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"Thomas Yarrow"
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Architects
What is creativity? What is the relationship between work life and personal life? How is it possible to live truthfully in a world of contradiction and compromise? These deep and deeply personal questions spring to the fore in Thomas Yarrow's vivid exploration of the life of architects. Yarrow takes us inside the world of architects, showing us the anxiety, exhilaration, hope, idealism, friendship, conflict, and the personal commitments that feed these acts of creativity. Architects rethinks \"creativity,\" demonstrating how it happens in everyday practice. It highlights how the pursuit of good architecture, relates to the pursuit of a good life in intimate and individually specific ways. And it reveals the surprising and routine social negotiations through which designs and buildings are actually made.
eBook
REMAINS OF THE FUTURE
Focusing on a planned scheme of resettlement undertaken in Ghana in the wake of independence in 1957, this essay explores how midcentury plans for modernization exist in disjunctive relation to unrealized material infrastructures. Drawing on ethnographic research in resettlement townships, the account describes the contemporary afterlives of the plan, tracing how its promised futures shadow present understandings of contemporary and future life. The essay examines the distinctive form that ruination takes not as once-functional, now-decaying infrastructure, but as the ongoing effects of an unrealized plan. Here, experiences of ruination are associated with a set of spatial and temporal dynamics that emerge as the felt negation of linear time and Cartesian space. Insofar as the recent scholarly turn to ruins assumes the existence of modernization, it in fact eclipses what is conceptually at stake in situations where modernization exists only as a promise.
Journal Article
Architects
What is creativity? What is the relationship between work life and personal life? How is it possible to live truthfully in a world of contradiction and compromise? These deep and deeply personal questions spring to the fore in Thomas Yarrow's vivid exploration of the life of architects. Yarrow takes us inside the world of architects, showing us the anxiety, exhilaration, hope, idealism, friendship, conflict, and the personal commitments that feed these acts of creativity.
Architectsrethinks \"creativity,\" demonstrating how it happens in everyday practice. It highlights how the pursuit of good architecture, relates to the pursuit of a good life in intimate and individually specific ways. And it reveals the surprising and routine social negotiations through which designs and buildings are actually made.
eBook
Archaeology and anthropology
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 resulted in a narrowing of horizons within both disciplines and explore the grounds upon which these might be opened up. The papers draw on a range of theoretical perspectives and empirical case-studies, but are unified in their concern to explore the ideological, practical and methodological commitments that mark each discipline as distinct. Ultimately, the volume arrives at the startling conclusion that archaeologys apparent absence of data may actually be a positive attribute, leading to a distinctive approach from which anthropology can learn.
eBook
Where knowledge meets: heritage expertise at the intersection of people, perspective, and place
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. À partir d'une recherche ethnographique auprès de professionnels du patrimoine en Écosse, l'auteur examine les réunions en tant que dispositifs organisationnels permettant de différencier et de mettre en relation différentes formes de contexte épistémique, social et matériel. Son récit décrit la manière dont l'idéal bureaucratique de cohérence institutionnelle est atteint par des rencontres graduées entre les points de vue des différentes personnes en présence et les bâtiments qui sont l'objet de leur réunion. Ces exemples ethnographiques permettent de développer deux points qui sont liés : d'une part, l'auteur suggère que le prisme de la « réunion » complique les caractérisations relativement monolithiques de l'expertise du patrimoine, telles qu'elles transparaissent dans les très influentes critiques déconstructives de la pratique de la conservation du patrimoine. D'autre part, les récits de ces négociations faits par les professionnels du patrimoine eux-mêmes mettent en évidence des dimensions matérielles et spatiales du comportement bureaucratique qui, contrairement aux comptes-rendus principalement textuels des pratiques institutionnelles, n'ont pas reçu beaucoup d'attention ethnographique.
