Photo: John Fahy
Dr Jonas Tinius
Department of European Ethnology Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Unter den Linden 6 10099 Berlin Germany jonas.tinius (at) hu-berlin.de + 49 (0) 30 70885 #Department Website #Academia.edu |
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current
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On 1 June 2016, I began as a post-doctoral research fellow (wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) in the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMaH) at the Institute of European Ethnology of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. CARMaH is directed by the Alexander von Humboldt Professor Sharon MacDonald. It is funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Humboldt University Berlin, the Museum of Natural History Berlin and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Our main research project Making Differences in Berlin: Transforming Museums and Heritage in the 21st Century focuses in particular upon the changing role and potentials of museums and heritage in the production of difference and diversity, with special emphasis on how these development take place in Berlin.
Against the backdrop of Berlin's major museum developments, most notably the Humboldt Forum, my own research project investigates how contemporary artists and contemporary art institutions negotiate (the representation of) alterity and difference in Berlin. The focus is not on a specific kind of alterity or difference, but deliberately widens their meaning to encompass ethnic, cultural, national, temporal, or ontological alterity, or as described by the specific circumstance. ‘Alterity’ and ‘difference’, thus, are always to be thought of as analytic or ethnographic starting points, rather than normative assertions about their significance and, as such, retain their inverted commas even when not continuously articulated. Since the scope of this project therefore includes challenges and alternatives to these notions and the anthropological significance of such challenges, it is also a project that asks about transformations of what we understand by ‘the ethnographic’, incl. ethnographic objects (and boundaries to art), research, or theories. The aim of this project is to study artists, artistic practices, and artistic institutions as public theorisers and ‘unfamiliar experts’ of core anthropological notions (such as alterity and difference) that may elucidate academic practice and theorising about them. This study therefore continues and draws on draws on research done in critical migration studies on subjects such as ‘the transnational’, critical heritage and museum studies on an expanded notion of the museum, and post-migrant theatre studies on notions such as ‘migrant’ or ‘exile’ - and it seeks to speaks back to these fields, among others. Ideally, the research outcomes of this project may feed back into practices and theorising within anthropology, museum and heritage studies, art history, and art practice. In the sense of ‘contemporary’ espoused by Paul Rabinow and others, I see an anthropology of contemporary art also as an investigation into the very idea of ‘the contemporary’: i.e. an experimentation with what it means to study the present, but also what present-day anthropological research can and should look like. This work expands in a number of ways from my doctoral research on ethnographic approaches to contemporary theatre and performance. This previous research explored post-national and post-migrant perspectives on theatre, the ethics of refugee theatre, rehearsal practices in public theatre institutions, and challenges to post-Fordist labour conditions and forms of self- organisation in the free performing arts scene. I am currently preparing a book manuscript based on this research, tentatively entitled State of the Arts; Anthropology, Self-Cultivation, and German Public Theatre. |
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teaching
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In Cambridge, I taught a four lecture series on art, images, and new media (Paper SAN11: 'The Anthropology of Media and Visual Culture) and conducted small group teaching for students on values, ethics, and morality (Advanced Social Anthropology I: Thought, Belief and Ethics) at the Division of Social Anthropology. I also supervised two undergraduate theses on contemporary political theatre and ballet institutions in Cuba, one of which is still ongoing. In 2015 and 2016, I taught methods seminars on 'Art as Research/Research as Art' for the AHRC Doctoral Training Session at the School of Arts and Humanities for 1st and 2nd year PhD students. On a number of different occasions, I have been conducting laboratories and workshops on ethnographic research methods and forms of collaboration between anthropologists and other 'experts', such as artists and community workers.
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