Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Institut für Europäische Ethnologie

Since April 2025, Jonas Tinius is responsible for the renamed and reframed Berlin-Brandenburgische Landesstelle für Alltagskultur (Office for Everyday Culture), which existed since 1995 as the Landesstelle für Berlin-Brandenburgische Volkskunde and was directed by PD Dr Leonore Scholze-Irrlitz. The Office for Everyday Culture gathers the archives, collections, and bequests of the Institute for European Ethnology and acts as a public documentation and research laboratory. Going forward, it facilitates collaborative possibilities with artists, curators, journalists, scholars, and students to work towards public anthropological engagement with (extra-)curricular knowledge production, archives, and university collections. For more information and until the digital presence of the Office for Everyday Culture has been revamped, please consult the Collections Website of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (link) or consider the module "Volk" with Franka Schneider in our edited book Awkward Archives (link). 

For the past decade, his research has grappled with public cultural production in Europe, focusing specifically on public and civic institutions, such as theatres, galleries, and museums. His research focuses on such institutions as prisms of public culture through which societies reckon with difficult pasts that break into the present and seek to prefigure hopeful futures. Through his research, teaching, public engagement, curation, and writing, he seeks to create modes of co-production, co-curation, co-performance, which reflect on the ways in which academic, including anthropological, knowledge production is embroiled in the same quest for understanding and producing contested ideas of world. 

Events

22 April 2025. 'Forms of Friendship: Can Institutions Function as Infrastructures of Solidarity'. Book launch and Institutskolloquium seminar with Michal Murawski (UCL) and Paz Guevara (HKW). 4.30pm, Room 408. More info here. 

29 April 2025. 'Zwischen Utopie und Alltag. Die Landesstelle für Alltagskultur als öffentliches Labor'. Institutskolloquium des Instituts für Europäische Ethnologie, HU Berlin. Public event, no registration necessary. 2.30pm, Room 408. More info here. 

20 May 2025. 'Every Monument Will Fall' (Dan Hicks, 2025). Book launch, discussion, reception. Public event, no registration necessary. 4.30pm, Room 408, IfEE. More info here. 

4 October 2025. 'Ethnography by Surprise. Exploring the Potentials of Experimental, Playful, Speculative and Improvised Fieldwork'. Workshop with Elisabeth Luggauer and Ruth Eggel as part of "Surprise, chance, contingency: On the indeterminate in society and science", the 45th Congress of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft (DGEKW) 2025 in Kiel. More info soon.

16-19 October 2025. 'Styles of Experimentation. Unsettling the Anthropological Syllabus'. 4th workshop of the EASA network colleex - collaboratory for ethnographic experimentation. Berlin. More info here. 

Projects

July-October 2025. 'Decentring Knowledge Production: Innovating Public Anthropology in Postindustrial University Hinterlands'. Funded by the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership. HU Project lead: Dr Jonas Tinius. Tandem partner: Prof Paul Basu (Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford).