Noel B. SalazarKU Leuven | ku leuven · Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Noel B. Salazar
PhD (UPenn), MSc (Essex), MA, BA (Leuven)
Envisioning planetary futures...
About
144
Publications
80,767
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5,552
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
I obtained my PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania (USA) and am Research Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Leuven (Belgium). I served as President of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (2013-15) and am currently Secretary-General of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (2018-23).
Additional affiliations
September 2014 - May 2022
October 2008 - September 2011
Position
- MIGRATOURIMA (FP7)
Description
- Migration, tourism, imaginaries, anthropology, ethnography, Tanzania, Chile, Indonesia
January 2005 - present
Education
September 2002 - May 2008
Publications
Publications (144)
Using examples from long-term anthropological fieldwork in Tanzania, this paper critically analyzes how well generally accepted community-based tourism discourses resonate with the reality on the ground. It focuses on how local guides handle their role as ambassadors of communal cultural heritage and how community members react to their narratives...
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...
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 i...
While situations of crisis are a cause of great distress for those affected, particularly the most vulnerable ones, they offer scholars unique opportunities to study people and society because such circumstances intensify existing processes, revealing what works well and where there are problems. The 2020 coronavirus outbreak was not any different....
The Special Issue pursues a two-fold objective: (1) fostering a grounded debate on the analytical fruitfulness of the neo-nomad concept to describe historically situated empirical phenomena, and (2) exploring the sociopolitical consequences of these allegedly alternative, although possibly highly individualistic, forms of living for collective proj...
This reflexive article combines recent as well as established insights from various anthropological subfields and beyond to address a world that is increasingly on the move, and this in ways that we do not fully understand, let alone manage or control. As such, the text involves a critical thinking exercise that focuses on the importance of process...
Purpose
As tourism destinations grapple with declines in tourist arrivals due to COVID-19 measures, scholarly debate on overtourism remains active, with discussions on solutions that could be enacted to contain the excessive regrowth of tourism and the return of “overtourism”. As social science holds an important role and responsibility to inform t...
Venezuelans escaping from the crisis in their country count currently among the largest displaced populations in the world. Chile seems to offer them an oasis of political and economic stability. This ethnographic study explores the migrant trajectories of Venezuelan women. We disentangle their migration process, including destination imaginaries,...
This special issue on Mobile Labour explores how mobility and labour conflate to create and perpetuate conditions of segregation, discrimination and differentiation, with a special emphasis on processes of racialization (although not excluding others, like gender and age).
In this commentary piece, I combine insights gained from the various contributions to this special issue with my own research and understanding to trace the (dis)connections between, on the one hand, (post-)nationalism and its underlying concept of belonging and, on the other hand, cosmopolitanism and its underlying concept of becoming. I pay speci...
Migration and tourism are interconnected forms of human mobility, similar but different. It is impossible to draw neat boundaries around the two because they constantly intersect, sometimes within one and the same individual. Tourism and migration often fuel each other, thereby raising two interesting questions that are rarely asked, namely ‘What w...
It is hard to talk about human mobilities without taking into consideration how mobility is being shaped by and shaping processes of imagination. The key concepts of imagination and mobility have rich and complex genealogies. The matter is even made more complex because there are many related concepts surrounding them. Imagination is associated wit...
This special issue is a reflection by tourism scholars on the initial impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the world, with travel and tourism being among the most sig- nificant areas to bear those impacts. However, instead of an analysis of the impacts of COVID-19 on tourism places and sectors, as is the emphasis for many other journal special issue...
This edited volume deploys the concept of ‘translocality’ to explore the exchange relations of mobile actors and how these redefine understandings about identity, ethnicity and Islam. The focus on Central Asia and the Caucasus makes sense because the movements of people and ideas in that post-Soviet region have been core sociocultural and political...
The large number of commentaries in this special issue reflect the need that so many
people have to express themselves as a way of releasing the anxieties and integrating
the hopes that the COVID-19 pandemic has engendered in individuals and groups
around the world. The guest editors of this special issue provide the following comments in reflectin...
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, a...
In this short article, I off er 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 exp...
The concepts of migration and mobility clearly intersect, but they are not synonyms. While migration by definition entails mobility, migration studies has privileged studying other aspects of the migratory process. This article analyzes migratory (im)mobilities and methodologies to study them and it critically reflects on the usefulness of mobility...
The European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) is a professional organization open to all social anthropologists either qualified in or working in Europe. Founded in 1989, the EASA is a self‐governing democratic body. The association seeks to advance anthropology in Europe by organizing biennial conferences, by editing the journal Social...
This article provides an ethnographic analysis of domestic labor mobility among Brazilian construction workers in the context of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. We start from the premise that mobile laborers are crucial for the physical development and expansion of cities. However, the importance of domestic migrants in this process is...
As a concept, mobility captures the common impression that one's lifeworld is in flux, with not only people, but also cultures, objects, capital, businesses, services, diseases, media, images, information, and ideas circulating across (and even beyond) the planet. The scholarly literature is replete with metaphors trying to describe (perceived) alt...
