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'.
Phone: +32-16-320159
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'.
Phone: +32-16-320159
Address: Cultural Mobilities Research
Faculty of Social Sciences
University of Leuven
Parkstraat 45, bus 3615
BE-3000 Leuven
Belgium
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Books by Noel B. Salazar
The first part of the book takes a closer look at endurance, by examining how it relates to concepts such as resilience, perseverance, and perdurance. By analysing how these concepts overlap but differ, we reach a better understanding of what constitutes endurance. Furthermore, endurance is reconfigured as a as a mundane aspect of everyday life. The latter part of the book focuses on embodied experiences of endurance, more specifically on endurance running, walking, and (physical) performances. The different contributions focus on the meanings, values, and attributes that people ascribe to endurance in various socio-cultural contexts. The book uncovers practices, environments, and discourses in which endurance is applied and manifested, from drought-affected communities in rural Australia to professional endurance runners in Ethiopia as well as migrants in Greece and performance acts in domestic spaces in the United Kingdom and beyond.
This book will be of interest to scholars of movement sciences, sports studies, mobilities, leisure studies, and resilience studies.
Based on empirical research in various fields, this collection provides valuable scholarship and evidence on current processes of migration and mobility.
exposure and intense struggles by different stakeholders. This is the first book to examine sports mega-events from a mobilities perspective. It analyses the ‘mobile construction’ of global sports mega-events and the role this plays in managing labour, imaginaries, policies and legacies. In particular, the book focuses on the tension between the various mobilities and immobilities that are implied in the process of constructing a mega-event. It seeks to uncover the
ways in which an event is a series of fluid interactions that occur sequentially and simultaneously at multiple scales in diverse spheres of interaction. Contributions
explore the dynamics through which mega-events occur, revealing the textures and nuance of the complex systems that sustain them, and the ways that events
ramify throughout the international system.
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 first part of the book takes a closer look at endurance, by examining how it relates to concepts such as resilience, perseverance, and perdurance. By analysing how these concepts overlap but differ, we reach a better understanding of what constitutes endurance. Furthermore, endurance is reconfigured as a as a mundane aspect of everyday life. The latter part of the book focuses on embodied experiences of endurance, more specifically on endurance running, walking, and (physical) performances. The different contributions focus on the meanings, values, and attributes that people ascribe to endurance in various socio-cultural contexts. The book uncovers practices, environments, and discourses in which endurance is applied and manifested, from drought-affected communities in rural Australia to professional endurance runners in Ethiopia as well as migrants in Greece and performance acts in domestic spaces in the United Kingdom and beyond.
This book will be of interest to scholars of movement sciences, sports studies, mobilities, leisure studies, and resilience studies.
Based on empirical research in various fields, this collection provides valuable scholarship and evidence on current processes of migration and mobility.
exposure and intense struggles by different stakeholders. This is the first book to examine sports mega-events from a mobilities perspective. It analyses the ‘mobile construction’ of global sports mega-events and the role this plays in managing labour, imaginaries, policies and legacies. In particular, the book focuses on the tension between the various mobilities and immobilities that are implied in the process of constructing a mega-event. It seeks to uncover the
ways in which an event is a series of fluid interactions that occur sequentially and simultaneously at multiple scales in diverse spheres of interaction. Contributions
explore the dynamics through which mega-events occur, revealing the textures and nuance of the complex systems that sustain them, and the ways that events
ramify throughout the international system.
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.
scholars and artists who want to understand cities and how city life is experienced.
Academics have a lot to learn from the critical walking methodologies and participatory practices that were developed in the arts. Artists, on the other hand, can enrich their
engagements with walking by incorporating walking-related insights generated
by scholars.
of life by disentangling anthropologically how the dynamics of pace and
pacing work out in recreational mobilities.
human creativity to deal with the border regimes imposed upon each of us.
expertise, Portuguese anthropologists Xerardo Pereiro and Filipa Fernandes
present a timely overview of anthropological research on tourism.
Tourism and migration often fuel each other, thereby raising two interesting questions that are rarely asked. The first one is: ‘What would tourism be without migration?’ The answer is simple. Global tourism would not be possible without the availability of both a numerical and functional flexible workforce of migrant workers. The labour-intensive and casual nature of tourism accentuates the role of this economic sectors as a magnet for migrant labour. Given the increasing transnational nature of tourism, it is hardly surprising that tourism employment is ‘cosmopolitan’ in nature, albeit heavily stratified according to characteristics such as age, ethnicity and gender. A mobile workforce usually offers a solution to labour shortages where the local workforce is not willing to engage in low pay, low status and seasonal employment.
