Noel B. Salazar is Research Professor in Anthropology at the University of Leuven, Belgium. He is co-editor of Keywords of Mobility (2016) and Regimes of Mobility (2014), and author of Envisioning Eden (2010) and numerous journal articles and book chapters on the anthropology of travel. He is vice-president of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, and member of the Young Academy of Belgium.
“This book establishes ‘imaginaries’ as part of the conceptual apparatus of the anthropology of tourism [and] contributes to social anthropology more generally by exploring how tourism imaginaries intersect with broader cultural and ideological structures… The wealth of its ethnography, combined with its innovative conceptual approaches, exemplifies the strengths anthropology is bringing to interdisciplinary tourism studies.” · Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute “With grounded ethnographic examples, the authors of each of the ten chapters demonstrate that critical analysis of tourism imaginaries is essential to understanding the social dynamics brought by tourism encounters… Because tourism imaginaries widely circulate and deeply permeate everyday lives in contemporary societies, the analysis in this collection offers broader insights beyond the study of tourism itself.” · American Ethnologist “A major strength of this anthology is the assertion that imaginaries are important to all participants in tourism, be they tourists, people visited by tourists, tourism promoters, governments, NGOs or others.” · Visual Anthropology “…the high quality of each contribution, range of ethnographic locations and structural cohesion of the book is exceptional, offering both newcomers and experts alike an excellent resource to explore tourism imaginaries in new ways.” · Annals of Tourism Research “Tourism Imagininaries is essentially the product of robust anthropological work, providing a coherent body of research that addresses a crucial issue for the understanding of tourism.” · Anthropological Forum “Now, two of the pioneers of the anthropology of tourism, Noel Salazar and Nelson Graburn, present a particularly satisfying set of essays exploring the issue from the perspective of the contemporary concept of cultural 'imaginaries.’” · Anthropology Review Database “This is a fine text that engages with pressing issues in the anthropology of tourism. It takes an ethnographic approach to the work of the imaginary in the tourism engagement…this volume lies at the vanguard of engagements with tourism by anthropologists and represents the best scholars in the world collectively and thoroughly engaging with the topic”. · Jonathan Skinner, University of Roehampton “…an interesting and timely collection of chapters that make an original contribution to academic debate about tourism imaginaries… A definite strength of the book is the contributions from authors from a range of countries (whose chapters are based on a wide range of locations around the world, some in Europe but most in the Developing World)”. · Duncan Light, Manchester Metropolitan University