One way to say what I do
I am a socio-cultural anthropologist, which means I spend longer-periods of time accompanying what people do, instead of attending primarily to what they say they do. A great interest of mine has been what we call "art": cultural production to which we socially ascribe or are taught to regard as, particular values, of beauty, of reflexivity, of goodness, of for-its-own sakeness.
Being trained through experiences of being with people, what anthropologists call fieldwork or participant observation, I regard cultural production as a form through which we come together, articulate how we want to be together - that is, as ways of thinking about, conceiving, prefiguring, and even enacting the society people want and fighting against ones they don't want. For that reason, I was drawn since my childhood to theatre, perhaps one of the most “social” of art forms, which is at its core dependent on the embodiment of others in front of yet more others. (A impersonates B while C looks on, in the words of Eric Bentley). Spending day in day out thinking about how to become others, actors develop a deep anthropological sensitivity - a Haltung in German - which acts as a prism for society at large. Theatre is a material, visual, ethical field in which subjectivity and sociality is rehearsed and prefiguratively enacted.
When people do the same things repeatedly over longer periods of time, they tend to start thinking about whether what they do is good or bad, worth it or not worth it, and as a consequence they may form more or less regularised rituals, habits, sometimes even ideologies and organisations that protect these spaces of action and reasoning. In the most stable and all-encompassing ways, this articulates in the form of traditions of practice and institutions. These are the social forms of cultural production that I find most intriguing, since they are extra-ordinary spaces, set-apart from the usual everyday but also creating their own ordinariness. They reveal as much about the practice within these institutions as they do about the society in which they are situated and to which they position themselves. I regard, therefore, institutions and traditions as microcosms of societal transformations but also of calcification, often as pockets of thought and ethics, through which we can understand the attachment to values and their contention at the same time.
Over time, I have shifted from working with public theatres - one of the most pertinent "ethico-aesthetic" traditions in Germany - to studying heritage politics, especially through the lens of curators and the exhibitions they create. I regard exhibitions as three-dimensional narratives that both help to understand the world as much as they create (perceptions, representations, judgements, ideas about) this world. Some of the most hotly contested heritage debates in the last two decades in Germany, France, Italy, and the UK have been waged over the issue of what Sharon Macdonald has called "difficult heritage", that is, pasts that do not sit comfortably with the present. I ask in my work how curators - those that create narratives about these pasts in the institutions that carry public memory (museums) - have negotiated the way we tell such stories. In my teaching and research, I follow the many ways in which curators - caretakers, storytellers, public theorisers, social DJs - craft stories about representation, identity, nation, and trouble such stories, too. Curators operate in a visual realm in which exhibitions are a form of narration that can intervene, confirm, contest, archive, order the world in which we live.
Another way to say what I do
Jonas Tinius studied British and American Studies as well as Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Münster (Germany) before completing the Archaeology and Anthropology Tripos with a focus on Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge (2012). He continued to conduct doctoral fieldwork on a migrant-situated public theatre in the postindustrial Ruhr region and received his PhD (2016) for a study entitled State of the Arts. An Anthropology of German Theatre and Political Self-Cultivation (published with Cambridge University Press in 2023). At King’s College and the Division of Social Anthropology, he was supervised by Prof James Laidlaw and received the William Wyse Scholarship. During his time in Cambridge, together with Clare Foster, he was founding co-convenor of the Mellon-Newton-funded Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network at the Centre for Research on the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH), and a research fellow at the theatre studies collection on Schloss Wahn, Institute of Theatre and Media, University of Cologne (Germany) under the directorship of Prof Peter W. Marx.
From 2016-2020, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) in the Institute of European Ethnology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, funded by Sharon Macdonald’s Alexander von Humboldt Professorship (2016-2020). As part of his research, he collaborated with artists and curators of art spaces and galleries in Berlin (among them SAVVY Contemporary, the ifa-gallery and the Berlin-Wedding district gallery) to study and think about curatorial practices as forms of troubling of national, universal, and hegemonic narratives, especially against the backdrop of major museum transformations such as the Humboldt Forum in the Berlin City Castle. From 2017-2020, he acted as founding convenor of the Anthropology and the Arts Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) together with Prof Roger Sansi (Barcelona). From 2017-2021, he was founding coordinator with Dr Ruba Totah of the research section and co-founder of the PostHeimat Network on migrant theatre funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes and founding member of the theatre and research collective RUHRORTER.
