Capacity for character: fiction, ethics and the anthropology of conduct

Abstract

Method acting is one of the most popular theatrical rehearsal systems, according to which actors seek intense identification with characters. In this article, I draw on fieldwork with a professional contemporary German theatre to suggest an alternative view. Rather than training to merge with characters, actors understand characters as a 'repertoire of fiction' they freely draw upon to compose themselves. Training for characters thus facilitates the capacity to detach and appropriate traits of different, imagined and real, persons. It is thus an active and reflected stance that minds the gap between actor and character, rather than a passive and predominantly embodied taking on by actors of fictional characters and their traits. Informed by discussions on the notion of conduct in the anthropology of ethics, this article investigates how training the 'capacity for character' can inform anthropological understandings of detachment, reflexivity and personhood.

European social anthropology in 2018: an increasingly recursive public

“…Yet contributors also seek to both catalogue the shortcomings of such conceptualisations (Faubion ; Strathern ) as well as to document how the notion of character in Western society overflows these boundaries in a myriad of ways. The concept of character, far from being limited to purposive individual ethical self‐fashioning, can also inhere in buildings and neighbourhoods (Yarrow ), idiosyncratic urban ‘personalities’ (Wardle ), the techniques of method acting (Tinius ) and even evolutionary theory (Candea ). With its deliberate de‐centring of the freely choosing and reflecting human subject as the unit of analysis, this move seems symptomatic of a broader anthropological disinvestment from earlier approaches to ethics in favour of a return to a more constrained conceptualisation of human action.…”