Cultivating ambivalence: Methodological considerations for anthropology

Abstract

Anthropologists’ longstanding ambivalence toward political advocacy has, in recent years, come under sustained fire—a shift that is often framed in terms of the discipline’s “moral turn.” In this essay, we make a case for the value of ambivalence, asking what lessons it yields as a methodological heuristic. Tracing the history of the concept, we argue that anthropology was founded on an epistemological ambivalence regarding its orientation to social problems. Thus, the moral turn implies a fundamental transformation in the ways that ethnography is conceived. Although the possibility of conflating moral evaluation with anthropological interpretation is a recognized danger of this shift, we don’t believe that the problem can be resolved by being reflexive, or that all ethnographers confront it. Instead, we suggest that cultivating an analytic of ambivalence is our best strategy for understanding what is going on around us, and teaches us more about the character of social relations than prefigured moral stances can.