"It's mobility, stupid": Interview with Walter Alejandro Imilan

Abstract

Anthropologist Walter Alejandro Imilan, from the Nucleo de Movilidades y Territorios (MOVYT) in Chile, explores how it is not possible to understand Latin American urban realities through static categories. For him, work, leisure, the neighbourhood, the street and the house are relevant units of analysis for sociology, but at the same time it is necessary to find alternatives to overcome them. One of them is to see how people produce cities as they move through them. The unequivocal method is to follow them on their journeys - to see where their flows are free and where they encounter restrictions, or where they chafe, but above all what happens on the way. In doing so, it becomes possible to understand everything from micro-scale phenomena to major events, such as the snap in Chile in 2019. For Imilan, all this theoretical and empirical framework makes it possible to understand how the original populations that inhabit Chile, especially the Mapuche, experience and produce the territory through which they move. At the end of the day, he finds issues that were not possible in traditional sociological research, such as the Mapuche demand to return to Santiago - and not migrate to the country's capital, as it was conceptualised until then - since the space of the city was, above all, part of their own ancestral territory.