Noel B. Salazar

Regimes of Mobility Across the Globe

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.

Community-based cultural tourism: issues, threats and opportunities

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 and practices. It pays special attention to the time-limited, project-based development method, the need for an effective exit strategy, for quality control, tour guide training and long-term tour guide retention. The study is based on a program funded by the Netherlands-based development agency, Stichting Nederlandse Vrijwilligers (SNV), from 1995 to 2001, and on post-program experiences. Findings reveal multiple complex issues of power and resistance that illustrate many community-based tourism conflicts. The encounter with the “Other” is shown to be central and that the role of professional intermediaries in facilitating this experience of cultural contact is crucial. Tour guides are often the only “locals” with whom tourists spend considerable time: they have considerable agency in the image-building process of the peoples and places visited, (re)shaping tourist destination images and indirectly influencing the self-image of those visited too. The paper provides ideas for overcoming the issues and problems described.

Tourism and Glocalization: ‘Local’ Tour Guiding

Abstract 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.

The Power of Imagination in Transnational Mobilities

At the roots of many travels to distant destinations, whether in the context of tourism or migration, are historically laden and socioculturally constructed imaginaries. People worldwide rely on such imaginaries, from the most spectacular fantasies to the most mundane reveries, to shape identities of themselves and others. These unspoken representational assemblages are powerful because they enact and construct peoples and places, implying multiple, often conflicting, representations of Otherness, and questioning several core values multicultural societies hold, by blurring as well as enforcing traditional territorial, social, and cultural boundaries. What are the contours of power, agency, and subjectivity in imaginaries of transnational mobility and the intersecting social categories those visions both reify and dissolve? Ethnographic studies of human (im)mobility provide an innovative means to grasp the complexity of the global circulation of people and the world-making images and ideas surrounding these movements. As a polymorphic concept, mobility invites us to renew our theorizing, especially regarding conventional themes such as culture, identity, and transnational relationships. This article critically analyzes some preliminary findings of an ongoing multisited research project that traces how prevalent imaginaries of transnational tourism to and migration from the “global South” are (dis)connected. I suggest anthropology has unique contributions to make to the current debate in the social sciences by ethnographically detailing how mobility is a contested ideological construct involving so much more than mere movement.

Anthropological Takes on (Im)Mobility

In this introduction, we outline the general conceptual framework that ties the various contributions to this special issue together. We argue for the importance of anthropology to “take on” mobility and discuss the advantages of the ethnographic approach in doing so. What is the analytical purchase of mobility as one of the root metaphors in contemporary anthropological theorizing? What are the (dis)advantages of looking at the current human condition through the lens of mobility? There is a great risk that the fast-growing field of mobility studies neglects different interpretations of what is going on, or that only patterns that fit the mobilities paradigm will be considered, or that only extremes of (hyper)mobility or (im)mobility will be given attention. The ethnographic sensibilities of fieldworkers who learn about mobility while studying other processes and issues, and who can situate movement in the multiple contexts between which people move, can both extend the utility of the mobilities approach, and insist on attention to other dynamics that might not be considered if the focus is first and last on (im)mobility as such. In this special issue, we do not want to discuss human mobility as a brute fact but rather analyze how mobilities, as sociocultural constructs, are experienced and imagined.

