This paper explores how authenticity is produced through different forms of expertise and skill, as they are negotiated and aligned in the daily practices of conservation. Focusing on the traditional craft practices of stonemasons, we trace out their relations to the broader nexus of experts responsible for conserving Glasgow Cathedral. We show that authenticity is a distributed property of distinct forms of expert practice, as they intersect with one another, and, crucially, with the material conditions of specific heritage sites. It is argued that, in the context of conservation practice, authenticity is neither a subjective, discursive construction, nor a latent property of historic monuments waiting to be preserved. Rather it is a property that emerges through specific interactions between people and things.

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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.

A number of recent theories have argued that archaeological objects and data reflect the social and subjective interpretation of the archaeologists excavating them. These interpretative or post-processual approaches have importantly called into question the empirical assumption that the world exists as an object prior to interpretations that archaeologists give it. However this perspective fails to look at the ways in which the social and subjective factors are themselves constructed through fieldwork. In contrast to an approach that seeks to investigate how social and subjective factors 'determine' different kinds of archaeological objects, this article therefore examines the particular fieldwork practices and conventions through which an opposition between subjectivity and objectivity is itself created.

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.