Airport Urbanism: Infrastructure and Mobility in Asia. By Max Hirsh . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2016. vii, 157 pp. ISBN: 9780816696109 (paper). - Volume 77 Issue 1 - Noel B. Salazar
This conversation considers some of the disciplinary divides and anxieties surrounding contemporary research on media and mobility through a discussion of linkages between these two research fields and the role of non-media centric focuses on media across the disciplines. The conversation was sparked by the three-day workshop, Anthropologies of Med...
The year 2017 happens to be the “International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development” (#IY2017). The idea to use tourism as a tool for development is not new. So, why this theme, and why now?
This Afterword reviews the special issue of the Journal of Sustainable Tourism on Critical Geographies, which focuses on the intricate relationships between tourism and various forms of tourism related violence. It notes the slippery and complex concept of violence in tourism, and that it is typically seen from the viewpoint of the tourist, with re...
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 th...
Research into mobility is an exciting challenge for the social sciences that raises novel social, cultural, spatial and ethical questions. At the heart of these empirical and theoretical complexities lies the question of methodology: how can we best capture and understand a planet in flux? Methodologies of Mobility speaks beyond disciplinary bounda...
This article contains the text and discussion of a debate held at the IUAES World Congress in Anthropology at Manchester University in 2013. The motion was proposed by Bela Feldman-Bianco (State University of Campinas), seconded by Noel Salazar (University of Leuven) and was opposed by Shahram Khosravi (Stockholm University), seconded by Nicholas d...
Within the social sciences, migration has traditionally been conceived of as a unidirectional, purposeful and intentional process from one state of fixity (in the place of origin) to another (in the destination). By mapping the trajectories of Brazilians who currently reside in Belgium or the UK, this article draws attention to a group of people wh...
This article analyses how cultural patterns and social organization shape the meaning-making of human mobility and technology, and vice versa. We extend the definition of mobile technologies from engineered devices with portable quality to tools supporting peoples’ customary mobile practices. Specifically, we analyse the embodiment of contemporary...
This exclusive department is created to include findings of special significance and to identify areas of subtle research nuances through mutual debates, discourse and discussions. Elenctic method is used wherein knowledge progresses through articulation, aoss-examination and rejection of spurious hypotheses. Thus, probe aims at encowaging scholars...
Some argue that the globalization of heritage through tourism has led to a greater respect for (both material and living) culture than previously existed. However, the transformation of heritage properties into destinations and cultural expressions into performances is seldom straightforward. The interface between heritage and tourism is extremely...
In A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China, Jenny Chio skillfully unpacks the complexities of ethnic-tourism development in rural China. Based on substantial ethnographic fieldwork in Ping’an (a Zhuang village in Guangxi) and Upper Jidao (a Miao village in Guizhou), she lays bare the regimes of mobility and visuality that t...
It is hard to imagine tourism without the creative use of seductive, as well as restrictive, imaginaries about peoples and places. These socially shared assemblages are collaboratively produced and consumed by a diverse range of actors around the globe. As a nexus of social practices through which individuals and groups establish places and peoples...
Tourists have been labelled, metaphorically, in multiple ways. This includes descriptions of tourists as (secular) pilgrims in a quest of authenticity but also as travellers on a sacred journey. In contrast, the stereotypical image that tourists are hedonists is related particularly (but not exclusively) with sun, sand and sex, and is associated wi...
Lifestyle migration has become a popular term to denote ‘voluntary relocation to places that are perceived as providing an enhanced or, at least, different lifestyle’ (McIntyre 2009: 4). Of course, virtually all forms of migration are related to aspirations of a ‘better life’. The focus of lifestyle migration is on ‘the lifestyle choices inherent w...
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...
Chile’s geographical remoteness has largely defined the imaginaries people share about this Latin American country. Despite its historical image as finis terrae (“the end of the world”), migrants from all corners found their way to these isolated peripheral lands. Thanks to new means of transport and communication, Chile nowadays is as exposed to t...
The role of anthropology as an academic discipline that seeds tourism imaginaries across the globe is more extensive than generally acknowledged. In this article, I draw on ethnographic and archival research in Indonesia and Tanzania to examine critically the recycling of long-refuted ethnological ideas and scientific ideologies in contemporary tou...
Ethnographic practice developed within anthropology as a fieldwork method and methodology that values uncertainty and the necessary reflexivity this triggers. In order to give this epistemological challenge a chance, ethnographers were allowed sufficient time to soak in 'Otherness'. Time was deemed indispensable to cope with the ambiguity of what e...
World heritage sites across the globe are adapting themselves to the homogenizing standards of tourism at the same time as trying to maintain, or even increase, their local particularity. While local and national tourism authorities and tour agencies package and sell so-called 'authentic' cultural landscapes or 'traditional' cultures, what counts a...
Women Lawyers for Human Rights); the Muslim Women's League; and the Association of Muslim Women in America. These non-governmental organizations have provided women with vehicles for articulating their interests, thereby creating a public identity for them to challenge existing stereotypes. Perhaps the most controversial discussion in this study co...
Questions
Question (1)
I’m trying to establish a list of cities/metropolitan regions, across the globe, with the highest percentage of “temporary populations” (including categories such as temporary workers, expatriates on fixed-term contracts and foreign students, but excluding immigrants who have settled). Dubai would be a good example. Who can point me to appropriate data sources or has first-hand information?
Keywords: world cities, global cities, gateway cities, temporary migration, mobility, transient population
