Author:

Keywords:

mobility, immobility, chile, critical theory, anthropology, concept

Abstract:

Mobility as a concept-metaphor captures the common impression that our lifeworld is in constant flux, with people moving in every direction across the planet. The literature is replete with metaphorical conceptualizations attempting to describe perceived altered spatial and temporal movements. The upsurge of interest in mobility goes hand in hand with new theoretical approaches that reject a sedentarist metaphysics in favor of a nomadic metaphysics and an increase in empirical studies on the most diverse kinds of movements, questioning the taken-for-granted bonds between people, place, and culture. While previously scholars tended to ignore or regard border-crossing movements as deviations from normative place-bound communities, cultural homogeneity, and social integration, discourses of globalization and cosmopolitanism (that became dominant since the end of the Cold War) seem to have shifted the pendulum in the opposite direction, mobility being promoted as normality, and place attachment a digression or resistance against globalizing forces. In this paper, I do not discuss human mobility as a brute fact but rather analyze how mobilities, as socio-cultural constructs, are experienced and imagined. Which forms of transnational mobility are currently desirable (whether they are accessible or not) and to whom? How are various forms of voluntary movement made meaningful and discursively framed as virtues or vices, both today and in a historical perspective? How do resulting ideologies of mobility circulate across the globe and become implicated in the production of mobile practices? How do people envision their potential for mobility (or motility), under what conditions do they enact that perceived right, and under what conditions is that right denied to them in practice? I explore these questions through ongoing ethnographic fieldwork about socio-cultural dominant imaginaries of (im)mobility in Chile. Chile’s geographical remoteness – a long and narrow coastal strip between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, the Atacama Desert and the icebergs of Patagonia – has largely defined the imaginaries people share about this Latin American country. Despite its historical image as finis terrae (the end of the world), many migrants found their way to these isolated peripheral lands (often as the last of imagined places), turning Chile into a mestizo society. Thanks to new means of transport and communication, Chile nowadays is as exposed to the global circulation of people, objects and ideas as the rest of the world. This points to the fact that all forms and types of (im)mobility and their imaginaries are deeply embedded in wider socio-economic structures and, thus, always need to be analyzed and understood in the specific context in which they occur. Based on recent ethnographic fieldwork, I trace how old imaginaries about Chile as an inaccessible island (going back to first descriptions by Spanish colonizers) influence how Chileans nowadays participate in and frame their perceived exclusion from a plethora of new mobilities, regardless of whether they have the actual means and freedom to cross (imaginary and real) boundaries. The method used involves extensive fieldwork in Chile, characterized by observation (direct or participant) and various types of interviews with key informants and other significant actors in the fields of migration and tourism. Ancillary data include analyses of secondary sources, audio-visual data, news media, documents, archives, the Internet, et cetera. I used exhaustive notes and personal diary entries to record the findings. The fine-grained ethnographic data I gathered reveal some interesting paradoxes, offering new perspectives on the relationality between mobility and immobility and complicating dominant assumptions about who is mobile and about who is kept in place and why.