What is it about?

We often hear that we live in an increasingly mobile world, where people, goods, information and ideas constantly move across borders. This article asks us to look more critically at that assumption. People have always moved, and not everyone today has the same freedom or ability to do so. Governments, borders, technologies, economic inequalities and cultural expectations encourage some forms of movement while restricting others. Drawing on anthropology and ethnography, the article argues that we should study mobility and immobility together. Rather than simply counting who moves where, we need to understand what movement means to people, how possibilities for movement are imagined, and why some people are encouraged to travel while others are prevented from doing so. Mobility is therefore not just physical movement. It is also about power, opportunity, inequality and belonging.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Mobility is frequently associated with freedom, opportunity and progress. We tend to assume that being able to travel, migrate, study or work elsewhere expands people's possibilities. But this article shows why such a positive view can be misleading. Mobility is distributed very unevenly. Some people move relatively freely across national borders, while others encounter visas, checkpoints, financial barriers, discrimination and other restrictions. The same global processes that increase mobility for some can therefore produce immobility and exclusion for others. The article also challenges the idea that today's world is uniquely mobile. Human beings have moved over considerable distances throughout history, and in some societies mobility was more common in the past than it is today. What is distinctive about contemporary movement is therefore not simply its quantity, but the complex systems through which movement is regulated, categorized and given meaning. This is where anthropology makes a distinctive contribution. Ethnographic research can reveal how apparently abstract forces such as borders, globalization or migration policies are actually experienced in everyday life. Importantly, the article warns researchers against starting from the assumption that mobility explains everything. If researchers look only for movement, they risk overlooking the importance of staying put, attachment to place and the institutions and infrastructures that enable some movements while preventing others. The article therefore shifts the question from“Is the world becoming more mobile?” toward more revealing questions: Who can move? Who cannot? Under what conditions? How is movement interpreted? And who gets to decide which kinds of mobility are desirable?

Perspectives

Looking back at this article, I think one of its enduring lessons is deceptively simple: movement should never be taken for granted. At the time, mobility was rapidly becoming an influential concept across the social sciences. There was considerable excitement around flows, networks, transnationalism and increasingly mobile lives. Alan Smart and I certainly recognized the analytical possibilities of this “mobility turn,” but we were also uncomfortable with the tendency to celebrate movement almost automatically. If mobility became the lens through which everything was viewed, what might disappear from sight? That question remains important to me. Mobility sounds inherently positive because we associate it with freedom: being able to travel, migrate, explore or pursue opportunities elsewhere. Yet mobility is never simply a matter of individual choice. A passport, border regime, income, social position or political situation can radically alter what moving means and whether it is possible at all. One person's effortless journey may correspond to another person's prolonged waiting, blocked aspiration or enforced displacement. I therefore find the relationship between mobility and immobility much more interesting than mobility by itself. The two are not opposites. They continually produce one another. Airports accelerate movement while simultaneously stopping and screening people. Borders facilitate some forms of circulation while obstructing others. Technologies can make movement easier, but technologies are also used to monitor, slow down and prevent movement. Even somebody who remains physically in one place may participate intensively in mobile worlds through imagination, communication and social relationships. This is also why ethnography remains so important. The contributors to the special issue did not originally enter the field determined to “study mobility.” Questions of movement and immobility emerged while studying tourism, migration, commodities and other aspects of social life. For me, that is a strength rather than a weakness. Anthropology is at its best when concepts emerge from sustained engagement with people's lives rather than when reality is forced to fit fashionable theoretical categories. Looking at the argument today, I would perhaps place even greater emphasis on mobility justice. The crucial question is not whether our world is mobile or immobile. It is how opportunities to move, remain, return or belong are distributed, and how differences in speed, risk, rights and status become mechanisms for producing inequality. The article already pointed strongly in that direction.

Professor Noel B. Salazar
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Anthropological Takes on (Im)Mobility, Identities, December 2011, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/1070289x.2012.683674.
You can read the full text:

Read

Resources

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page