Heritage Tourism, Conflict, and the Public Interest: An Introduction

This special issue explores how and why conflicts arise in the development and practice of heritage tourism. From New York City’s Ground Zero and the archaeological site of Chichen Itza in Yucatan, Mexico, to an Underground Railroad site in Pennsylvania and a post-industrial Massachusetts town, the authors of these four articles are concerned with identifying the often overlapping interests of stakeholders in their attempts to gain access to and guide the development of heritage resources. This issue grows out of a 2003 symposium entitled ‘Resolving Conflicts in Heritage Tourism: A Public Interest Anthropology Approach’, at the 102nd annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago, Illinois, organised by Dr Peggy Reeves Sanday, Noel Salazar, and Benjamin Porter of the University of Pennsylvania. The symposium encouraged scholars to consider heritage apart from official and ‘top-down’ definitions as well as how an emerging methodological approach, public interest anthropology (PIA hereafter),1 could be applied to the analysis of heritage conflicts. This introduction places the issue’s key themes of heritage, tourism, conflict, and the public interest in focus and illustrates their intersection in a brief case study from modern Jordan. Following this, the four ensuing articles are discussed with an emphasis on their contributions to the issue’s themes. Heritage and heritage tourism are longfamiliar terms to this journal’s readership and our goal here is not to recapitulate what others have described so well elsewhere.2 In particular, we analyse a process of revaluation that objects, sites, and practices undergo before they are placed within the domain of heritage. Additionally, we explain why tourism is an ideal realm in which to investigate heritage and why the conflicts that erupt around heritage tourism are particularly volatile.

Contemporary Ethnographic Practice and the Value of Serendipity

Serendipity, ‘the art of making an unsought finding’, is a much sought after scientific ideal. In anthropology, the epistemological weight placed on serendipity goes beyond mere sagacious discoveries because it is deemed to shape the ethnographic process. Dwelling on decades of de-construction of fieldwork as both a temporal and spatial unity, recent claims urge the discipline to shift from a quest for alternative social and cultural cosmologies to a journey that explores uncharted issues. This introduction lays out some of the new fieldwork conceptions and practices, which are analysed in depth by three ‘young scholars’ in the papers that follow.

Tourism and Cosmopolitanism: A View from Below

Based on long-term fieldwork in Indonesia and Tanzania, this article sheds new light on the contested relationship between tourism and cosmopolitanism. The ethnographic findings shift the attention from tourists to key service providers as those accruing most cosmopolitan capital through the tourism encounter. Local tour guides are able to use their privileged contacts with foreign visitors to develop cross-cultural competencies and to enhance their own cosmopolitan status. They substantiate the idea that cosmopolitanism is no privilege of the rich and well-connected and that physical or spatial mobility is not a necessary condition to become cosmopolitan. Paradoxically, the guides’ dreams of becoming more cosmopolitan (and more modern and Western) can only materialise if they represent to tourists their lifeworld, including themselves, as frozen in both time and space, because it is exactly this kind of imaged and imagined difference tourism sells to tourists for the build-up of their own cosmopolitan capital.

Towards a Global Culture of Heritage Interpretation? Evidence from Indonesia and Tanzania

Natural and cultural heritage destinations worldwide are adapting themselves to the homogenizing culture of tourism and at the same time trying to maintain, or even increase, their local distinctiveness. While local and national tourism authorities and travel agencies package and sell so-called ‘authentic’ natural landscapes or ‘traditional’ cultures, what counts as heritage and the way in which it is interpreted are increasingly defined on a global scale (e.g., UNESCOs World Heritage policies). By way of a comparative case study, this paper examines how local tour guides in Yogyakarta, Indonesia (cultural heritage tourism destination), and Arusha, Tanzania (natural heritage tourism destination), learn to tell their foreign guests seducing tourism tales. Combining an in-depth ethnography of the local tourism industry with a discourse-centred analysis of guiding narratives, the author explores the relationship between global tourism discourses and local tour guiding in both destinations. The focus is on how guides, through their interpretations of local heritage, act as key actors in mediating the tension between ongoing processes of globalization and local differentiation. Paradoxically, guides seem to rely on fashionable global tourism tales to interpret and sell their culture and heritage as authentically ‘local’. This is partly because tourists appear to appreciate interpretations that combine narratives about the particularities of a destination with well-known tourism imaginaries that are circulating globally. However, this does not mean that guides merely reproduce normative templates. In the interaction with tourists, they become themselves creative producers of tourism rhetoric.

Imagineering Otherness: Anthropological Legacies in Contemporary Tourism

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 tourism interpretation. A fine-grained analysis of local tour guide narratives and practices in two popular destinations, Yogyakarta and Arusha, illustrates empirically how outdated scholarly models, including anthropological ones, are strategically used to represent and reproduce places and peoples as authentically different and relatively static, seemingly untouched by extra-local influences.