Talk, Roundtable & Booklaunch 

With: Lindsey Drury, Azadeh Sharifi, Lucia Ruprecht, Jonas Tinius, and Matthias Warstat

In State of the Arts, anthropologist Jonas Tinius presents an account of the German public theatre system through the prism of an unusual institution that doesn’t fit the system, the Theater an der Ruhr, a migrant artistic institutions in the post-industrial Ruhr valley which acted as a precursor to so many post-migrant initiatives. The book 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. At the heart of the book are questions about how migration troubles nationalist narratives of state culture and Bildung, while raising critical questions about how anthropological methods can work together with professional, institutionalised, and highly reflexive fields of cultural production.

State of the Arts. An Ethnography of German Theatre and Migration. Cambridge University Press, 2023. 

(Series: Theatre and Performance Theory, edited by Tracy C. Davis)

http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2023/09/an-anthropology-of-german-theatre-by-jonas-tinius/