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Anthropology
Social Anthropology

Navigating (im)mobility rules

Profile image of Noel B. SalazarNoel B. SalazarProfile image of Ignacio Fradejas-GarcíaIgnacio Fradejas-García

2024, Focaal

https://doi.org/10.3167/FCL.2024.990101
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14 pages

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Abstract

In this introductory article, we critically analyze which rules govern human 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.

Key takeaways
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  1. Mobility rules intertwine social norms and institutional control, influencing human movement.
  2. The article critiques how mobility regulations are resisted, transgressed, and remade by diverse actors.
  3. States enact both exclusionary and welcoming mobility rules, reflecting unequal global mobility dynamics.
  4. COVID-19 intensified challenges to mobility, revealing a lack of preparedness for global emergencies.
  5. Ethnographic case studies illustrate how marginalized migrants navigate complex mobility rules and power relations.

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Noel B. Salazar

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2013

Mobility studies emerged from a postmodern moment in which global ‘flows’ of capital, people and objects were increasingly noted and celebrated. Within this new scholarship, categories of migrancy are all seen through the same analytical lens. This article and Regimes of Mobility: Imaginaries and Relationalities of Power, the special issue of JEMS it introduces, build on, as well as critique, past and present studies of mobility. In so doing, this issue challenges conceptual orientations built on binaries of difference that have impeded analyses of the interrelationship between mobility and stasis. These include methodological nationalism, which counterpoises concepts of internal and international movement and native and foreigner, and consequently normalises stasis. Instead, the issue offers a regimes of mobility framework that addresses the relationships between mobility and immobility, localisation and transnational connection, experiences and imaginaries of migration, and rootedness and cosmopolitan openness. The introduction highlights how, within this framework and its emphasis on social fields of differential power, the contributors to this collection ethnographically explore the disparities, inequalities, racialised representations and national mythscapes that facilitate and legitimate differential mobility and fixity. Although the authors examine nation-state building processes, their analysis is not confined by national boundaries.

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Related topics

  • Anthropology
  • Social Anthropology
  • Migration mobilities
  • Social and Cultural Anthropology
  • Anthropology of Mobility
  • Migration (Anthropology)
  • Anthropology of migration
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