The anthropology of ambiguity
The anthropology of ambiguity
Adjunct Research Fellow
Postdoctoral Fellow
Cite
Abstract
The concept of ambiguity – as context, state, situation or feeling – is defined as possessing many things at once (or perhaps being less than this or coming to be nothing at all) resembling both confusion and a position from which clarity might emerge. Moving beyond now dominant expressions of ‘certainty’ and ‘uncertainty’ in a world affected by viral contagion, climate change, economic instability, labour precarity and (geo)political tension, this volume considers the concept of ambiguity as a mode of expression, narration, process, condition, impediment or, indeed, as the grounds for launching critique. Each chapter challenges assumptions about ambiguity by positioning the concept at the centre of theorising to consider it as method, methodology, or a form of sense-making in life and in ethnography. In turn, this volume illuminates how anthropologists embrace the confusing albeit rich nature of ambiguity as it is encountered in the field as well as in the making of ethnography, thereby highlighting its generative and destructive modes as the source of dynamism across knowledge-experience, certainty-uncertainty, and ontology-nonontology. The works of Simone de Beauvoir and the Manchester School of anthropology are used as a conceptual guide throughout.
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Front Matter
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Introduction
Timothy Heffernan andMahnaz Alimardanian
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Part I Theorising ambiguity
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1
Ontology and its double: on the nature of ambiguity and lived experience
Mahnaz Alimardanian
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2
Ambiguity and catastrophe: crises of understanding in the age of COVID-19
David J. Rosner
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3
Ambiguity and politics: the suppression of complexity in Australian governmental responses to climate change
Jonathan P. Marshall
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1
Ontology and its double: on the nature of ambiguity and lived experience
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Part II Navigating temporal disruption
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4
Queering the crisis–recovery nexus: personhood and societal transformation after economic collapse in Iceland
Timothy Heffernan
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5
Accommodating care through strategic ignorance: the ambiguities of kidney disease amongst Yolŋu renal patients in Australia’s Northern Territory
Stefanie Puszka
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6
Charting fields of uncertainty: disaster, displacement and resilience in Bangladeshi char villages
Mohammad Altaf Hossain
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4
Queering the crisis–recovery nexus: personhood and societal transformation after economic collapse in Iceland
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Part III Imagining an ‘otherwise’
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7
Ambiguity in Belgrade’s bike activism: marginalised activists, powerful agents of change
Sabrina Steindl-Kopf
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8
Adding (ambiguous) value: interfacing between alternative economics and entrepreneurial innovation in Ecuador
Alexander Emile D’Aloia
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9
The sovereign’s road: checkpoints and the ambiguity of exception during Aotearoa’s lockdown
Joe Clifford
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10
Grease Yakā in Sri Lankan political culture: humour, anxiety and existential ambiguities in the public sphere
Anton Piyarathne
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7
Ambiguity in Belgrade’s bike activism: marginalised activists, powerful agents of change
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Part IV Self-realisation and disjuncture
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11
Liminal ambiguity: the tricky position of being Black in white skin
Suzi Hutchings
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12
The ambiguous path of self-cultivation in contemporary China
Gil Hizi
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13
Ontological ambiguity: crisis, hyperfiction and social narratives in postmodern Japan
Angélica Cabrera Torrecilla
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Afterword: sitting and being with ambiguity
Mahnaz Alimardanian andTimothy Heffernan
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11
Liminal ambiguity: the tricky position of being Black in white skin
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End Matter
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