Noel B. Salazar

Noel B. Salazar
Education	B.Sc., University of Leuven (1993) M.Sc., University of Essex (1998) Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania (2008)
Occupation	Anthropologist

Noel B. Salazar (born 1973) is a sociocultural anthropologist known for his transdisciplinary work on mobility and travel, the local-to-global nexus, discourses and imaginaries of 'Otherness', heritage, cultural brokering and cosmopolitanism.

Noel B. Salazar was born in Dunkirk, France, of a Spanish father and a Belgian mother. He grew up in the historical Flemish town of Bruges, a celebrated cultural tourism destination. Salazar studied psychology, philosophy, and development studies at the University of Leuven (Belgium), neuropsychology at the University of Essex (UK), and anthropology and African studies at the University of Pennsylvania (United States). He is currently research professor in anthropology at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Leuven, where he founded CuMoRe (Cultural Mobilities Research). In addition, he is visiting professor at the University of Bergamo (Italy). His ethnographic fieldwork so far has focused on Indonesia, Tanzania, Chile and Belgium. Salazar currently lives in Brussels, the "capital of Europe", together with his spouse and two daughters.

Noel B. Salazar's main research interests include anthropologies of (im)mobility and travel, the local-to-global nexus, discourses and imaginaries of alterity, cultural brokering and cosmopolitanism. His anthropological work synthesizes ethnographic findings with conceptual frameworks developed within anthropology, sociology, geography, cultural studies, tourism studies, philosophy and psychology. Salazar has won numerous grants for his research projects (including from the National Science Foundation, the EU Seventh Framework Programme and FWO).

While at the University of Pennsylvania, Salazar experienced first-hand the benefits of transdisciplinary research. His involvement within the Department of Anthropology's Public Interest Anthropology project taught him the necessity of bridging the divide between academia and the wider public. Together with archaeologist Benjamin W. Porter, now professor at the Near Eastern Studies Department, UC Berkeley, he applied the public interest perspective to heritage tourism. Understanding the changing meaning and value of (intangible) cultural heritage is still high on his research agenda. It forms part of Salazar's broader work within the subfield of the anthropology of tourism. He used the findings from his extended ethnographic fieldwork to shift the predominant focus in tourism studies on tourist and impact studies to a study of tourism service providers, showing their crucial role as intermediaries. In his book, Envisioning Eden: Mobilizing Imaginaries in Tourism and Beyond (2010), he critically analyses the circulation and dynamics of tourism imaginaries, illustrated with fine-grained ethnographic data from Yogyakarta (Indonesia) and Arusha (Tanzania).

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