What is it about?

Before people travel or migrate, they often already have powerful ideas about the places they might go and the lives they could lead there. These ideas come from television, advertising, tourism, popular culture, stories told by travellers and migrants, and images that have circulated for generations. Drawing on ethnographic research in Indonesia and Tanzania, this article explores how such shared imaginings influence both tourism and migration. In Indonesia, tourists often expect local people to represent an authentic, traditional and relatively unchanging way of life, even when those people themselves aspire to be mobile and cosmopolitan. In Tanzania, imaginaries of life abroad can make Europe and other destinations appear to offer opportunities for economic and social advancement, even when actual migration remains beyond most people's reach. The article shows that mobility is about much more than physical movement: it also involves imagination, identity, aspiration, inequality and power.

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Why is it important?

We often explain tourism and migration by looking at practical factors such as money, employment, transport, borders and visas. These certainly matter, but they do not fully explain why people want to move in the first place, where they dream of going, or how they imagine the people they encounter there. This article shows that imagination is itself an important force in shaping human mobility. What makes the article distinctive is that it examines tourism and migration together. These are usually treated as separate fields, yet both depend upon powerful ideas about elsewhere. Tourists may imagine destinations as authentic, exotic and unchanged, while people living in those destinations may imagine greater opportunities, modernity or cosmopolitan status somewhere else. These contrasting imaginaries can meet in the same place, and even in the same person. The article also demonstrates that imagination does not automatically lead to physical movement. A person can be geographically immobile while imagining a highly mobile life. Conversely, somebody who travels extensively may remain strongly oriented towards an imagined home. By examining such contradictions, the article helps explain why mobility and immobility need to be understood together and why access to movement remains deeply unequal. This matters because widely circulating ideas about who is supposedly modern or traditional, mobile or rooted, cosmopolitan or local can reinforce inequalities. Understanding these imaginaries therefore gives us a more nuanced way to think about tourism, migration and the unequal possibilities people have for imagining and pursuing different futures.

Perspectives

For me, this article marked an important moment in realizing that mobility cannot be understood simply by following people who physically move. Long before we travel, migrate or even seriously consider doing so, we may already have travelled extensively in our imagination. Images, stories, rumours and encounters allow us to construct possible lives elsewhere, and these imagined possibilities can profoundly influence how we understand our lives in the present. My fieldwork in Indonesia and Tanzania made the contradictions involved particularly visible. In Central Java, I encountered tour guides who were far more cosmopolitan and mobile, both physically and imaginatively, than tourists often assumed. Yet their professional success partly depended upon presenting themselves and the communities around them as distinctly “local,” traditional and rooted. The more convincingly local they appeared, the more authentic the experience could seem to foreign visitors. In Tanzania, I encountered an almost inverted dynamic. Many people who had travelled very little nevertheless possessed remarkably vivid imaginaries of life elsewhere. “The West” could become less a precise geographical location than an imagined space of possibility, prosperity and upward mobility. Yet the structural means actually to undertake such journeys were distributed extremely unevenly. People could therefore be highly mobile in their imagination while remaining physically in place. What continues to interest me is the tension between these two dimensions. Imagining another life can be enabling: it allows people to see alternatives to existing circumstances and formulate aspirations for the future. But imagination can also reproduce stereotypes, create unrealistic expectations and intensify people's awareness of opportunities from which they are excluded. This is why I see mobility as much more than getting from one place to another. It is also about the capacity to imagine oneself elsewhere, the power to turn that imagination into reality, and the inequalities that determine who can actually do so.

Professor Noel B. Salazar
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

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This page is a summary of: The Power of Imagination in Transnational Mobilities, Identities, December 2011, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/1070289x.2011.672859.
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