ABSTRACT
Many people leaving the periphery also maintain a connection with their old home, as tourists, secondary residents, retirees and the like. Returning from a stay abroad or just keeping contact with home can easily be an asset, because staying abroad means competences, networks and greater opportunities for valuable entrepreneurship. Being a highly mobile worker is therefore more than opting out: it is a strategic choice at one point of a life course, which may change, and may in different ways be an important source of progress for the home community. Coping is a way to shape places affected by flows and ruptures, and to create stability in local and family life, and a family strategy can simply be seen as those decisions and practices of home and belonging in which we, under certain institutional conditions, attempt to make stable and comfortable lives in contemporary circumstances.
