Introduction

How are objects of conservation made and manifested through the work of heritage professionals? This chapter introduces the paradoxes that emerge from the ostensibly simple aim of keeping things as they are. As context to the ethnographic chapters in the book, it describes the linked but distinctive terms in which conservation objects are conceptualised in modern and postmodern approaches to heritage. We explore ethnographically how both these orientations are implicated in contemporary heritage practice. In order to do so, we develop a novel conceptual approach that moves beyond analytic subject-object binaries to foreground the situated negotiations through which conservation objects are made to matter.