Journal Article
Life/History: Personal Narratives of Development Amongst NGO Workers and Activists in Ghana
Widespread assumptions about the extractive and self-serving nature of African elites have resulted in the relative neglect of questions concerning their personal ethics and morality. Using life-history interviews undertaken with a range of Ghanaian development workers, this article explores some of the different personal aspirations, ideologies and beliefs that such narratives express. The self-identification of many of those interviewed as ‘activists’ is examined in terms of the related concepts of ‘ideology’, ‘commitment’ and ‘sacrifice’. Much recent work within history and anthropology uses the ‘life-history’ as a way of introducing ‘agency’ that is purported to be missing in accounts focusing on larger social abstractions. Yet it is the very opposition between abstractions such as ‘history’ and ‘society’ and their own more ‘personal’ lives that such narratives themselves enact. The article thus interrogates the various ways in which development workers variously imagine their lives in relation to broader social and historical processes. Les idées répandues sur la nature extractive et intéressée des élites africaines ont conduit à un désintérêt relatif des questions concernant leur éthique personnelle et leur moralité. À travers des entretiens de récits de vie menés auprès d'un éventail d'agents de développement ghanéens, cet article explore les différentes aspirations personnelles, idéologies et croyances qu'expriment ces récits. Il examine l'étiquette d'activiste que se donne un grand nombre de personnes interrogées, en termes de concepts liés d'〈idéologie〉, d'〈engagement〉 et de 〈sacrifice〉. Beaucoup de travaux récents menés en histoire et en anthropologie utilisent le 〈récit de vie〉 comme moyen d'introduire l'〈action〉 qui est censée manquer dans les récits centrés sur des abstractions sociales plus larges. C'est pourtant l'opposition même entre des abstractions (comme l'〈histoire〉 et la 〈société〉) et leur propre existence plus personnelle que ces récits interprètent eux-mêmes. L'article interroge ainsi les différentes manières dont les agents de développement imaginent leur existence par rapport à des processus sociaux et historiques plus larges.
Journal Article
Introduction: towards an ethnography of meeting
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 forms through which these work. Seeking to develop a distinctively ethnographic focus to these quotidian and ubiquitous procedures, we outline an approach that moves attention beyond a narrow concern with just their meaning and content. We highlight some of the innovative strands that develop from this approach, describing how the negotiation of relationships 'within' meetings is germane to the organization of 'external' contexts, including in relation to time, space, organizational structure, and society. The essay offers a set of provocations for rethinking approaches to bureaucracy, organizational process, and ethos through the ethnographic lens of meeting. Le présent essai introductif décrit une nouvelle approche des réunions, en relation avec diverses littératures anthropologiques et autres. Malgré les nombreux récits dans lesquels apparaissent des réunions, les formes concrètes que prennent celles-ci n'ont pas reçu beaucoup d'attention. En cherchant à concentrer clairement l'examen ethnographique sur ces processus quotidiens et omniprésents, les auteurs esquissent une approche qui élargit le champ de l'attention au-delà d'une vision étroite englobant simplement leur signification et leur teneur. Ils mettent en lumière quelques pistes innovantes qui naissent de cette approche en décrivant comment la négociation de relations « dans » les réunions s'apparente à l'organisation des contextes « externes », notamment par rapport au temps, à l'espace, à la structure d'organisation et à la société. Notre essai avance une série d'incitations à repenser les approches de la bureaucratie, du processus organisationnel et de l'éthique à travers le prisme ethnographique de la réunion.
Journal Article
Archaeology, anthropology and the stuff of time
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), Lucas's central insight is that contemporaneity is not a function of a shared unit of time but of the specific relations through which objects are imbricated. The approach is likely to have profound implications for archaeological approaches to chronology. Whether or not it undermines the current preoccupation with absolute dating, it should certainly give renewed impetus to those branches of archaeology that make it possible to examine time as a matter of the specific material properties of artefacts. This is important, first, because it opens up the possibility of more nuanced empirical understanding of the very stuff of time (literally how it is materially manifest) and, second, because such empirical understandings enable conceptual refinement and extension of the categories through which time is understood. Of broader interest for non-archaeological readers are the ramifications of this discussion of contemporaneity for the ways in which time is investigated and conceptualized. Writing as an anthropologist, interested but with no expertise in archaeological dating, it is these latter considerations that I want to pursue in my comments, as these relate to contemporaneity and to the broader investigation of time.
Journal Article