Since 2020, he is scientific coordinator and postdoctoral researcher in cultural anthropology of the ERC project Minor Universality. Narrative World Productions After Western Universality (PI: Prof Markus Messling) at Saarland University, as part of which he co-curated with Franck Hofmann a residency, research, and exhibition programme entitledThe Pregnant Oyster - Doubts on Universalism (June-July 2022). This residency and exhibition project was conceived by Markus Messling and Franck Hofmann as part of the ERC project and realised in collaboration with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin and the Minor Universality Research Team. Overall, the multilingual research project investigates forms of world-making narratives that emerge out of and after the critique of the violent articulations of Western Universality. The project goes beyond narratives that resort to relativistic or identitarian claims, and focuses instead on concrete, situated narratives of humanity, world, justice, freedom that articulate themselves in "minor" forms of literature, architecture, curating, publishing and so on. The project publishes in Markus Messling's open-access book series Beyond Universalism / Partager l'universel and maintains a Youtube series of conversations with scholars, thinkers, and writers, which will also be published in the series in French and English. During the winter quarter of 2023, he was visiting fellow at the Department of World Arts and Cultures / Dance of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA, see here).
He remains associate member of CARMAH at the Institute of European Ethnology of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he completes a habilitation and teaches. His habilitation analyses minor forms of curation against the backdrop of the European universal museum. You can read more about it here.
He is author of State of the Arts. An Ethnography of German Theatre and Migration (Cambridge University Press, 2023, and editor of several collections, among them the open-access volume Minor Universality. Rethinking Humanity After Western Universalism (with Markus Messling, 2023, Boston: de Gruyter), the open-access student workbook Awkward Archives. Ethnographic Drafts for a Modular Curriculum (with Margareta von Oswald, Archive, 2022). Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and Heritage (with Margareta von Oswald, Leuven University Press, 2020), the two-volume reference book Der Fremde Blick. Roberto Ciulli und das Theater an der Ruhr (2020, with Alexander Wewerka, Alexander Verlag), the edited volume Otherwise. Rethinking Museums and Heritage (2018, with Sharon Macdonald et al), the special issue Micro-utopias (with Ruy Blanes, Maïté Maskens, and Alex Flynn, 2016), and the book Anthropology, Theatre, and Development (with Alex Flynn, 2015, Palgrave).
I am a socio-cultural anthropologist, which means I spend longer-periods of time accompanying what people do, instead of attending primarily to what they say they do. A great interest of mine has been what we call "art": cultural production to which we socially ascribe or are taught to regard as, particular values, of beauty, of reflexivity, of goodness, of for-its-own sakeness.
Being trained through experiences of being with people, what anthropologists call fieldwork or participant observation, I regard cultural production as a form through which we come together, articulate how we want to be together - that is, as ways of thinking about, conceiving, prefiguring, and even enacting the society people want and fighting against ones they don't want. For that reason, I was drawn since my childhood to theatre, perhaps one of the most “social” of art forms, which is at its core dependent on the embodiment of others in front of yet more others. (A impersonates B while C looks on, in the words of Eric Bentley). Spending day in day out thinking about how to become others, actors develop a deep anthropological sensitivity - a Haltung in German - which acts as a prism for society at large. Theatre is a material, visual, ethical field in which subjectivity and sociality is rehearsed and prefiguratively enacted.
When people do the same things repeatedly over longer periods of time, they tend to start thinking about whether what they do is good or bad, worth it or not worth it, and as a consequence they may form more or less regularised rituals, habits, sometimes even ideologies and organisations that protect these spaces of action and reasoning. In the most stable and all-encompassing ways, this articulates in the form of traditions of practice and institutions. These are the social forms of cultural production that I find most intriguing, since they are extra-ordinary spaces, set-apart from the usual everyday but also creating their own ordinariness. They reveal as much about the practice within these institutions as they do about the society in which they are situated and to which they position themselves. I regard, therefore, institutions and traditions as microcosms of societal transformations but also of calcification, often as pockets of thought and ethics, through which we can understand the attachment to values and their contention at the same time.
