For those of us located in the Global North, 2021 began with a barrage of media content documenting a coup attempt in the United States, the United Kingdom's split from Europe after four years of Brexit deliberations, and talk of mass vaccinations amid the uneven global devastation of COVID-19. For the three of us, with our connections to South Asia, Latin America, and West Africa, current Euro-American mediatized stories were supplemented by ongoing narratives of state-sponsored sectarian violence in India and Brazil, police brutality in Nigeria, and “Southern” stories related to the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences.

In each of these cases, social media has fostered contradictory participatory potentials. On the one hand, social media has the potential to foment the creation of shared and iterative conspiracy theories, disinformation, and right-wing plots. From QAnon to antimask and antivaccine discourses to anti-immigrant “Leave.EU” campaigns in the United Kingdom, the circulations of images, texts, and videos have sowed the seeds for an amplification of white supremacist violence, a rejection of public health guidance, and a rearticulation of virulent nativist political thought in an age of capitalist dispossession. On the other hand, just as multimodal making and circulation strategies on social media have played a role in fomenting right-wing violence and homicidal disinformation, they have also played an integral part in social movements towards justice. Grassroots mobilizations of images, videos, and texts collocating collective imaginaries towards various projects of recognition and solidarity in and across Chile, India, Thailand, Argentina, and Puerto Rico, just to give a few examples, demonstrate the ways in which the “multimodal” plays an important role in generating the potential for visualizing, articulating, and conceptualizing different futures, both online and off.

It is in this context that we take up the mantle as editors of the Multimodal Anthropologies section of American Anthropologist. On the one hand, we are thrilled to continue the important work of supporting, facilitating, and eliciting multimodal anthropology projects that “dive into a broad range of methods for doing our work” and that strive “to understand and define what counts as knowledge production in increasingly expansive ways” (Chin 2017). Indeed, in the last several years, anthropologists have embraced multimodality as an opportunity to collaborate and invent with our participants, to create alternate pathways for the circulation of anthropological knowledge, and, more broadly, to rethink, recalibrate, and reimagine ethnography as the epistemological grounds for our discipline.

For those already working within the strictures of visual anthropology, multimodality has offered the opportunity to bring various forms of technical and conceptual expertise to the multimodal table. Indeed, a growing number of anthropologists and those working in adjacent disciplines have affirmed and expanded on the potential of extratextual forms of representation, communication, and theorization and continue to look for guidance and potential collaborators. For those bent towards an activist and engaged anthropology, multimodal approaches build on earlier imaginings of a “shared anthropology,” only now there is the potential to meet our participants in the shared realms of social media and together create projects that circulate more widely and, we hope, help to address the pressing social and political challenges of our time. In short, multimodal experimentation has been and continues to be an important growing edge of the discipline, and one we hope to serve in our tenure as editors of the section inaugurated under the editorial leadership of Deborah Thomas and curated in wonderful and unanticipated ways by Samuel Collins, Matthew Durington, and Harjant Gill.

However, even as we are excited about engendering and enacting a multimodal anthropology, we are also ambivalent about its trajectory, given the broader media-saturated world-historical context in which we are living. We are particularly wary of noncritical engagements with digital communications technologies, which have been fetishized as the foundational medium for multimodal work. An uncritical engagement with the new digital tools at our disposal can easily aid in reproducing and sustaining the “bad habitus” of capitalism—as it reifies projects and structures of inequality (Takaragawa et al. 2019), reinscribes and propagates problematic representations of the so-called Other, and incites extreme forms of speech (Pohjonen and Udupa 2019) that fuel xenophobic nationalist projects while also potentially overshadowing other nondigital and embodied forms of multimodal knowledge production. Our ambivalence is grounded in a recognition that the illusion of democratic circulation of media in the digital realm makes it easy for us to either embrace a romanticism that the digital will somehow save us (Noble 2018) or amplify an anxiety that the digital itself is the root cause of rupture (rather than the imperial and colonial histories that are the foundations of our shared global condition) (Udupa and Dattatreyan, under review). Algorithmic orders, in short, make it easy for us and those with whom we are in close conversation to fall into a never-ending loop, mostly anchored in events unfolding in the Global North, that reproduce ahistorical and geographically limited understandings of the present.

Merriam-Webster dictionary defines ambivalence as the “simultaneous and contradictory attitudes or feelings (such as attraction and repulsion) toward an object, person, or action.” Paying attention to these contradictory affects as they are linked to objects, persons, ideas, and so on helps us to orient ourselves differently to the world (Ahmed 2006). An orientation to multimodality that takes seriously one's mixed feelings reminds us that narratives that paint the digital world as a democratic space or that offer opportunities to simplistically “even the playing field” are dangerous fictions. An embrace of our ambivalence towards anthropology, we suggest, helps keep us honest about tendencies within the discipline to reproduce liberal assumptions, unreflexive understandings, and colonial frameworks even when our practices are reimagined on different grounds. As such, we depart from Ciara Kierans and Kirsten Bell's (2017) ableist theorization of anthropological ambivalence as a “bi-polar” register that pits moral imperatives against relativist ones. Instead, our turn to ambivalence as a methodological and ethical stance is an embrace of what Sara Ahmed (2021) calls “killjoy commitments” to engage in world-making that begins with an apprehensive but hopeful recognition of the unequal worlds we inherit and our positions in them. Part of our hopeful killjoy commitment is to constantly remind ourselves that any multimodal endeavor we dream up must be contextualized in the broader digital proliferation of content and its fraught political potentials.

