Nostos Salon 10
A monthly gathering of good food, drinks, and conversation—where anthropology meets community in an engaging, accessible way.
The Anthropology of Ambiguity, Liminality, and Uncertainty with Dr Mahnaz Alimardanian
In an era marked by contested truths, competing belief systems, and growing anxiety about what counts as certain knowledge, this conversation invites us to reflect on ambiguity not as a problem to be solved, but as a condition we all move through, and sometimes a resource we can draw on.
Through the lens of anthropology we'll explore how communities navigate liminality, paradox, and uncertainty in their everyday lives, and how healing, belief, and ritual offer ways of holding what cannot be fully resolved. How do people act meaningfully when the ground beneath a decision is unstable? What can existential and sensory experience teach us about being, rather than only knowing? Whose knowledge is trusted to make sense of uncertain worlds, and whose is dismissed as too ambiguous to count? And how might grounded, culturally attuned research help us sit with complexity rather than rushing past it?
We are delighted to welcome Dr Mahnaz Alimardanian, social anthropologist and Senior Research Fellow at The Mabo Centre, University of Melbourne. Her research sits at the intersection of philosophical and psychological inquiry and ethnographic fieldwork, with a focus on existential and sensory experience, healing and belief systems, and the lived, everyday work of decision-making under uncertainty. She is co-editor of The Anthropology of Ambiguity, and her applied research spans culturally responsive, trauma-informed work across Indigenous land and cultural rights, restorative justice, and redress.
Special thanks to NON and NOW Wines for supporting this event.
Recommended Reading and Resources via Zine
"Liminality may perhaps be regarded as the Nay to all positive structural assertions, but as in some sense the source of them all, and, more than that, as a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise.”
― Victor Turner (The Ritual Process, 1969)