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All Outputs (41)

Ancient Identities in Britain: Exploring heritage in the making (2025)
Book
Hingley, R., Sharpe, K., & Yarrow, T. (in press). Ancient Identities in Britain: Exploring heritage in the making. UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800089426

How are ideas about Roman and Iron Age pasts relevant to people in contemporary Britain? And how do the interests and ideologies of our own society shape the way we present, curate and understand these histories? This book is the first detailed study... Read More about Ancient Identities in Britain: Exploring heritage in the making.

Ethnographies of interest: between enthusiasm and the instrumental (2024)
Journal Article
Candea, M., Heywood, P., Reed, A., & Yarrow, T. (in press). Ethnographies of interest: between enthusiasm and the instrumental. Current Anthropology,

Anthropologists and social theorists have written extensively about the ways in which economic and political interests lead people to act in social life. Less scholarly attention has been paid, however, to what people find ‘interesting’, in the sense... Read More about Ethnographies of interest: between enthusiasm and the instrumental.

Emergent Explanation (2023)
Book Chapter
Matt, C., & Thomas, Y. (2023). Emergent Explanation. In P. Heywood, & M. Candea (Eds.), Beyond Description: Anthropologies of Explanation (81-103). Cornell University Press

The Object of Conservation: an ethnography of heritage practice (2022)
Book
Jones, S., & Yarrow, T. (2022). The Object of Conservation: an ethnography of heritage practice. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315622385

The Object of Conservation examines how historic buildings, monuments and artefacts are cared for as valued embodiments of the past. It tells the fascinating story of the working lives of those involved in conservation through an ethnographic account... Read More about The Object of Conservation: an ethnography of heritage practice.

Retaining character: heritage conservation and the logic of continuity (2018)
Journal Article
Yarrow, T. (2018). Retaining character: heritage conservation and the logic of continuity. Social Anthropology, 26(3), 330-344. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12532

In anthropology and beyond, discussions of character have more often focused on this as a quality of human subjects rather than of the material world. How is character figured as a quality of historic buildings, monuments and places? I situate this q... Read More about Retaining character: heritage conservation and the logic of continuity.

How Conservation Matters: ethnographic explorations of historic building renovation (2018)
Journal Article
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

This article focuses on ideas of historic conservation, examining the multiple ways in which these are made to matter through practices of renovation. Bypassing normatively inflected literatures on heritage, the author adopts a more ‘agnostic’ ethnog... Read More about How Conservation Matters: ethnographic explorations of historic building renovation.

Remains of the Future: rethinking space and time of ruination through the Volta Resettlement Project, Ghana (2017)
Journal Article
Yarrow, T. (2017). Remains of the Future: rethinking space and time of ruination through the Volta Resettlement Project, Ghana. Cultural Anthropology, 32(4), 566-591. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.4.06

Walking around the township of New Senchi, Ghana, the ghost of the original plan is still faintly discernible in linear rows of crumbling, single-story houses.1 Constructed to resettle people displaced by a large hydroelectric power scheme in the 196... Read More about Remains of the Future: rethinking space and time of ruination through the Volta Resettlement Project, Ghana.

Where Knowledge Meets: heritage expertise at the intersection of people, perspective, and place (2017)
Journal Article
Yarrow, T. (2017). Where Knowledge Meets: heritage expertise at the intersection of people, perspective, and place. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 23(S1), 95-109. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12596

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 b... Read More about Where Knowledge Meets: heritage expertise at the intersection of people, perspective, and place.

Introduction: towards an ethnography of meeting (2017)
Journal Article
Brown, H., Reed, A., & Yarrow, T. (2017). Introduction: towards an ethnography of meeting. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 23(S1), 10-26. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12591

This introductory essay describes a novel approach to meetings in relation to broader literatures within and beyond anthropology. We suggest that notwithstanding many accounts in which meetings figure, little attention has been given to the mundane f... Read More about Introduction: towards an ethnography of meeting.

Negotiating Heritage and Energy Conservation: an ethnography of domestic renovation (2016)
Journal Article
Yarrow, T. (2016). Negotiating Heritage and Energy Conservation: an ethnography of domestic renovation. The Historic Environment: Policy & Practice, 7(4), 340-351. https://doi.org/10.1080/17567505.2016.1253149

What is the relationship between energy efficiency and old buildings? While a large body of research exists on the buildings science and technology of retro-fit, relatively little attention has focused on the social practices and assumptions that sha... Read More about Negotiating Heritage and Energy Conservation: an ethnography of domestic renovation.

Science, value and material decay in the conservation of historic environments (2016)
Journal Article
Douglas-Jones, R., Hughes, J., Jones, S., & Yarrow, T. (2016). Science, value and material decay in the conservation of historic environments. Journal of Cultural Heritage, 21, 823-833. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.culher.2016.03.007

The historic environment undergoes cycles of material deterioration, and these processes have a powerful impact on the meanings and values associated with it. In particular, decay informs the experience of authenticity, as a tangible mark of age and... Read More about Science, value and material decay in the conservation of historic environments.

Growing Old Gracefully? (2015)
Other
Douglas-Jones, R., Hughes, J., Jones, S., & Yarrow, T. (2015). Growing Old Gracefully?

Introduction: reconsidering detachment (2015)
Book Chapter
Candea, C., Cook, J., Trundle, C., & Yarrow, T. (2015). Introduction: reconsidering detachment. In C. Candea, J. Cook, C. Trundle, & T. Yarrow (Eds.), Detachment: essays on the limits of relational thinking (1-34). Manchester University Press

This volume urges a reconsideration of the productive potential of disconnection, distance and detachment, as ethical, methodological and philosophical commitments. In so doing, we write against the grain of a strong tendency in contemporary social t... Read More about Introduction: reconsidering detachment.

Detachment: essays on the limits of relational thinking (2015)
Book
Yarrow, T., Candea, M., Trundle, C., & Cook, J. (Eds.). (2015). Detachment: essays on the limits of relational thinking. Manchester University Press

This interdisciplinary volume questions one of the most fundamental tenets of social theory by focusing on detachment, an important but neglected aspect of social life. Going against the grain of recent theoretical celebrations of ‘engagement’, this... Read More about Detachment: essays on the limits of relational thinking.

Archaeology, Anthropology and the Stuff of Time (2015)
Journal Article
Yarrow, T. (2015). Archaeology, Anthropology and the Stuff of Time. Archaeological Dialogues, 22(1), 31-36. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1380203815000070

Lucas's discussion of contemporaneity makes an important contribution to archaeological understandings of chronology and dating and to broader debates about temporality. Extending his earlier work on time (Buchli and Lucas 2001; Lucas 2001; 2005), Lu... Read More about Archaeology, Anthropology and the Stuff of Time.