevailing anthropological tendency to critique the opposition between "indigenous" and "western" knowledge, I suggest that it is important to understand how these terms are used by different actors in the negotiation of identities and relations that are not reducible to the binary logic of the terms themselves.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of figures -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Abbreviations and Acronyms -- Chapter 0: Introduction -- The work of conservation -- Situating conservation -- Theorising objects in practice -- Approaching conservation ethnographically -- Note on the text -- Note -- Part I: People -- Chapter 1: Present pasts -- Re/valuing the past -- Expertise in question -- "Going deep with the paper" -- "Change fatigue" -- Ambivalent nostalgias -- Crisis and continuity -- Conclusion: shadowed by the past -- Note -- Chapter 2: Working from the past -- Humility -- Patience -- Pragmatism -- Restore or preserve? -- Conclusion: working from the past -- Note -- Chapter 3: Organising knowledge -- Site meeting -- Characterful contexts -- Office meeting -- Conclusion: the place of organisational knowledge -- Chapter 4: Subjects as objects -- Direct experience -- Professional judgement -- Aligning perspectives -- Negotiating external interests -- Detaching through practice -- Conclusion: objects in action -- Chapter 5: Life and work -- Living with history -- Vocation -- Being interested -- Ambivalent interests -- Becoming the person you are -- Conclusion: interests in conservation -- Part II: Things -- Chapter 6: (Dis)Ordered things -- Ordering things -- Grappling with profusion -- The work of stabilisation -- Follow the documents -- "Unmuddling" through fieldwork -- Conclusion: the dialectics of order and disorder -- Notes -- Chapter 7: Crafting authenticity through skilled practice -- Working out intervention -- Fabric and form -- Craft and conservation -- Skilled vision and the practice of stonemasonry -- Negotiating authenticity -- Conclusion: working with multiplicity -- Note -- Chapter 8: Material transformation and scientific conservation -- Making fast "the look of age".

Over the last two decades, anthropological studies have highlighted the problems of 'development' as a discursive regime, arguing that such initiatives are paradoxically used to consolidate inequality and perpetuate poverty. This volume constitutes a timely intervention in anthropological debates about development, moving beyond the critical stance to focus on development as a mode of engagement that, like anthropology, attempts to understand, represent and work within a complex world. By setting out to elucidate both the similarities and differences between these epistemological endeavors, th

Introduction : archaeological anthropology / Duncan Garrow & Thomas Yarrow -- Not knowing as knowledge : asymmetry between archaeology and anthropology / Thomas Yarrow -- Triangulating absence : exploring the fault-lines between archaeology and anthropology / Gavin Lucas -- Spaces that were not densely occupied -- questioning 'ephemeral' evidence / Lesley McFadyen -- On the boundary : new perspectives from ethnography of archaeology / Matt Edgeworth -- Archaeology and the anthropology of memory : takes on the recent past / Paola Filippucci -- Resolving archaeological and ethnographic tensions : a case study from south-central California / David Robinson -- Words and things : thick description in archaeology and anthropology / Chris Gosden -- Re-evaluating the long term : civilisation and temporalities / Stephan Feuchtwang and Michael Rowlands -- Relational personhood as a subject of anthropology and archaeology : comparative and complementary analyses / Chris Fowler -- No more ancient; no more human : the future past of archaeology and anthropology / Tim Ingold -- Commentary. Boundary objects and asymmetries / Marilyn Strathern -- Commentary. Walls and bridges / Julian Thomas

This book focuses on the relationship between the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology. Both disciplines arose from a common project: a desire to understand human social and cultural diversity. However, in recent years, archaeologys interest in anthropology has remained largely unreciprocated. To date, the causes and consequences of this imbalance have received little attention, particularly within anthropology. Including papers by eminent thinkers within both disciplines, this book sheds new light on issues of disciplinary identity. The contributors show how a lack of collaboration has

Since the mid‐nineteenth century, craft has been characterized by relations of engagement, resonating with broader romantic discourses that idealize craftsmen in explicit contrast to forms of alienation linked to capitalist production. In recent work on craft, the analytic lens of engagement usefully highlights the dynamic interplay of human and non‐human agencies. Our own account builds on these ideas but suggests that the conceptual privileging of engagement creates interpretative problems, precluding ethnographic attention to the role of detachment in craft. Focusing on the skilled practices of conservation stonemasons, we describe the specific constellations of ideology and practice involved in cutting and fixing stone. Through elucidating masons' own understandings of their work, we highlight their commitment to the 'disciplined' embodiment of tradition as a means of separating personal subjectivity from the stones they carve. Our analysis of the skilled practices required to work stone questions the primacy of engagement, suggesting instead that detachment and engagement are mutually implicated relational forms. This finding sheds new light on craft practice and offers a position from which to reconsider broader anthropological commitments to concepts of engagement.