Anthropological Notebooks, XXIV/2, 2018
Elliot, Alice, Roger Norum and Noel B. Salazar (eds.). 2017. Methodologies of Mobility. Ethnography and Experiment (Afterword by Simone Abram). Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books. 216 pp. Hb.: $95.00/£67.00. ISBN: 9781785334801.
Methodologies of Mobility is the second volume published in the book series Worlds in Motion, the transdisciplinary book series that brings forward empirically grounded studies on movement from around the world. The series is constantly bringing forward new knowledge of mobility, and three more volumes also published as e-books are forthcoming. The series is edited by the founder of the EASA Anthropology and Mobility network, Noel B. Salazar, one of the leading experts in the "anthropology of mobility". Salazar, with Alice Elliot and Roger Norum, also co-edited the Methodologies of Mobility. Ethnography and Experiment and is the co-author of the Introduction to the same book.
Mobility - this rather notorious concept of past and present research endeavours - is ever more popular and therefore very often the subject of academic discussions both in social sciences and humanities. Thus far, the concept of mobility has gone through many fiery discussions, several re-considerations and caused a "turn" in social theory to hit the scientific surface as a "new paradigm". Next to extensive literature written so far, directly or indirectly dealing with the concept of mobility, I am asking myself: Do we really need another anthropological (or any disciplinary shaped) book on mobility? Is there something that has not yet been reflected, learned, discussed or scrutinised? Nevertheless, analysing the world through the lens of mobility still presents a specific challenge to scholars in many academic disciplines. Indeed, many issues that have been raised within mobility studies influenced also current anthropological debates. Therefore, as authors of the Introduction to the Methodologies of Mobility observe, there has been not enough "scholarship that speaks to the implications of this theorizing for methodological consideration", such as key anthropological methods and of ethnographic thought in particular (p. 2-3). After reading the Methodologies of Mobility, especially eight chapters reflecting on different mobile methods within and through specific, innovative, sometimes cutting-edge ethnographic work, I would recommend the book as informative reading also to more knowledgeable readers and researchers in the anthropology and the broader spectrum of mobility studies.
The book consists of a comprehensive and informative Introduction to the topic, eight case studies written by anthropologists from around the world, and a reflective Afterword, contributed by Simone Abram. The main aim of the volume is to 'rise to the specifically methodological challenge that mobility-related research poses' (p. 3) to the field of anthropology and also to other fields. Thus, a range of questions are raised, e.g., how best to capture and understand the planet in flux; what methods need to be designed and reinvented to achieve that; and what challenges and possibilities generated by new methodologies of mobility are there to enable engaged theory and practice in social sciences? Authors who are searching for answers to these questions had to accept the challenge that 'engaging methodologically with mobility goes well beyond mere methodological exercise' (p. 3). Issues of scale, ethics, geographic boundaries, social imagination, class and gender, material culture, and last but not least, interdisciplinarity, are occupying the scholars' thoughts.
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Book reviews
An essential contribution of this volume is the already mentioned interdisciplin-arity; the authors are (some more some less) comprehensively committed to looking beyond the anthropological understanding of the movement of subjects, objects, and ideas. To be able to develop a more 'adequate picture' of the world in motion they 'reflect on the ways in which mobility acquires, and requires, specific forms of methodological thinking and acting' (p. 3).
Individual chapters discuss diverse notions, scales and forms of mobility, referring to different localities, from the North of Europe and West Africa to Iran and Tokyo, and also others, reflecting and applying both conventional and innovative methodologies of mobility. Authors scrutinise and uncover the methodological pitfalls and not only apply and reinvent diverse (novel) research techniques, but critically asses their different use. Some authors are engaged in a discussion between mobility and - what is often considered its opposite - immobility. An important observation is that either mobility and immobility - 'can eclipse the other' and mobile methods discussed and applied by some authors in this volume 'acknowledge both the mobile and the immobile' (p. 198). Therefore, as Simone Abram suggests in her final reflections on methodologies of mobility, we are facing a new starting point, where we should not only speak of opposition but should consider the 'unequal distribution of mobility and immobility' in the mobile society we study (p. 198).
All chapters would deserve a more detailed review, but for the sake of the above-discussed relation between mobility and immobility, I would like to briefly discuss one particular chapter or method. In Idleness as Method. Hairdressers and Chinese Urban Mobility in Tokyo, Jamie Coates writes on the importance of picking a "strategic location" in conducting the fieldwork when studying "people on the move". He reflects on some immobile technique of observation he conducted while studying Chinese migrants in Tokyo, specifically in a small hair salon. Coates claims that immobility of the researcher can equally help him/her understand the shapes and forms of 'fluctuating world of mobilities' (p. 124). It could be argued that the "idleness as method" is merely a contextualised, reconsidered and reinvented traditional single-sited ethnographic approach under the mobility paradigm.
KRISTINA TOPLAK
Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Slovenia)
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