ABSTRACT
The conclusion summarises the key findings of the book and highlights the conceptual implications for debates about heritage conservation and beyond. Moving beyond framings of heritage as either object or action, we draw together the various dialectal relationships between these. While conservation creates objects out of action, actions are simultaneously made out of objects. Keeping things “in being” involves forms of active passivity that we distinguish from the incidentally passive sense of simply “letting things be”. We argue that different kinds of expertise, skilled practice and bureaucracy produce different logics – of time, authenticity, significance – which are integral to ideas of continuity and change. This creates a politics of practice in which difference is negotiated and aligned in provisional, often ultimately unresolved ways. Everyday practices of repair connect to ethical and affective sensibilities of care, which complicate dualistic distinctions between heritage professionals and others. Ultimately, we argue that conservation involves an active and recursive relationship between the past, present and future.