This brings us to the second, related question: ‘What would migration be without tourism?’ Not only does the tourism sector provide migrant labour, many migrants are also partly inspired by tourism-related imaginaries to plan their migratory itineraries. In the sociocultural logics of migration, imaginaries play a predominant role in envisioning the green grass on the other side. Not surprisingly, many of these imaginaries are circulated via tourism. Moreover, mobile lifestyles evolve not just to explore economic opportunities not available locally but also to pursue particular types of culturally and socially desirable livelihoods, what is also known as ‘lifestyle migration’ or ‘lifestyle mobility’.
Even if tourism and migration often overlap, in practice tourist and migrant movements are governed by very different regimes of mobility. In the context of the tourism labour market, this is partially related to the type of people that is employed. Tourism largely relies on low-skilled workers and workers with little qualification in general, ethnic minority groups, unemployed youth, long-term unemployed, as well as women with family responsibilities who can take only part-time jobs. The high labour mobility is not only related to the seasonality of tourism activities but also to the high turnover of staff joining and leaving the sector. Given this general context, many issues of sustainability arise. In this talk, then, I want to focus on the questions of sustainability that are directly related to the ‘mobility’ aspects of tourism labour.
In tourism, studies of mobility often focus merely on tourist movements. UNWTO has very detailed statistics on ‘international arrivals’ for instance. Unfortunately, our understanding of the issues related to the mobility of workers to meet the increased tourism demand is less progressed. In general, there has been little detailed examination of the forces that constitute and reproduce the transnational movements of tourism-related labour. If there is little attention to tourism-related labour mobilities, considerations related to the sustainability implications of worker mobility are highlighted even less often. Sustainable development as a concept was developed alongside the acute awareness that the ecological destruction and the 1980s ‘retreat from social concerns’ – manifested as poverty, deprivation and urban dereliction that blight many parts of the world – are untenable. Though the concept of sustainable development originally included a clear social mandate, for the first decades this human dimension was neglected amidst abbreviated references to sustainability that focused on bio-physical environmental issues, or was subsumed within a discourse that conflated ‘development’ and ‘economic growth’.
Indeed, despite the anthropocentric focus of the definition of sustainability, surprisingly little attention has been given to the definition of social sustainability. Social sustainability is a wide-ranging multi-dimensional concept, with the underlying question ‘what are the social goals of sustainable development?’, which is open to a multitude of answers, with no consensus on how these goals are defined. Social sustainability is the ability of maintaining social capital, including investments and services that create the basic framework for society. This implies respecting human rights and equal opportunities for all in society. It requires an equitable distribution of benefits, with a focus on alleviating poverty.
In terms of the nexus between migration and tourism, the challenges are huge. For the Asia-Pacific region, for example, the diametrically opposed mobility trends of tourists and migrants have been pointed out. Tourists are searching for experiences in the ‘pleasure periphery’, isolated destinations facilitating frontier escapist adventure, wildlife and cultural experiences. The contemporary pattern of increasing urbanization, on the other hand, mobilizes the required workforce toward the metropolitan areas. These two trends create major challenges for tourism, which faces a growing demand for labour in both areas where there is growing labour supply but without skills (untrained agricultural workers migrating to core megacities) and where there is a shrinking labour supply of all employees (pleasure periphery).
Worryingly, sustainable tourism planning and development is threatened by quickly spreading neoliberal ideas of resilience. Resilience refers to the ability to resist and recover from aversity or disaster. When resilience is lacking, crises will be experienced as disruptive; when resilience is strong, the crisis will be experienced more smoothly. Resilience planning has emerged in recent years as an alternative to the sustainable development paradigm.
Tourism stakeholders have sought to address issues of sustainability in many ways. Similarly, communities and businesses may have developed capacity (resilience) to respond to immediate and sudden threats. Few, however, have demonstrated a capacity to adapt to incremental threats to their longevity (sustainability). In the tourism literature, there is considerable emphasis on resilience to the immediate challenges (local impacts, disasters or financial shocks, for instance), yet there is merit in conceptualizing resilience as a dynamic long-term state, where there are obvious parallels with the sustainability concept.
