Noel B. Salazar
I obtained my PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania (USA) and am currently Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences, KU Leuven (Belgium). From 2011 until 2015 I served as Executive Committee member of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (including as President of EASA) and from 2013 until 2018 as Vice President and from 2018 until 2023 as Secretary-General of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES).
My research interests include anthropologies of mobility and travel, the local-to-global nexus, discourses and imaginaries of Otherness, heritage, cultural brokering, cosmopolitanism, and endurance. I have published peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and newspaper articles on these topics in the USA, the UK, India, Indonesia, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Estonia, and Colombia.
I am the author of Momentous Mobilities (2018, Oxford: Berghahn), Envisioning Eden (2010, Oxford: Berghahn) and co-editor of Pacing Mobilities (2020, Oxford: Berghahn), Methodologies of Mobility (2017, Oxford: Berghahn), Mega-event Mobilities (2016, London: Routledge), Keywords of Mobility (2016, Oxford: Berghahn), Regimes of Mobility (2014, New York: Routledge) and Tourism Imaginaries (2014, Oxford: Berghahn). I founded CuMoRe (Cultural Mobilities Research) and the EASA Anthropology and Mobility Network.
I am on the editorial boards of, among others, Applied Mobilities, Mobile Culture Studies Journal, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, and the International Journal of Tourism Anthropology. In addition, I am on UNESCO’s and UNWTO’s roster of consultants, and I am an expert member of the ICOMOS International Cultural Tourism Committee and the UNESCO-UNITWIN Network 'Culture, Tourism and Development'.
Address: Cultural Mobilities Research
Faculty of Social Sciences
University of Leuven
Parkstraat 45, bus 3615
BE-3000 Leuven
Belgium
My research interests include anthropologies of mobility and travel, the local-to-global nexus, discourses and imaginaries of Otherness, heritage, cultural brokering, cosmopolitanism, and endurance. I have published peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and newspaper articles on these topics in the USA, the UK, India, Indonesia, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Estonia, and Colombia.
I am the author of Momentous Mobilities (2018, Oxford: Berghahn), Envisioning Eden (2010, Oxford: Berghahn) and co-editor of Pacing Mobilities (2020, Oxford: Berghahn), Methodologies of Mobility (2017, Oxford: Berghahn), Mega-event Mobilities (2016, London: Routledge), Keywords of Mobility (2016, Oxford: Berghahn), Regimes of Mobility (2014, New York: Routledge) and Tourism Imaginaries (2014, Oxford: Berghahn). I founded CuMoRe (Cultural Mobilities Research) and the EASA Anthropology and Mobility Network.
I am on the editorial boards of, among others, Applied Mobilities, Mobile Culture Studies Journal, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, and the International Journal of Tourism Anthropology. In addition, I am on UNESCO’s and UNWTO’s roster of consultants, and I am an expert member of the ICOMOS International Cultural Tourism Committee and the UNESCO-UNITWIN Network 'Culture, Tourism and Development'.
Address: Cultural Mobilities Research
Faculty of Social Sciences
University of Leuven
Parkstraat 45, bus 3615
BE-3000 Leuven
Belgium
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Books by Noel B. Salazar
The first part of the book takes a closer look at endurance, by examining how it relates to concepts such as resilience, perseverance, and perdurance. By analysing how these concepts overlap but differ, we reach a better understanding of what constitutes endurance. Furthermore, endurance is reconfigured as a as a mundane aspect of everyday life. The latter part of the book focuses on embodied experiences of endurance, more specifically on endurance running, walking, and (physical) performances. The different contributions focus on the meanings, values, and attributes that people ascribe to endurance in various socio-cultural contexts. The book uncovers practices, environments, and discourses in which endurance is applied and manifested, from drought-affected communities in rural Australia to professional endurance runners in Ethiopia as well as migrants in Greece and performance acts in domestic spaces in the United Kingdom and beyond.
This book will be of interest to scholars of movement sciences, sports studies, mobilities, leisure studies, and resilience studies.
Based on empirical research in various fields, this collection provides valuable scholarship and evidence on current processes of migration and mobility.
exposure and intense struggles by different stakeholders. This is the first book to examine sports mega-events from a mobilities perspective. It analyses the ‘mobile construction’ of global sports mega-events and the role this plays in managing labour, imaginaries, policies and legacies. In particular, the book focuses on the tension between the various mobilities and immobilities that are implied in the process of constructing a mega-event. It seeks to uncover the
ways in which an event is a series of fluid interactions that occur sequentially and simultaneously at multiple scales in diverse spheres of interaction. Contributions
explore the dynamics through which mega-events occur, revealing the textures and nuance of the complex systems that sustain them, and the ways that events
ramify throughout the international system.
Journal Articles by Noel B. Salazar
mobility and how mobility regulations and codes are resisted, transgressed, broken, and remade. To play by the rules of mobility means to follow habits and laws governed by social norms and institutional control. Our point of departure is that social and institutional mobility rules both abound and are intertwined and that they are routinely disputed by individuals, groups, and institutions. Drawing on ethnographic examples and the literature on legal anthropology, mobilities, and transnational migration, the article disentangles the specifi c mechanisms, principles,
and symbolic power of mobility rules—written and non-written, legal and
non-legal, formal and informal, codifi ed and non-codifi ed, explicit and implicit. In short, we address how people are navigating rules of mobility that operate in contradictory, ambiguous, and hidden ways.
imaginary. This conceptual article proposes imaginaries as a useful analytical lens to critically study heritage. Imaginariesenable us to uncover how people assume and signify heritage from various positions and experiences. Furthermore, this article aims to shed light on how alternative imaginaries grounded in non-western ontologies enable us to rethink heritage meaning and practice in the encounters and conflicts between different systems of meaning in daily life. More concretely, we identify three significant contributions of using imaginaries as a lens for the study of heritage. To illustrate our theoretical propositions, we incorporate empirical examples from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Ecuadorian Andes.
controlling the side effects of “sedentary” lifestyles and physical
inactivity, i.e., obesity, heart diseases and other health risks. This
trend developed in the 19th century, with the emergence of middle
classes who had the requisite time and resources to exercise during
their leisure time. Recreational running became popular in the
1970s, within the context of renewed societal attention to fitness
and physical health, which developed in countries such as the
USA and spread quickly to other industrialised nations. Based on
ethnographic research, I discuss in this article the crucial role that
mobile tracking devices, as markers of an active lifestyle, play in
keeping runners (im)mobile. I focus on how the data generated by
GPS sports watches are widely shared and used by runners and their
followers in general as well as specialised social media platforms. I
disentangle why, paradoxically, these mobility technologies make
exemplary mobile people more immobile, because many hours
are spent behind electronic device screens to communicate (and
seeking social approval for) their mobile performances. I place my
critical anthropological analysis of recreational running and mobility
technologies within the context of wider societal trends related to
(self-)discipline.