ABSTRACT
The literature on lifestyle migration places attention on mobile individuals that migrate to different places in search of a more fulfilling way of life, especially in contrast to the one left behind. Migration for these individuals is often an anti-modern, escapist, self-realisation project, a search for the intangible ‘good life’ (Benson and O'Reilly 1990). The emergence of ‘mobile nomads’ (D'Andrea 2007) not only constitutes the expression of a society that has dramatically reduced the barriers hampering the movement of individuals, commodities and ideas, it also signals a number of societal tensions and dissatisfactions which influence how individuals feel about their own existence. For Harvey (1992), the postmodern condition characterised by increasing an acceleration in the turnover of capital (via credit, electronic and plastic money, etc.) and an acceleration in consumption leads to deeper questions of identity for individuals living under this regime of accumulation, which explains that the search for identity many times means the revival of ‘basic institutions’ such as ‘family’ and ‘community’. The search for identity through lifestyle migration is a complex phenomenon that triggers processes at a variety of spatial scales. The receiving community and the incomers will eventually engage in disputes over meaning, while each actor attempts to advance particularistic ends through the deployment of a range of spatial and cultural strategies. In addition, new forms of appropriation of space will emerge as groups of individuals, via material or symbolic appropriation, attempt to control its production and reproduction. These two outcomes will necessarily imply the rearticulation of power relations as actors acquire a differential capacity to exert control over other actors. In short, lifestyle migration is not a neutral process; it is deeply political, given that actors are capable of constructing meanings, engaging in disputes over meaning, and rearticulating the basis to exert power. So the question here is to what extent lifestyle migrants can challenge — discursively and practically — the way of life and customs prevalent in our late-capitalist society. Although many researchers emphasise that practices carried out by the incoming populations are subject to surveillance and commodification, we claim that they do retain the capacity to affect more general social structures of society. From our understanding, some central questions to assess this capacity are the following: How does the migration process unfold on the empirical level? What meanings are put forward? What practices are deployed to appropriate space materially and symbolically? Our approach first puts analytical attention on conflict over settlement, signalling that ‘the social’ gets concrete expression primarily through a system of written and unwritten rules that defines the channels open to exert power (Zunino 2006). However, this does not necessarily mean the capacity to trigger social changes is extinguished in the absence of struggles; there are always possibilities to change the value system of late capitalism society from below, from the local, from that sphere where dreams and projects attain concrete material expression.
