Cycle de conférences en anthropologie : Bastard theatre. Anthropology, Becoming, and Nation-Building

Cycle de conférences en Anthropologie / Lectures in Anthropology

Titre : Bastard theatre. Anthropology, Becoming, and Nation-Building by Jonas Tinius (Saarland University)

Abstract :

Theatre critic and playwright Eric Bentley once formulated a “minimal definition” of theatre: “A impersonates B while C looks on” (The Life of Drama, 1964). Few art forms constitute, even at their simplest, such a theatrical sociality that enacts and simultaneously reflects on the constitution of social relations. In this talk, I draw on a decade of engagement with the unique German public theatre tradition through the prism of a migrant artistic institution in the western post-industrial Ruhr region. I will present aspects of my book State of the Arts, in which I analyse how the formalisation of the German cultural tradition of Bildung (self-formation through artistic education and practice) as a governmental principle of the modern Prussian state has institutionalised public theatres as sites for moral and state-formation and thus helped co-constitute modern German governmentality. I discuss how this idiosyncratic institutionalised governmental tradition has facilitated the development of what I call “extra-ordinary” forms of conduct through which a professional political, social, and aesthetic subjectivity emerges. The theatre at the heart of my fieldwork understood itself as a place for and of the bastardo—those without father-land and mother-tongue—and as such exemplified both a culmination of the German logic of state patronage and its starkest rebuttal in a post-migrant logic of transnational becoming.

Bio :

Jonas Tinius is a sociocultural anthropologist, and currently scientific coordinator and post-doctoral researcher in cultural anthropology in the European Research Council project Minor Universality: Narrative World Productions after Western Universalism based at Saarland University. He studied Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge (2009-2012), before completing a PhD in the Department of Social Anthropology (2016). Subsequently, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, funded by Sharon Macdonald's Alexander von Humboldt Professorship. He is an associate member of CARMAH and teaches at the Institute of European Ethnology of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He was founding co-convenor of the Mellon-Newton Interdisciplinary Performance Network at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) of the University of Cambridge and co-founded the Network for Anthropology and the Arts of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) with Roger Sansi. His publications include Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial (with Margareta von Oswald, 2020), Der fremde Blick. Roberto Ciulli und das Theater an der Ruhr (two volumes, with Alexander Wewerka, 2020), and Minor Universality. Rethinking Humanity After Western Universalism (with Markus Messling, 2023). More info: www.jonastinius.com