ANTHROMOB

Why do people travel? Travel has always been central to humanity. While mass tourism only origi-nated in the nineteenth century, seasonal migration, pilgrimage and other forms of travel existed in most societies long before that period. Today, the practice of journeying across imagined as well as physical ‘borders’ is practically universal, and travel encompasses many areas of social life. Un-doubtedly, transnational mobility is now one of the most pervasive and visible activities the world over. While travel motivations widely differ, ‘free’ movement is often fuelled by the incessant desire for novelty and difference and propelled by prefabricated images and myths about ‘Other’ peoples and places. At the same time, human mobility is marked by fundamental imbalances of power, re-flecting economic disparities, and providing grounds for sociocultural conflict. As a central dimen-sion of globalisation, cross-border travel offers us a useful lens on many key questions about trans-nationalism and cosmopolitanism, identity and heritage, commoditisation, historical and cultural representation, authenticity and ownership, inequality, gender relations, environmental sustaina-bility, and more. How do people move across various sociocultural boundaries and how do they create specific cultures of mobility? Drawing upon contemporary anthropological concepts and theories of movement and border crossings (rather than place and location), this course analyses ‘travel’ as a dynamic set of sociocultural practices and discourses. Students are invited to think crit-ically about the complex interrelationships between various forms of border-crossing human mo-bilities.

Drawing on a thematically and geographically diverse set of theoretical and ethnographic texts, this seminar aims at discussing the analytical purchase of (im)mobility as an overarching conceptual framework to study and understand the current human condition.

Combining reflections on my personal experiences regarding tourism with an analytical review of key concepts, this essay addresses the question whether and how tourism contributes to building a global ‘culture of peace’. Setting the scene, I first situate myself vis-à-vis tourism and the peace-through-tourism idea. The next section of the paper provides an in-depth analysis of the terms culture, peace, and tourism. After having defined these concepts, I illustrate how my own research project contributes in innovative ways to the current debate. I conclude with a plea for more collaboration and open dialogue between policy makers, industry representatives, and scholars in order to facilitate ‘peace through tourism’ as well as ‘peace within tourism’.

Despite mass investments in advanced border controls, refugees and migrants keep arriving along southern European shores under increasingly desperate circumstances. Outside Italy, hardly a week has passed in summer 2014 without news of boat tragedies; in Greece, refugees have launched hunger strikes in crammed detention camps; and in Spain, migrants have clambered up border fences or drowned while trying to swim into the country's North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla.

What has gone wrong at Europe's frontiers – and who is responsible for the mess? asks anthropologist Ruben Andersson in his new book Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe. Based on mobile fieldwork, the book gives a rare ethnographic account of Europe's border control landscape, showing how the "fight against illegal migration" has created absurd incentives and devastating consequences. At the continent's southern frontiers, an "illegality industry" has emerged to halt the migrant boats, involving an expanding range of sectors: European and African border forces, defence conglomerates and intelligence agencies, international and humanitarian organisations, research institutes and media outlets. When another tragedy occurs, when another boat sinks, the industry grows yet again. But this industry is not the "solution" to the crisis at the borders, the book shows – it is rather a fundamental part of the problem.

As a result of European externalization of the politics of migration, Southern and Eastern Mediterranean countries like Morocco are increasingly co-opted to deter asylum-seekers and other migrants. These latter, criminalized and labelled as ‘illegal’, are prevented from reaching a Europe whose economy nevertheless partially relies on the precarious and low-cost labour of sans-papiers. As Morocco shifts from a country of mainly emigration to also a country of ‘transit’ and immigration, thousands of Sub-Saharan migrants find themselves ‘stranded’, unable to go further, return or gain a meaningful legal status in Morocco. The research focuses on the two poor and densely populated neighbourhoods of Douar Hajja and Maadid, often called after the larger, adjacent neighbourhood Taqaddoum (‘progress’ in Arabic). Reputed to be violent and dangerous, they host a visible, (im)mobile population of irregular, sub-Saharan migrants struggling to cope with everyday life and (re)considering their uncertain migratory journeys.
This research engages with recent critical debates in anthropology over ‘mobility’ and ‘illegalization’ to examine how ‘irregular’ sub-Saharan migrants cope with violent abuses and attempt to exert control over their lives in a Moroccan marginal neighbourhood. Exploring migrants’ imagination and hope, it focuses particularly on migrants’ circumscribed agency as well as emerging social relationships and political participation. Rather than adding to the profuse production of migration studies concepts, the thesis contends that migrants’ own articulations of notions such as ‘adventure’ and ‘objective’ offer an analytical tool to overcome some of the pitfalls of other concepts (e.g. transit, imagined community) which do not completely succeed in accounting for migrants’ experiences; their own ambiguities and limits are useful in uncovering some of the dilemmas faced by migrants in Morocco.