Over time, I have shifted from working with public theatres - one of the most pertinent "ethico-aesthetic" traditions in Germany - to studying heritage politics, especially through the lens of curators and the exhibitions they create. I regard exhibitions as three-dimensional narratives that both help to understand the world as much as they create (perceptions, representations, judgements, ideas about) this world. Some of the most hotly contested heritage debates in the last two decades in Germany, France, Italy, and the UK have been waged over the issue of what Sharon Macdonald has called "difficult heritage", that is, pasts that do not sit comfortably with the present. I ask in my work how curators - those that create narratives about these pasts in the institutions that carry public memory (museums) - have negotiated the way we tell such stories. In my teaching and research, I follow the many ways in which curators - caretakers, storytellers, public theorisers, social DJs - craft stories about representation, identity, nation, and trouble such stories, too. Curators operate in a visual realm in which exhibitions are a form of narration that can intervene, confirm, contest, archive, order the world in which we live.
Another way to say what I do
Jonas Tinius studied British and American Studies as well as Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Münster (Germany) before completing the Archaeology and Anthropology Tripos with a focus on Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge (2012). He continued to conduct doctoral fieldwork on a migrant-situated public theatre in the postindustrial Ruhr region and received his PhD (2016) for a study entitled State of the Arts. An Anthropology of German Theatre and Political Self-Cultivation (published with Cambridge University Press in 2023). At King’s College and the Division of Social Anthropology, he was supervised by Prof James Laidlaw and received the William Wyse Scholarship. During his time in Cambridge, together with Clare Foster, he was founding co-convenor of the Mellon-Newton-funded Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network at the Centre for Research on the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH), and a research fellow at the theatre studies collection on Schloss Wahn, Institute of Theatre and Media, University of Cologne (Germany) under the directorship of Prof Peter W. Marx.
From 2016-2020, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) in the Institute of European Ethnology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, funded by Sharon Macdonald’s Alexander von Humboldt Professorship (2016-2020). As part of his research, he collaborated with artists and curators of art spaces and galleries in Berlin (among them SAVVY Contemporary, the ifa-gallery and the Berlin-Wedding district gallery) to study and think about curatorial practices as forms of troubling of national, universal, and hegemonic narratives, especially against the backdrop of major museum transformations such as the Humboldt Forum in the Berlin City Castle. From 2017-2020, he acted as founding convenor of the Anthropology and the Arts Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) together with Prof Roger Sansi (Barcelona). From 2017-2021, he was founding coordinator with Dr Ruba Totah of the research section and co-founder of the PostHeimat Network on migrant theatre funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes and founding member of the theatre and research collective RUHRORTER.
Since 2020, he is scientific coordinator and postdoctoral researcher in cultural anthropology of the ERC project Minor Universality. Narrative World Productions After Western Universality (PI: Prof Markus Messling) at Saarland University, as part of which he co-curated with Franck Hofmann a residency, research, and exhibition programme entitledThe Pregnant Oyster - Doubts on Universalism (June-July 2022). This residency and exhibition project was conceived by Markus Messling and Franck Hofmann as part of the ERC project and realised in collaboration with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin and the Minor Universality Research Team. Overall, the multilingual research project investigates forms of world-making narratives that emerge out of and after the critique of the violent articulations of Western Universality. The project goes beyond narratives that resort to relativistic or identitarian claims, and focuses instead on concrete, situated narratives of humanity, world, justice, freedom that articulate themselves in "minor" forms of literature, architecture, curating, publishing and so on. The project publishes in Markus Messling's open-access book series Beyond Universalism / Partager l'universel and maintains a Youtube series of conversations with scholars, thinkers, and writers, which will also be published in the series in French and English. During the winter quarter of 2023, he was visiting fellow at the Department of World Arts and Cultures / Dance of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA, see here).
He remains associate member of CARMAH at the Institute of European Ethnology of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he completes a habilitation and teaches. His habilitation analyses minor forms of curation against the backdrop of the European universal museum. You can read more about it here.
He is author of State of the Arts. An Ethnography of German Theatre and Migration (Cambridge University Press, 2023, and editor of several collections, among them the open-access volume Minor Universality. Rethinking Humanity After Western Universalism (with Markus Messling, 2023, Boston: de Gruyter), the open-access student workbook Awkward Archives. Ethnographic Drafts for a Modular Curriculum (with Margareta von Oswald, Archive, 2022). Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and Heritage (with Margareta von Oswald, Leuven University Press, 2020), the two-volume reference book Der Fremde Blick. Roberto Ciulli und das Theater an der Ruhr (2020, with Alexander Wewerka, Alexander Verlag), the edited volume Otherwise. Rethinking Museums and Heritage (2018, with Sharon Macdonald et al), the special issue Micro-utopias (with Ruy Blanes, Maïté Maskens, and Alex Flynn, 2016), and the book Anthropology, Theatre, and Development (with Alex Flynn, 2015, Palgrave).