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Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA)
Oral Presentation Session
Henrik Vigh
University of Copenhagen
For many people around the world stability and predictability are seen as alien states. Rather than inhabiting solid societal structures and unwavering social fields their lives are defined by insecurity and unease - by enduring situations of conflict, crisis, poverty, illegality or vulnerability.
Building on ethnographic research in situations of conflict and crisis this paper looks at the ways people adjust social practice and imaginaries to continuous insecurity, shifts and rupture. Empirically, such situations challenge our regular view on practice. Instead of movement being planned and executed on solid grounds of enactment, with expectable outcomes in sight, it becomes attuned to tumultuous and capricious circumstance. The paper takes its point of departure in local idioms and understandings of such modalities of action in order to illuminate the way people navigate difficult social environments, and asks what such a perspective on practice may bring to our anthropological understanding of movement and mobility in general.