Author:

Keywords:

anthropology, mobility, tourism, immobility

Abstract:

It is fashionable nowadays to imagine the world on the move, with not only people, but also cultures, objects, capital, businesses, services, diseases, media, images, information, and ideas circulating across (and even beyond) the planet. If mobility is the new mantra to be chanted, the chorus line might be older than some of its proponents want to acknowledge. The founding fathers of anthropology had a keen interest in movement (e.g. Boas’ work on Inuit migration and Malinowski’s studies of the Kula ring trade) and critically engaged anthropologists were among the first to point out that not all contemporary mobilities are valued equally positively and that the very processes that produce global geographical as well as social mobility also result in immobility and exclusion. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Tanzania, I illustrate how border-crossing mobilities are imagined and discursively given meaning as a virtue or vice in the context of transnational tourism and beyond. The empirical data allow for a theoretical reflection on various uses of mobility as a concept-metaphor and on the genealogy of ideas of human mobility in anthropology, a discipline which has accused itself in the recent past of misrepresenting people as territorially, socially, and culturally bounded. I focus particularly on the added value of anthropology and its ethnographic methods in the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of mobility studies and end by assessing the analytical purchase of (im)mobility as a conceptual framework or paradigm.