Noel B. Salazar
I obtained my PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania (USA) and am currently Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences, KU Leuven (Belgium). From 2011 until 2015 I served as Executive Committee member of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (including as President of EASA) and from 2013 until 2018 as Vice President and from 2018 until 2023 as Secretary-General of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES).
My research interests include anthropologies of mobility and travel, the local-to-global nexus, discourses and imaginaries of Otherness, heritage, cultural brokering, cosmopolitanism, and endurance. I have published peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and newspaper articles on these topics in the USA, the UK, India, Indonesia, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Estonia, and Colombia.
I am the author of Momentous Mobilities (2018, Oxford: Berghahn), Envisioning Eden (2010, Oxford: Berghahn) and co-editor of Pacing Mobilities (2020, Oxford: Berghahn), Methodologies of Mobility (2017, Oxford: Berghahn), Mega-event Mobilities (2016, London: Routledge), Keywords of Mobility (2016, Oxford: Berghahn), Regimes of Mobility (2014, New York: Routledge) and Tourism Imaginaries (2014, Oxford: Berghahn). I founded CuMoRe (Cultural Mobilities Research) and the EASA Anthropology and Mobility Network.
I am on the editorial boards of, among others, Applied Mobilities, Mobile Culture Studies Journal, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, and the International Journal of Tourism Anthropology. In addition, I am on UNESCO’s and UNWTO’s roster of consultants, and I am an expert member of the ICOMOS International Cultural Tourism Committee and the UNESCO-UNITWIN Network 'Culture, Tourism and Development'.
Address: Cultural Mobilities Research
Faculty of Social Sciences
University of Leuven
Parkstraat 45, bus 3615
BE-3000 Leuven
Belgium
My research interests include anthropologies of mobility and travel, the local-to-global nexus, discourses and imaginaries of Otherness, heritage, cultural brokering, cosmopolitanism, and endurance. I have published peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and newspaper articles on these topics in the USA, the UK, India, Indonesia, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Estonia, and Colombia.
I am the author of Momentous Mobilities (2018, Oxford: Berghahn), Envisioning Eden (2010, Oxford: Berghahn) and co-editor of Pacing Mobilities (2020, Oxford: Berghahn), Methodologies of Mobility (2017, Oxford: Berghahn), Mega-event Mobilities (2016, London: Routledge), Keywords of Mobility (2016, Oxford: Berghahn), Regimes of Mobility (2014, New York: Routledge) and Tourism Imaginaries (2014, Oxford: Berghahn). I founded CuMoRe (Cultural Mobilities Research) and the EASA Anthropology and Mobility Network.
I am on the editorial boards of, among others, Applied Mobilities, Mobile Culture Studies Journal, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, and the International Journal of Tourism Anthropology. In addition, I am on UNESCO’s and UNWTO’s roster of consultants, and I am an expert member of the ICOMOS International Cultural Tourism Committee and the UNESCO-UNITWIN Network 'Culture, Tourism and Development'.
Address: Cultural Mobilities Research
Faculty of Social Sciences
University of Leuven
Parkstraat 45, bus 3615
BE-3000 Leuven
Belgium
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Journal Articles by Noel B. Salazar
mobility and how mobility regulations and codes are resisted, transgressed, broken, and remade. To play by the rules of mobility means to follow habits and laws governed by social norms and institutional control. Our point of departure is that social and institutional mobility rules both abound and are intertwined and that they are routinely disputed by individuals, groups, and institutions. Drawing on ethnographic examples and the literature on legal anthropology, mobilities, and transnational migration, the article disentangles the specifi c mechanisms, principles,
and symbolic power of mobility rules—written and non-written, legal and
non-legal, formal and informal, codifi ed and non-codifi ed, explicit and implicit. In short, we address how people are navigating rules of mobility that operate in contradictory, ambiguous, and hidden ways.
imaginary. This conceptual article proposes imaginaries as a useful analytical lens to critically study heritage. Imaginariesenable us to uncover how people assume and signify heritage from various positions and experiences. Furthermore, this article aims to shed light on how alternative imaginaries grounded in non-western ontologies enable us to rethink heritage meaning and practice in the encounters and conflicts between different systems of meaning in daily life. More concretely, we identify three significant contributions of using imaginaries as a lens for the study of heritage. To illustrate our theoretical propositions, we incorporate empirical examples from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Ecuadorian Andes.
