Across Anthropology
About
Across Anthropology is a multimodal project that grapples with thinking and practising anthropology otherwise and beyond itself. We want to explore means of doing and fields for understanding anthropology across and through museums, art spaces, archives, collections, and practices that problematise the discipline, its history, and its possible futures. We think this project in iterations, meaning that it articulates in different forms, formats, and contexts – each of which a way to think about the how, why, and where of anthropology. Drawing on a comparative multi-researcher project based in Berlin, we edited an open-access book, and developed a modular curriculum in collaboration with archives associated with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. You can explore past and future iterations, download the book and further material, find out more about the curriculum, and about us and the project.
Biographies
Margareta von Oswald is an anthropologist trained at the Institut d’Études Politiques (Bordeaux), the École Normale Supérieure (Paris), the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Since 2016, she has been a research fellow in the multi-researcher and multi-location ethnography project Making Differences: Transforming Museums and Heritage in the Twenty-First Century at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (Berlin), led by Sharon Macdonald as part of Macdonald’s Alexander von Humboldt Professorship. Based on a two-year-ethnography in Berlin’s Ethnologisches Museum and the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren), Margareta von Oswald’s doctoral research analyses the restructuring processes and accompanying controversies of anthropological museums in Europe. In particular, she has been interested in the ways in which the museums relate to and deal with their colonial legacies and their reverberations in the present. From 2016 to 2019, she co-organised the seminar series Rewriting the Colonial Past: Contemporary Challenges of Museum Collections (EHESS, Paris). In 2015, she curated the exhibition Object Biographies with Verena Rodatus (Humboldt Lab Dahlem, Berlin).
Jonas Tinius studied British and American Literature, Language and Culture as well as Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Universities of Münster and Cambridge (UK). He completed his PhD on the negotiation of identity, migration, and society in German theatre in 2016 at the Department of Social Anthropology and King's College of the University of Cambridge (UK). From 2016–2020, he was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) at the Institute of European Ethnology of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, funded as part of Sharon Macdonald's Alexander von Humboldt Professorship. During his research, he collaborated with artists and curators of art spaces and galleries in Berlin (including SAVVY Contemporary, the ifa-gallery, and the Wedding district gallery) to explore curatorial practices as ways to trouble national, universal, and hegemonic narratives, especially against the backdrop of major museum transformations such as the Humboldt Forum. In 2017, he co-founded (with Prof Roger Sansi) the Anthropology and the Arts Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). He is research coordinator and co-founder of the Post-Heimat Network on migrant theatre and art, funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Cultural Foundation).
Partners and Funders
Across Anthropology
About
Across Anthropology is a multimodal project that grapples with thinking and practising anthropology otherwise and beyond itself. We want to explore means of doing and fields for understanding anthropology across and through museums, art spaces, archives, collections, and practices that problematise the discipline, its history, and its possible futures. We think this project in iterations, meaning that it articulates in different forms, formats, and contexts – each of which a way to think about the how, why, and where of anthropology. Drawing on a comparative multi-researcher project based in Berlin, we edited an open-access book, and developed a modular curriculum in collaboration with archives associated with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. You can explore past and future iterations, download the book and further material, find out more about the curriculum, and about us and the project.
Biographies
Margareta von Oswald is an anthropologist trained at the Institut d’Études Politiques (Bordeaux), the École Normale Supérieure (Paris), the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Since 2016, she has been a research fellow in the multi-researcher and multi-location ethnography project Making Differences: Transforming Museums and Heritage in the Twenty-First Century at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (Berlin), led by Sharon Macdonald as part of Macdonald’s Alexander von Humboldt Professorship. Based on a two-year-ethnography in Berlin’s Ethnologisches Museum and the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren), Margareta von Oswald’s doctoral research analyses the restructuring processes and accompanying controversies of anthropological museums in Europe. In particular, she has been interested in the ways in which the museums relate to and deal with their colonial legacies and their reverberations in the present. From 2016 to 2019, she co-organised the seminar series Rewriting the Colonial Past: Contemporary Challenges of Museum Collections (EHESS, Paris). In 2015, she curated the exhibition Object Biographies with Verena Rodatus (Humboldt Lab Dahlem, Berlin).
Jonas Tinius studied British and American Literature, Language and Culture as well as Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Universities of Münster and Cambridge (UK). He completed his PhD on the negotiation of identity, migration, and society in German theatre in 2016 at the Department of Social Anthropology and King's College of the University of Cambridge (UK). From 2016–2020, he was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) at the Institute of European Ethnology of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, funded as part of Sharon Macdonald's Alexander von Humboldt Professorship. During his research, he collaborated with artists and curators of art spaces and galleries in Berlin (including SAVVY Contemporary, the ifa-gallery, and the Wedding district gallery) to explore curatorial practices as ways to trouble national, universal, and hegemonic narratives, especially against the backdrop of major museum transformations such as the Humboldt Forum. In 2017, he co-founded (with Prof Roger Sansi) the Anthropology and the Arts Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). He is research coordinator and co-founder of the Post-Heimat Network on migrant theatre and art, funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Cultural Foundation).
Partners and Funders