Si bien la antropología y el turismo no siempre han tenido una relación feliz, la antropología del turismo ha alcanzado la mayoría de edad, y esto en diferentes tradiciones académicas. Desde hace medio siglo, este subcampo de la antropología desempeñó un papel importante en el establecimiento de los estudios de turismo. Aquí trazo esta historia, analizando el influyente papel en los volúmenes editados de Anfitriones e Invitados para dar forma a la relación entre la antropología y el  turismo. Me acerco a cómo algunas ideas novedosas no fueron recogidas, mientras que otras empezaron a llevar sus propias vidas. Este ejercicio nos ayuda a comprender mejor la posición actual de la antropología del turismo dentro de los estudios de antropología y
turismo, así como a identificar las direcciones futuras. Esto incluye el reconocimiento de que no hay un solo canon, sino múltiples antropologías del turismo. La antropología como disciplina tiene importantes contribuciones que hacer al estudio del turismo. Ofrece un enfoque holístico para el análisis crítico del turismo a través de su marco comparativo y la capacidad de unir varias escalas, reconociendo la interconexión intercultural de los ámbitos económico, ambiental y social. La pregunta que pide una respuesta es cómo los antropólogos deben tratar la implicación de la disciplina en el turismo contemporáneo alrededor del globo.

In this paper, I examine how home is imagined and socially constructed in the life of " location-independent families " (LIF). Location-independence is a form of lifestyle mobility based on the possibility of running an online business from anywhere in the world and the choice to homeschool the children. Through an examination of families' stories based on in-depth interviews and virtual ethnography, the article explores the ways families-on-the-move negotiate their idea of home at the complicated intersections between security and freedom; material dispossession and need for attachment; isolation and sense of community. LIFs' imagination of home is not bound to a static, fixed, geographical place but takes a contextual and processual dimension, as social process and lived experience. Its core is the simultaneous physical presence of the family members and different home-making practices.

In community-centered cultural tourism, the encounter with the ‘Other’ is central and the role of professional intermediaries in facilitating this experience crucial. Tour guides are often the only ‘locals’ with whom tourists spend a considerable amount of time. These tourism service workers have considerable agency in the image-building process of the peoples and places visited. They not only shape tourist imaginaries but indirectly influence the self-image of those visited too. Using ethnographic examples from long-term fieldwork in Tanzania, this paper scrutinizes how local guides handle their public role as ambassadors of communal cultural heritage and how communities variously react to their tourismifying narratives and practices. Selected modules from the well-established and award-winning Cultural Tourism Program (CTP) are taken as an instructive case study. Findings reveal multiple issues of power and resistance that help us grasp what is at the root of many community-centered tourism conflicts and how these can be overcome.

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.

Introduction to a special journal issue on public interest anthropology applied to cultural heritage and tourism. All papers in this special issue on public interest anthropology applied to cultural heritage and tourism were originally presented at the 102nd Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. The panel took up the general conference theme, ‘Peace', in an exploration of heritage, tourism, and the ways public interest anthropology can address proliferating conflicts arising in tourism at heritage sites. Each author addresses a diverse assortment of themes intersecting with tourism, heritage, and the public interest, analyzing how groups formulate heritage identities and translate these identities into representations and special interests.

In tourism studies globalization and localization are often conceived of as a binary opposition. The ethnography of an Indonesian group of tour guides presented here illustrates how the global and the local are intimately intertwined through what has been described as the process of “glocalization”. The guides studied are remarkable front-runners of glocalization. They fully participate in global popular culture and use new technologies in their private lives. While guiding, however, they skillfully represent the glocalized life around them as a distinctive “local”, adapted to the tastes of different groups of international tourists. It is concluded that tourism offers excellent opportunities to study glocalization, but that more grounded research is needed.

In this short article, I offer a personal reflection on my own mobilities and how these influenced my academic interest in human movement and brought me in contact with mobility studies and Transfers. On the special occasion of the journal's tenth anniversary, I look back at how the journal has fared. I remind readers of the initial plans and expectations that were expressed by the founding editors, with a focus on issues that are important from an anthropological point of view. I complement this critical and constructive analysis with a brief look into the future. In which direction should Transfers ideally be moving? What are the implications of societal developments such as the ones surrounding the coronavirus pandemic for the journal and its thematic focus?

Turning the attention to the temporal as well as the more familiar spatial dimensions of mobility, this volume focuses on the momentum for and temporal composition of mobility, the rate at which people enact or deploy their movements as well as the conditions under which these moves are being marshalled, represented and contested. This is an anthropological exploration of temporality as a form of action, a process of actively modulating or responding to how people are moving rather than the more usual focus in mobility studies on where they are heading.

In this article, I discuss immobility as both an analytical concept and a lived experience. I review contemporary scholarly understandings of immobility and disentangle the unavoidable relational dynamics with its positive linguistic opposite, mobility. Concrete illustrations from migration studies and the global coronavirus crisis illustrate how immobility, at various scales of analysis and experience, is not only theoretically but also socially, economically, and politically relevant. Together with the in-depth review of existing scholarship, these examples confi rm that the conceptual distinction made between immobility and mobility is often purely heuristic. In the messiness of people's lives, mobility and immobility are not mutually exclusive categories but, rather, two dynamic sides of the same coin.

