State of the Arts

An Ethnography of German Theatre and Migration
Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-1-009-32113-6
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 261 Seiten, Format (B × H): 149 mm x 225 mm, Gewicht: 382 g

Reihe: Theatre and Performance Theory

This is a bold and wide-ranging account of the unique German public theatre system through the prism of a migrant artistic institution in the western post-industrial Ruhr region. State of the Arts analyses how artistic traditions have responded to social change, racism, and cosmopolitan anxieties and recounts how critical contemporary cultural production positions itself in relation to the tumultuous history of German state patronage, difficult heritage, and self-cultivation through the arts. Jonas Tinius' fieldwork with professional actors, directors, cultural policy makers, and activists unravels how they constitute theatre as a site for extra-ordinary ethical conduct and how they grapple with the pervasive German cultural tradition of Bildung, or self-cultivation through the arts. Tinius shows how anthropological methods provide a way to understand the entanglement of cultural policy, institution-building, and subject-formation. An ambitious and interdisciplinary study, the work demonstrates the crucial role of artistic intellectuals in society.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Tinius, Jonas

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Theaterwissenschaft

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction. Scaling Traditions: An Anthropology of Theatre, Migration, and State; 1. Activism, Aesthetic Education, and the Making of Modern German Theatre; 2. A Public Migrant Theatre: Inventing Institutional Traditions and the Becoming of an Artistic Organisation; 3. Rehearsal as Method: Ethnographies of Conduct and Character; 4. Repertoire Politics: Transnational Theatre and Travel as Diplomacy; 5. Places Along the Ruhr: Situated Knowledge and Refugee Theatre; Conclusion. Proposals for an Ethnography of Theatre and Performance.

Über Autor(innen)

Tinius, Jonas
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).