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The anthropology of ambiguity

Online ISBN:
9781526188113
Print ISBN:
9781526173843
Publisher:
Manchester University Press
Book

The anthropology of ambiguity

Mahnaz Alimardianian (ed.),
Mahnaz Alimardianian
(ed.)

Adjunct Research Fellow

La Trobe University
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Timothy Heffernan (ed.)
Timothy Heffernan
(ed.)

Postdoctoral Fellow

University of New South Wales
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Published online:
23 January 2025
Published in print:
28 May 2024
Online ISBN:
9781526188113
Print ISBN:
9781526173843
Publisher:
Manchester University Press

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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