ABSTRACT
What kind of person is a heritage professional? Building on recent work in the anthropology of ethics and interdisciplinary perspectives on maintenance and repair, this chapter explores how HS employees articulate the personal and professional virtues that are central to their work. The linked ideas of humility, pragmatism and patience form part of a shared “conservation approach”, elaborated in specific ways by those from different professional backgrounds. These differences of orientation are discussed in relation to ideas of “minimal intervention” and tensions between restorative and more purely conservationist approaches. The chapter foregrounds how these shared ideals constitute the ethical cultivation of a form of active passivity. These emerge as the counterpart to commitments to figure the present with respect to the past.