Even if the absolute numbers of labour mobilities may be small, they can raise delicate issues locally that need to be considered when assessing the value of tourism as a local development tool. Another issue is that increasing migrant mobility and the presence of greater numbers of migrants in a tourism destination also carries consequences for tourism in terms of the product and experience offered to tourists and the imaginary they cultivate of a destination. Migrants employed in front-stage positions interact with the host society as well as domestic and international tourists. Interestingly, those workers play the role of ‘host’ for international tourists. In the case of new arrivals, migrants play a double role: they are ‘the migrant-guest’, but they are also ‘migrant- host’ to those they serve.
In sum, it is necessary to understand tourism and migration within a specific context, and as counter-veiling forces, of a broader reading of globalisation and of uneven and unequal development. While the frontiers of tourism are dismantled through the liberalisation of the service sector, the cordon sanitaire against migration to the developed economic core is tightened, even though migrants’ remittances are, in some cases, more significant than earnings from tourism. Juxtaposing migration and tourism helps emphasise the framework of global unevenness and inequality in which all forms of people movement must be contextualised and are conditioned.
An issue that urgently requires our attention and research is the general impact of human mobility and everything that comes with it. This impact is becoming continuously greater because of the number and frequency of human movements across the planet and because of the (polluting) means of transport used. In general, the whole (environmental) sustainability argument seems to have very limited impact on how most people imagine, experience, and value translocal mobilities in the context of tourism and/or migration. This is a huge challenge, one that will only grow in the future.
tourism, the reality is that tourism cannot be longer neglected as an unwanted
negative sideeffect.
It is a dynamic force through which heritage is not only consumed
but also created. Tourism development of cultural heritage is both an opportunity and a
risk and requires careful consideration, planning, implementation and management.
Sustainable tourism development entails the adoption of planning strategies to mitigate
the negative impact of tourism without sacrificing its benefits. There is an urgent need
for new ideas and concepts that reconcile tourism and heritage preservation with the
need for sustainable development. Besides this, more attention needs to be paid to
ethical issues, in particular the involvement of local communities, ethical codes of
tourism (such as the UNWTO Global Code for Ethics in Tourism), the moral implications
of cultural heritage, the responsibilities of museums and the question of who has the
power to own and interpret heritage. As global tourism continues to expand, cultural
heritage sites and practices will be the source of historically unprecedented numbers of
tourists. Most indicators suggest there will be a huge increase in tourism worldwide
over the next ten years, virtually doubling the current numbers. While the
management of cultural heritage is usually the responsibility of a particular community
or custodian group, the protection, conservation, interpretation and (re)presentation of
the cultural diversity of any particular place or people are important challenges for us
all.
there. For migrants, the journey is merely a means to get to their milk-and-honey destination. Many, however, are structurally forced to travel slowly, having to rely on basic forms of locomotion and using the most precarious and insecure roads and routes. These
trips, involving personal and social upheaval, can turn into powerful life-changing events that greatly influence whoever experiences them. As such, these journey conditions very much resemble those of wandering pilgrims, the archetypes of transformative traveling.
Tourists, on the other hand, many of whom desire their holiday experience to be transformative, are structurally barred from travel-as-toil. For the sake of comfort, modern transport technologies and tourism service providers alike have taken the travail out of travel, thereby taking the journey out of the holiday experience.
The movement of ‘slow travel’ is an attempt to reverse this. In this presentation, I reflect anthropologically on imaginaries of mobility (in the physical sense of 'motion’). Why does the actual journey of migrants (not to mention refugees), and it transformative effects,
hardly figures in imaginaries of migration? And what is the role of imaginaries in the tourism shift from ‘being moved’ around to a renewed desire for more active form of mobility, as an integral part of the tourist experience?
Participants should wear comfortable clothes and shoes and need to pre-register in advance (max. 30). They will be able to access recommended reading list before the session via the lab's blog. During the lab, which will take place outside, they will be assigned various micro-tasks to be executed alone, in pairs, in small groups, or with everybody present. The idea is to allow participants to acknowledge and challenge issues of pace, rhythm, tempo, velocity and flow surrounding their own movements as well as the people, 'things' and contexts circulating around us. They will be invited to explore their own patterns of 'being there' through techniques of breathing and mindfulness. At the end of the lab, we want to discuss how these issues and experiences can be extrapolated to situations of fieldwork and teaching.
ethica Kristien Hens (UAntwerpen) en antropoloog
Noël Salazar.