For us, an ambivalent multimodal anthropology “stays with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) and perhaps even makes trouble. Rather than pivoting on false binaries, an ambivalent multimodality recognizes and critiques the ways in which the digital (re)produces neocolonial forms of extraction, exclusion, inequality, and representational problematics. Yet, an ambivalent multimodality doesn't necessarily stay at the level of critique or recognition; it also seeks to open spaces of hope and speculative possibility. An ambivalent multimodality allows us to utilize the detritus of capitalist technoscience and encourages us to hack its latest advances to invent new pathways for shared representations, all the while staying with the reflexive recognition of knowing that we are, in multiple ways, complicit. It helps us produce work that contends with the fact that neither us as anthropological makers or the technologies we use are outside the frame of imperialism and capitalism. Ambivalence, we suggest, is a particularly productive techno-material-affective register and political stance that holds the potential for helping us move past the problem of reproducing a “stir in the same old anthropological frame” (Minh-Ha 1992) that promotes avoidance strategies when it comes to contending with the larger structures of power that shape the ways in which we work and the objects/tools we work with.

This short essay—written as a manifesto and an invitation—engages with an ambivalent multimodality in three different frames: the visual, the collaborative, and the sensorial. Our manifesto is a means not just to participate in the vibrant theorization of multimodality that has unfolded over the last several years in the discipline but to embrace an ambivalence towards its promise and potential and to offer an invitation for you to do the same. In short, our embrace of “the manifesto” as a rhetorical device is as much a call to action as it is about theorizing the affordances and limits of multimodality in the present conjuncture. In what follows, we briefly mark the ways in which an ambivalent multimodality has the capacity to draw our attention to the different problematics of doing ethnography in the contemporary moment while recognizing, simultaneously, the tremendous opportunity it presents for us to imagine anthropology on different grounds. We believe that when we account for those problematics in creative-critical ways—including the ways we are deeply embedded in and complicit in them—we open speculative possibilities and potentially enact anthropology otherwise. We conclude this short essay by discussing the experiments we will take up to create a different sort of review process for this type of work, one that is transparent, dialogic, and guided by the key tenets of our manifesto.

对于我们这些位于全球北部的人来说，2021 年开始时有大量媒体内容记录了美国的政变企图、英国在经过四年的脱欧审议后从欧洲分裂，以及在不平衡的全球破坏中谈论大规模疫苗接种COVID-19。对于我们三个人来说，由于我们与南亚、拉丁美洲和西非的联系，当前的欧美媒体报道补充了印度和巴西国家支持的教派暴力、尼日利亚警察暴行和“南方”与 COVID-19 大流行及其后果相关的故事。

在每一种情况下，社交媒体都培养了相互矛盾的参与潜力。一方面，社交媒体有可能助长共享和反复的阴谋论、虚假信息和右翼阴谋的产生。从 QAnon 到反面具和反疫苗话语，再到英国的反移民“Leave.EU”运动，图像、文本和视频的传播播下了放大白人至上主义暴力、拒绝公共卫生指导的种子，以及在资本主义掠夺时代恶毒的本土主义政治思想的重新表述。另一方面，正如社交媒体上的多模式制作和传播策略在煽动右翼暴力和杀人虚假信息方面发挥了作用一样，它们也在社会正义运动中发挥了不可或缺的作用。

正是在这种背景下，我们担任了美国人类学家Multimodal Anthropologies 部分的编辑。一方面，我们很高兴继续支持、促进和引发多模态人类学项目的重要工作，这些项​​目“深入研究开展工作的广泛方法”，并努力“理解和定义什么是知识生产”以越来越广泛的方式”（Chin 2017）。事实上，在过去的几年里，人类学家已经将多模态作为与我们的参与者合作和发明的机会，为人类学知识的流通创造替代途径，更广泛地说，重新思考、重新校准和重新想象民族志作为认识论的我们纪律的根据。

对于那些已经在视觉人类学的限制范围内工作的人来说，多模态提供了将各种形式的技术和概念专业知识带入多模态表的机会。事实上，越来越多的人类学家和在相邻学科工作的人已经肯定和扩展了超文本形式的表征、交流和理论化的潜力，并继续寻找指导和潜在的合作者。对于那些热衷于激进主义和参与人类学的人来说，多模式方法建立在“共享人类学”的早期想象之上，只有现在才有可能在社交媒体的共享领域与我们的参与者会面并共同创建更广泛传播的项目，并且，我们希望有助于应对我们这个时代紧迫的社会和政治挑战。简而言之，