This chapter is organized into four sections that explore different facets of glocalization: (1) as a cultural approach, (2) as a tool to mitigate crises in tourism experiences, (3) as a business approach to develop successful tourism experiences, and (4) as an impetus for transformative tourism experiences.

Historically, recreational running grew partially with the aim of
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.

It is hard to imagine tourism without the creative use of seductive as well as restrictive imaginaries about peoples and places. This article presents a conceptual framework for the study of tourism imaginaries and their diffusion. Where do such imaginaries originate, how and why are they circulated across the globe, and what kind of impact do they have on people’s lives? I discuss the multiple links between tourism and imagination, illustrating the overlapping but conflicting ways in which imaginings and fantasies drive tourists and tourism service providers alike. By applying this conceptual approach to international tourism in developing countries, I illustrate how the critical analysis of imaginaries offers a powerful deconstruction device of ideological, political, and sociocultural stereotypes and cliche´s.

Taken together, the various articles that make up this special issue offer a variety of analyses in different social, cultural, material, political, economic, and historical settings from which to understand how discrimination, and segregation are formed in contexts of high mobility and intense labour, with a special focus on processes of racialization, but not excluding others like age and gender. The papers explore how mobility and labour converge to create and perpetuate racial categories, cultural profiling, and forms of exclusion. The contributions include both contemporary and historical studies, and their geographies encompass the arctic, the Middle East, Asia, the Atlantic, Europe and the seas themselves. These include analyses of labour lifestyles in arctic working camps, the racialization of Filipino workers in container ships, or the racialization of Chinese workers in Singapore, the livelihoods of expats between Europe and Dubai and how they cope with different racial ca...

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 book builds on, as well as critiques, past and present studies of mobility. In so doing, it 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 book proposes 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. Within this framework and its emphasis on social fields of differential power, the various contributors to this collection ethnographically explore the disparities, inequalities, racialised representations and national mythscapes that facilitate and legitimate differential mobility and fixity. Although they examine nation-state building processes, the anthropological analysis is not confined by national boundaries.

Grounded in scholarly analysis and personal reflection, and drawing on a multi-sited and multi-method research design, Momentous Mobilities disentangles the meanings attached to temporary travels and stays abroad and offers empirical evidence as well as novel theoretical arguments to develop an anthropology of mobility. Both focusing specifically on how various societies and cultures imagine and value boundary-crossing mobilities “elsewhere” and drawing heavily on his own European lifeworld, the author examines momentous travels abroad in the context of education, work, and spiritual quests and the search for a better quality of life.

Success stories in tourism usually come from the industry and are eagerly used as marketing tools to promote destinations. This chapter reflects on what ‘successful tourism’ is, and why scholars are more cautious than practitioners are in using this kind of catchphrase terminology. The discussion takes into account the contemporary context of an increasingly powerful global tourism-industrial complex. By way of a case study, the second part of the chapter analyzes a remarkable transnational network that has organically grown and aims at creating sustainable small-scale tourism projects worldwide. Focusing on the network’s unique combination of for-profit and non-profit activities in Belgium, Indonesia, and Tanzania, I assess the degree to which they are examples of ‘successful tourism’. The examples show that sustainable tourism development takes vision, planning, and a lot of work and dedication to assure that projects that were successful at one stage remain so in the near future.

El presente artículo examina las teorías del turismo internacional en países en desarrollo, inspiradas en la perspectiva antropológica. Esto se hace analizando las interrelaciones entre tres conceptos teóricos centrales: la cultura, el poder y la identidad. Los primeros intentos antropológicos de teorizar sobre el turismo contemporáneo se inscribieron en el marco de la economía política y se centraron en las desigualdades a escala macro. Enlazando el turismo con la dependencia y la dominación, dichas teorías estaban muy influenciadas por la teoría marxista. El mismo marco se ha usado más recientemente para analizar las llamadas formas de turismo «alternativas», las cuales hacen énfasis en lo auténtico y la sostenibilidad. Basados en el paradigma «anfitrión-invitado», los antropólogos han explorado tradicionalmente la interacción personal entre los turistas y las personas que habitan los destinos turísticos. Esta perspectiva se ha combinado con un enfoque en la relación entre el turismo y las políticas identitarias. Los académicos del tema han añadido recientemente una perspectiva foucaultiana y una crítica feminista. Con el propósito de sintetizar esta amplia gama de elaboraciones teóricas, la antropología del turismo tiene una apremiante necesidad de un marco teórico integrador, que entrelace los diferentes niveles en los que entran en juego las culturas, los poderes y las identidades.

Figures of mobility, from nomads to flâneurs and tourists, have been used to describe both self and other in the social sciences and humanities for a long time. They act as a conceptual shorthand in contemporary scholarly debates, allowing social theorists to relate broad-scale phenomena to the human condition. This repeated usage highlights how these figures have become 'keywords', in the sense given by Raymond Williams, which typify much of the vocabulary constituting the study of human mobility today. In this general introduction, I lay out the overall conceptual framework behind the various contributions to this special issue.