Key figures of mobility: an introduction Figures of mobility, from nomads to flâneurs and tourists, have been used to describe both self and other in the social sciences and humanities for a long time. They act as a conceptual shorthand in contemporary scholarly debates, allowing social theorists to relate broad-scale phenomena to the human condition. This repeated usage highlights how these figures have become ‘keywords’, in the sense given by Raymond Williams, which typify much of the vocabulary constituting the study of human mobility today. In this general introduction, I lay out the overall conceptual framework behind the various contributions to this special issue. Key words figures, theory, epistemology, genealogy, anthropology As a concept, mobility captures the common impression that our life-world is in flux, with not only people, but also cultures, objects, capital, businesses, services, diseases, media, images, information and ideas circulating across (and even beyond) the planet. The scholarly literature is replete with metaphorical conceptualisations attempting to describe (perceived) altered spatial and temporal movements: deterritorialisation, reterritorialisation and scapes; time–space compression, distantiation or punctuation; the network society and its space of flows; the death of distance and the acceleration of modern life; and nomadology. The interest in mobility, particularly in Europe, goes hand in hand with theoretical approaches that reject ‘sedentarist metaphysics’ (Malkki 1992) in favour of ‘nomadic metaphysics’ (Cresswell 2006) and empirical studies on the most diverse kinds of mobilities (Adey et al. 2013), questioning earlier taken- for-granted correspondences between peoples, places and cultures. The way the term is being used, mobility entails, in its coinage, much more than mere physical motion (Marzloff 2005). It can be seen as movement infused with both self-ascribed and attrib- uted meanings (Frello 2008). Put differently, ‘mobility can do little on its own until it is materialised through people, objects, words and other embodied forms’ (Chu 2010: 15). Importantly, mobility means different things to different people in differing social circumstances (Adey 2010). Mobilities have become central to the structuring of people’ s lives. In many parts of the world, mobility is considered to be an important way of belonging to today’ s society. We can identify many kinds of ‘movers’: tourists and pilgrims; migrants and refugees; diplomats, businesspeople and those working for international organisations; missionaries, NGO-workers and people belonging to the most diverse transnational networks; students, teachers and researchers; athletes and artists; soldiers and journal- ists; children and partners (and service personnel) accompanying the aforementioned people; and those in the traffic and transport industries who move people (including themselves) across the globe. Mobility research calls attention to the myriad ways in which people become part, in highly unequal ways, of multiple translocal networks and linkages. Notwithstanding the many kinds of involuntary or forced movements (mostly linked to situations of conflict, persecution or environmental threat), the currently dominant discourse links Social Anthropology (2017) 25,15–12. © 2017 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 5 doi:10.1111/1469-8676.12393 NOEL B. SALAZAR