A (Linguistic) Anthropology of Ambivalence: Exploring Discourses of Serbian Pasts, Presents, and Futures

Abstract

Ambivalence is a crucial framework for understanding the lived realities of ethnographic research participants in a wide variety of sociopolitical contexts. Using research at a high school in Belgrade, Serbia, as a case study, this paper proposes a linguistic anthropology of ambivalence. Drawing and expanding upon recent discussions of ambivalence in anthropology, the paper analyzes multiple types of ambivalent discourse, considers common themes across such discourses, and suggests some implications of centering ambivalence for core linguistic anthropological concepts.