controlling the side effects of “sedentary” lifestyles and physical
inactivity, i.e., obesity, heart diseases and other health risks. This
trend developed in the 19th century, with the emergence of middle
classes who had the requisite time and resources to exercise during
their leisure time. Recreational running became popular in the
1970s, within the context of renewed societal attention to fitness
and physical health, which developed in countries such as the
USA and spread quickly to other industrialised nations. Based on
ethnographic research, I discuss in this article the crucial role that
mobile tracking devices, as markers of an active lifestyle, play in
keeping runners (im)mobile. I focus on how the data generated by
GPS sports watches are widely shared and used by runners and their
followers in general as well as specialised social media platforms. I
disentangle why, paradoxically, these mobility technologies make
exemplary mobile people more immobile, because many hours
are spent behind electronic device screens to communicate (and
seeking social approval for) their mobile performances. I place my
critical anthropological analysis of recreational running and mobility
technologies within the context of wider societal trends related to
(self-)discipline.
The main point is to show how mobility is a factor in amplifying categories of race, as well as gender and age. Mobility does not necessarily mean deleting or alleviating these. Highly mobile lifestyles, particularly in the context of labour mobilities, do not translate into a more liquid, transnational, or hybrid outset. What people do and how people move operate together to perpetuate certain categories and profiles – and, as we discussed, there are even new categories and profiles that are created by a moving lifestyle. This special issue only offers a starting point to consider and tackle these important issues.
interprétations de ce qui est entendu par « mobilité » divergent. Il peut être question de mobilité spatiale, physique, informationnelle, culturelle, sociale ou matérielle, pour n’en citer que quelques-unes. Cette complexité s’est avérée dans l’élaboration même de ce numéro thématique et, de surcroît, avec l’idée que celle-ci devienne mode de vie. En effet, qu’est-ce qu’un mode de vie mobile ? Si nous avions une idée relativement claire de ce que cela signifiait, travaillant sur ce sujet depuis plusieurs années, nous nous sommes aperçus au fur et à mesure que de nombreuses variantes et nuances provenant de conceptions différentes permettaient de questionner l’idée que nous en avions et, ainsi, de la faire évoluer. Il nous a donc fallu réfléchir ce numéro autrement, en nous servant de ces divergences pour saisir toute la complexité de ce qu’est un mode de vie mobile. La proposition qui est faite ici relève plus d’un laboratoire réflexif sur la mobilité comme mode de vie — ce qui est nommé en anglais lifestyle mobilities — à partir de cas d’études variés que d’une volonté de catégorisation en vue de démontrer tout le potentiel de recherche de ce champ d’études relativement récent. Elle découle également d’une volonté d’offrir un premier numéro en français sur cette thématique et ainsi de suggérer une terminologie en français de notions fréquemment utilisées dans la littérature scientifique anglophone ayant trait à ces modes de vie mobiles.
implications of worker mobility are highlighted even less often. Indeed, despite the anthropocentric focus of sustainability as a concept, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the aspect of social sustainability. As the COVID-19 crisis shows, when it comes to the nexus between migration and tourism, the current and future challenges are huge.
associated with images, imagery and imaginaries, whereas mobility is connected to movement, motion and migration (not to mention its imagined opposite, immobility). To be able to see the forest for the trees, I focus in this critical reflection on a discussion of the concepts themselves. One of the analytical advantages of mobility studies, a
relatively novel field of study, is that it shows us how imagination (a dynamic psychological process) and imaginaries (products of the imagination) are crucial for very different forms of human (im)mobility.
events of 2020 are contributing to a possibly substantial, meaningful and positive transformation of the planet in general, and tourism specifically. This is not a return to a ‘normal’ that existed before – but is instead a vision of how the world is changing, evolving, and transforming into something different from what it was before the 2020 global pandemic experience. Comments from the guest editors for this special issue
are individually identified in this introduction editorial.