Art as ethical practice: anthropological observations on and beyond theatre

Abstract

This article discusses a central tenet of anthropological approaches to ethics, namely the notion of conduct. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with contemporary German theatre professionals, this article highlights how actors and directors within a public theatre institution cultivate artistic forms of conduct through the practice of the rehearsal. It analyses how rehearsals emerge as both spaces and practices of self-conduct, building on what actors refer to as Haltung – a term that simultaneously denotes attitude, posture, and conduct. Rehearsals facilitate a collective locus and modus of reflected action, suffused with the authority of the director, but ultimately aimed at training actors’ capacity to make ethical and aesthetic choices. The aim of this discussion is to show how emic artistic concepts and practices may refine existing and open up new pathways for dialogue between the ethnographic study of art and the anthropology of ethics.

Keywords:

• anthropology
• art
• aesthetics
• ethics
• theatre
• Germany

Notes on contributor

Jonas Tinius, PhD, is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH), co-funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and based at the Department of European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. He studied social anthropology at the Universities of Münster (Germany) and Cambridge (UK), where he also completed his PhD, entitled ‘State of the Arts: German Theatre and Political Self-Cultivation’ (2016). His current research explores how Berlin-based curators, contemporary artists, and art institutions engage with notions of alterity and otherness through critical curatorial strategies to reflect on German and European heritage and identities. He is editor of Anthropology, Theatre, and Development: The Transformative Potential of Performance (Palgrave, 2015, with Alex Flynn) and convenor of the ‘Anthropology and the Arts’ network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (with Prof Roger Sansi, Barcelona, Goldsmiths).

Notes

1. Well into the nineteenth century, the custom was to have only one full rehearsal of the whole play with all the actors present, and sometimes there was no rehearsal at all. When Edmund Kean was invited to play Shylock at the Croydon Theatre, he notified the stage manager that he would not require any rehearsal, even though he knew nothing about the planned production and had not worked with the company before (Marshall 1957, 12 cited in McAuley 2012, 5).

2. Gender hierarchies in the German public theatre system, as well as the male gaze of the director, are a point of contention that has been discussed, for instance, in Dennis Hänzi’s sociological analysis (2013).

Additional information

Funding

The research that led to this article was supported by the William Wyse Trust, University of Cambridge, UK. I wrote it up during my postdoctoral research fellowship, supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany.