Henrik Vigh

Bio: Henrik Vigh is an academic researcher from University of Copenhagen. The author has contributed to research in topics: Social navigation & Social anthropology. The author has an hindex of 13, co-authored 30 publications receiving 1540 citations. Previous affiliations of Henrik Vigh include Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims.

Motion squared A second look at the concept of social navigation

Abstract: Serving as a metaphor for practice, the concept of navigation has become increasingly popular in anthropological theory. The concept seems to have almost sneaked its way into our analytical vocabulary; it is used when referring to how people act in difficult or uncertain circumstances and in describing how they disentangle themselves from confining structures, plot their escape and move towards better positions. Yet, despite its increasing popularity, the concept is most often used in an unspecified or misunderstood manner — it is generally not well defined! Building on prolonged fieldwork in Bissau, West Africa, and with West African migrants in Lisbon, Portugal, I take a second look at the concept of social navigation, clarifying the notion as an analytical optic, discarding the most unfortunate misconceptualizations of the term and elucidating the contribution that the concept can make to our understanding of the way people act in their social worlds.

Crisis and Chronicity: Anthropological Perspectives on Continuous Conflict and Decline

Abstract: Crisis is normally conceived of as an isolated period of time in which our lives are shattered. It defines the loss of balance and the inability to control the exterior forces influencing our possibilities and choices. The phenomenon is seen as a temporary disorder, a momentary malformation in the flow of things. Yet, for a great many people around the world crisis is endemic rather than episodic and cannot be delineated as an aberrant moment of chaos or a period of decisive change. For the structurally violated, socially marginalised and poor, the world is not characterised by balance, peace or prosperity but by the ever-present possibility of conflict, poverty and disorder. In this introductory article I examine the social and experiential consequences of chronic crisis and investigate how it challenges and furthers our analytic apparatus. Instead of placing crisis in context I argue that we need to see crisis as context – as a terrain of action and meaning – thereby opening up the field to eth...

Navigating Terrains of War: Youth and Soldiering in Guinea-Bissau

Abstract: Acknowledgements PART I: INTRODUCTION Chapter 1. Mbuli the Victorious: The Micro-history of an Aguenta Chapter 2. Perspectives and Positions PART II: THE AGUENTAS Chapter 3. Becoming Aguentas Chapter 4. Wars without Enemies PART III: SOCIAL NAVIGATION Chapter 5. The Social Moratorium of Youth Chapter 6. Dubriagem and Social Navigation: Constructing Social Trajectories through War PART IV: ON SHIFTING GROUND Chapter 7. Inhabiting Unstable Terrains: The Everyday of Decline and Conflict Chapter 8. From Negritude to Ineptitude: On Horizons and Broken Imaginaries PART V: IN APPEASEMENT? Chapter 9. Recategorising Men as Children: Bottom-up Reconciliation Chapter 10. Closure Bibliography Index

Navigating youth, generating adulthood : social becoming in an African context

Abstract: This book focuses on the lives and experiences of young people in Africa. On agents who, willingly or unwillingly, see themselves as belonging to the socio-generational category of youth and the wa ...

Wayward Migration: On Imagined Futures and Technological Voids

Abstract: This article exploresimagined migration and migrantimaginaries. It takes its point of departure in fieldwork among would-be migrants in Bissau and traces the realization of their hopes into Europe. More specifically, it sheds light on the way young men from Bissau, the capital of the small, impoverished West African country of Guinea-Bissau, position the decline and destruction that characterize their city in relation to the peace, prosperity and progress they see elsewhere. In doing so, it illuminates a world that, seen from Bissau, is characterized by very uneven levels of control over socio-political matters. A world that is divided into different zones of mastery over social, political and economic processes. Finally, the article dwells on the consequences of this imagined global order and its effect on the acts and strategies of young migrants.

In a Different Voice. Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA (Harvard University Press) 1982.

Abstract: Introduction 1. Woman's Place in Man's Life Cycle 2. Images of Relationship 3. Concepts of Self and Morality 4. Crisis and Transition 5. Women's Rights and Women's Judgment 6. Visions of Maturity References Index of Study Participants General Index

The Nervous System

Abstract: Experimental Neurology By Prof Paul Glees Pp xii + 532 (Oxford: Clarendon Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1961) 75s net

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Abstract: Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics