On 1 June 2016, I began as a post-doctoral research fellow 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 Professor Sharon MacDonald and 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.
Against the backdrop of Berlin's major museum developments, most notably the Humboldt Forum, and the questions about representation, difficult heritage, and provenance that it raises, my own post-doctoral research project investigates how contemporary artists and contemporary art institutions negotiate (the representation of) alterity and difference in Berlin. The focus here is not on a specific kind of alterity or difference, but deliberately widens these concepts' meaning to encompass ethnic, cultural, national, temporal, gender\queer, or ontological alterity. ‘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. This project therefore does not 'search for' articulations of difference, but assumes that alterity and difference are themselves contentious, renegotiated, and constructed (not unlike their supposed counterparts: identity, the self, and sameness). Since the scope of this project therefore includes challenges and alternatives to central anthropological notions, it is also an inquiry into the nature of 'the anthropological' or 'the ethnographic' grasp of alterity. By inquiring how contemporary artists and institutions negotiate (the representation of) alterity and difference, this project therefore engages in what I will refer to as 'ethnographic' or 'alternative' theorising, which raises fundamental questions about what we understand by 'expertise' or 'the ethnographic', including the boundaries between ethnographic and artistic objects, practices, and 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’. 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.
Against the backdrop of Berlin's major museum developments, most notably the Humboldt Forum, and the questions about representation, difficult heritage, and provenance that it raises, my own post-doctoral research project investigates how contemporary artists and contemporary art institutions negotiate (the representation of) alterity and difference in Berlin. The focus here is not on a specific kind of alterity or difference, but deliberately widens these concepts' meaning to encompass ethnic, cultural, national, temporal, gender\queer, or ontological alterity. ‘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. This project therefore does not 'search for' articulations of difference, but assumes that alterity and difference are themselves contentious, renegotiated, and constructed (not unlike their supposed counterparts: identity, the self, and sameness). Since the scope of this project therefore includes challenges and alternatives to central anthropological notions, it is also an inquiry into the nature of 'the anthropological' or 'the ethnographic' grasp of alterity. By inquiring how contemporary artists and institutions negotiate (the representation of) alterity and difference, this project therefore engages in what I will refer to as 'ethnographic' or 'alternative' theorising, which raises fundamental questions about what we understand by 'expertise' or 'the ethnographic', including the boundaries between ethnographic and artistic objects, practices, and 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’. 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.