然而，即使我们对产生和制定多模态人类学感到兴奋，但考虑到我们所生活的更广泛的媒体饱和的世界历史背景，我们对其轨迹也感到矛盾。我们特别警惕与数字通信技术的非关键接触，这些技术已被视为多模式工作的基础媒介。不加批判地使用我们可以使用的新数字工具可以很容易地帮助复制和维持资本主义的“坏习惯”——因为它具体化了不平等的项目和结构（Takaragawa 等人，2019 年），重新描述和传播了对这种不公平的有问题的表述。 - 称为其他，并煽动极端形式的言论（Pohjonen 和 Udupa 2019) 助长了仇外的民族主义项目，同时也可能使其他非数字化和具身化的多模态知识生产形式黯然失色。我们的矛盾心理是基于这样一种认识，即数字领域中媒体民主流通的幻觉使我们很容易接受一种浪漫主义，即数字会以某种方式拯救我们（Noble 2018) 或放大一种焦虑，即数字本身是破裂的根本原因（而不是作为我们共同全球状况基础的帝国和殖民历史）（Udupa 和 Dattatreyan，正在审查中）。简而言之，算法命令让我们和那些与我们密切交谈的人很容易陷入一个永无止境的循环，主要是锚定在全球北部发生的事件中，这些事件再现了对现在的非历史和地理上有限的理解。

Merriam-Webster词典将矛盾心理定义为“对一个对象、一个人或一个行为同时存在和矛盾的态度或感觉（例如吸引和排斥）”。关注这些与物体、人物、想法等相关的相互矛盾的影响有助于我们以不同的方式将自己定位于世界（Ahmed 2006）。一种重视复杂情绪的多模态取向提醒我们，将数字世界描绘成一个民主空间或提供简单化“公平竞争”机会的叙事是危险的虚构。我们建议，接受我们对人类学的矛盾心理，有助于让我们对学科内的趋势保持诚实，即使我们的实践在不同的基础上重新构想，也能重现自由假设、非反身理解和殖民框架。因此，我们背离了 Ciara Kierans 和 Kirsten Bell（2017 年）将人类学矛盾心理作为一种“两极”登记册的能力论理论，该理论将道德要求与相对主义要求进行了对比。反而，2021 年）呼吁“killjoy 承诺”参与世界创造，首先是对我们继承的不平等世界及其地位的担忧但充满希望的承认。我们充满希望的 killjoy 承诺的一部分是不断提醒自己，我们梦想的任何多模式努力都必须与更广泛的数字内容扩散及其充满政治潜力的内容相关联。

对我们来说，矛盾的多模态人类学“与麻烦同在”（Haraway 2016)，甚至可能会制造麻烦。一种矛盾的多模态不是以错误的二进制为中心，而是承认和批评数字（重新）产生新殖民主义形式的提取、排斥、不平等和表征问题的方式。然而，矛盾的多模态并不一定停留在批评或认可的层面；它还寻求打开希望和投机可能性的空间。矛盾的多模态使我们能够利用资本主义技术科学的碎屑，并鼓励我们利用其最新进展来发明共享表征的新途径，同时保持反思性地认识到我们在多种方面都是同谋。它帮助我们制作出与这样一个事实相抗衡的作品：我们作为人类学的创造者或我们使用的技术都不在帝国主义和资本主义的框架之外。我们认为，矛盾心理是一种特别富有成效的技术-材料-情感记录和政治立场，它具有帮助我们克服重现“在同一个古老的人类学框架中搅拌”问题的潜力（Minh-Ha1992 年），当涉及到塑造我们工作方式和我们工作的对象/工具的更大的权力结构时，它促进了回避策略。

这篇短文——以宣言和邀请的形式写成——在三个不同的框架中体现了矛盾的多模态：视觉、协作和感官。我们的宣言不仅是参与过去几年在该学科中展开的充满活力的多模态理论化的一种手段，而且是对其承诺和潜力抱有矛盾的态度，并邀请您这样做。简而言之，我们将“宣言”作为一种修辞手段，既是对行动的呼吁，也是对当前形势下多模态的可供性和局限性的理论化。在接下来的内容中，我们简要地标记了矛盾的多模态有能力将我们的注意力吸引到当代人种学的不同问题上的方式，同时认识到，同时，它为我们提供了从不同角度想象人类学的巨大机会。我们相信，当我们以创造性批判的方式来解释这些问题时——包括我们深深地嵌入其中并参与其中的方式——我们打开了推测的可能性，并可能以其他方式制定人类学。我们通过讨论我们将采取的实验来结束这篇短文，以便为此类工作创建一种不同类型的审查过程，该过程透明、对话并以我们宣言的关键原则为指导。我们相信，当我们以创造性批判的方式来解释这些问题时——包括我们深深地嵌入其中并参与其中的方式——我们打开了推测的可能性，并可能以其他方式制定人类学。我们通过讨论我们将采取的实验来结束这篇短文，以便为此类工作创建一种不同类型的审查过程，该过程透明、对话并以我们宣言的关键原则为指导。我们相信，当我们以创造性批判的方式来解释这些问题时——包括我们深深地嵌入其中并参与其中的方式——我们打开了推测的可能性，并可能以其他方式制定人类学。我们通过讨论我们将采取的实验来结束这篇短文，以便为此类工作创建一种不同类型的审查过程，该过程透明、对话并以我们宣言的关键原则为指导。