Jonas Tinius: A Para-archival Anthropology. Thinking with Berlin’s Awkward Archives

Awkward archives are those that generate disquieting frictions, sitting uneasily within the contemporary world. Yet what makes an archive “awkward” cannot be determined in advance. Awkwardness is a relational category, contingent on the ethical, political, and historical frames through which an archive is approached—on our own judgments and on the archival grammars that decide what is considered good, wrong, violent, or problematic. To call an archive awkward is to acknowledge its instability: it is an archive whose meaning shifts with its use, an archive always at risk of tipping out of place. As poet Mary Capello evocatively puts it, it sits like a book on the edge of a shelf—potentially dangerous, perhaps merely misplaced, maybe easiest just to ignore.

In this talk, I present the publication Awkward Archives (2022), a volume I co-edited with Margareta von Oswald, and outline its theoretical grounding and modular set of Berlin-based archival portraits. I propose that awkwardness is a productive lens through which to approach a particular set of archives in Berlin and to paint a picture of Berlin as a city more generally, but I will focus especially in the collections of the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, which I coordinated as director of the Berlin-Brandenburg Office for Everyday Culture since April 2025. These collections, assembled over a century of tumultous political and ideological instrumentalisations of German anthropology, or Volkskunde and Völkerkunde, paint a picture of the city that sits uneasily within the present. They speak of a search for a German identity that never existed, in the process constructing ideas of community and society through the writing and “documenting” of German (folk) culture. Confronting this material today means confronting the awkwardness of difficult heritage collections, and the writing of German culture and society through anthropology. I argue that to understand the complexity of the relation between anthropology, archives, and the city of Berlin, we need to adopt a para-archival perspective, which takes into account the infrastructural, situated, and contextual of awkward archival existence.   

Jonas Tinius is director of the Berlin-Brandenburg Office for Everyday Culture in the Institute for European Ethnology of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he is also a associated member of the Centre for Cultural Techniques (ZfK). He studied social anthropology at the University of Cambridge, where he also completed a PhD on German theatre, migration, and Haltung. He was post-doctoral research fellow in the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH), funded by Sharon Macdonald's Alexander von Humboldt Professorship, at the Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Subsequently, he was scientific coordinator and postdoctoral research fellow in Cultural Anthropology in the ERC Consolidator grant project Minor Universality. Narrative World Productions After Western Universalism, directed by Markus Messling, at Saarland University. He held visiting research and teaching posts at the Universität zu Köln, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the The Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (NABA) in Milan, the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin, and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max Planck Institute. He was founding co-convenor of the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) with Clare Foster, the Anthropology and the Arts network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) with Roger Sansi, and the research group of the PostHeimat theatre production network funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes, with Ruba Totah. Since 2025, he is secretary of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) and co-convenor of the EASA network colleex - collaboratory for ethnographic experimentation, together with Adolfo Estalella, Elisabeth Luggauer, and Maka Suarez. His publications include: State of the Arts. An Ethnography of German Theatre and Migration (Cambridge, 2023), The Trouble with Art. An Anthropology Beyond Philistinism (edited with Roger Sansi, Routledge, 2024), and Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial (edited with Margareta von Oswald, Archive, 2022).