Lifestyle Mobilities

Intersections of Travel, Leisure and Migration

Tara Duncan, Scott A. Cohen, Maria Thulemark, Tara Duncan, Scott A. Cohen, Maria Thulemark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409453710
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317105121
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Being mobile in today's world is influenced by many aspects including transnational ties, increased ease of access to transport, growing accessibility to technology, knowledge and information and changing socio-cultural outlooks and values. These factors can all engender a (re)formation of our everyday life and moving - as and for lifestyle - has, in many ways, become both easier and much more complex. This book highlights the crossroads between concepts of lifestyle and the growing body of work on 'mobilities'. The study of lifestyle offers a lens through which to study the kinds of moorings, dwellings, repetitions and routines around which mobilities become socially, culturally and politically meaningful. Bringing together scholars from geography, sociology, tourism, history and beyond, the authors illustrate the breadth and richness of mobilities research through the concept of lifestyle. Organised into four sections, the book begins by dealing with aspects of bodily performance through lifestyle mobility. Section two then looks at how we can use mobile methods within social research, whilst section three explores issues surrounding ideas of mobility, immobility and belonging. Finally, section four draws together a number of chapters that focus on the complexities of identity within mobility. Often drawing on ethnographic research, contributors all share one common feature: they are at the forefront of research into lifestyle mobilities.

Chapter 1 Introducing Lifestyle Mobilities

Scott A. Cohen, Tara Duncan and Maria Thulemark

DOI: 10.4324/9781315592404-1

Introduction

Although mobility is far from a new idea (Cresswell 2010), the notion of a mobilities ‘paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry 2006) or ‘turn’ (Hannam, Sheller and Urry 2006) has gained significant traction in recent years within the social sciences. Increasingly, mobility is influenced by and through transnational ties, shifting socio-cultural outlooks and emerging technologies of communication, transport and social connectivity, all of which characterize the configuration and reconfiguration of the everyday. While these technological, societal and cultural changes continue to facilitate virtual and imaginative mobilities, physical, that is embodied movement (i.e. travel), also continues to increase. As Urry (2002: 256) emphasizes, ‘“being on the move” has become a “way of life” for many’.

At the same time, ideas of ‘lifestyle’ have also seen resurgence within the social sciences. Physical mobility has become central to many lifestyle choices as individuals use mobility options to negotiate the growing complexity of modern living (McIntyre 2006). Our lifestyles and our mobilities are more dynamic and complex than at any point in the past. Travel and mobility have become increasingly everyday practice (Edensor 2007, Hannam 2008) for many in developed countries and elites in developing countries (Hall 2005).

In this book we illustrate how the mobilities paradigm and lifestyle intersect. We engage an interdisciplinary approach to highlight mobility as an on-going lifestyle choice and we proffer the term ‘lifestyle mobilities’ as a theoretical lens to challenge current thinking on the intersections between travel, leisure and migration (see also Cohen, Duncan and Thulemark 2013). Our aim in this edited book is to contribute to mobilities studies by showing how voluntary on-going mobile lifestyles: 1) blur the boundaries between travel, leisure and migration; 2) are exemplary of how a binary divide between work and leisure may be destabilized; and 3) illustrate complexities of belonging, place and identity associated with sustained mobility. This analysis is important not only for foregrounding patterns of lifestyle mobility positioned at the borders of travel, leisure and migration, but also for demonstrating how these mobility choices contribute to, and are emblematic of, continuing processes of de-differentiation in contemporary social life (Bauman 2000).

In this introductory chapter, we begin by exploring the concept of lifestyle in relation to mobility, before turning to an examination of how travel, leisure and migration blur. Our analysis forms the basis for a conceptualization of lifestyle mobilities in comparison to temporary mobility and permanent migration. From here we turn to complexities of belonging, place and identity, and hence problems in distinguishing between ‘home’ and ‘away’, that are associated with lifestyle mobility. We conclude this chapter by outlining the thematic sections of the book and the individual chapter contributions contained therein.

Lifestyle choices and mobility

Definitions of lifestyle have often concentrated on identifying lifestyles through patterns of everyday tangible behaviour. Sobel (1981: 3) defined lifestyle as ‘any distinctive, and therefore recognisable, mode of living’ whilst Stebbins (1997) advocated that lifestyles encompass related sets of values and attitudes in addition to shared patterns of behaviour. Therefore, lifestyles can be seen to encompass on-going tangible practices and orientations constituting ‘the basis for a separate, common social identity’ (Stebbins 1997: 350). Thus lifestyle practices offer a distinctive sense of personal identity on the one hand, and a distinct and recognizable collective identity on the other (Cohen 2011).

The term ‘lifestyle’ is connected to the shifts identified with post-Fordism and post-modernism/late modernity (Giddens 1991). Identities became less based on class (Bell and Hollows 2006) and logics of production and instead were increasingly created through aesthetic consumption practices (Shields 1992). Thus consumption practices were designed together into lifestyles (Featherstone 1987) and lifestyle consumption practices became ‘decisions not only about how to act but who to be’ (Giddens 1991: 81).

How we choose our lifestyle has become progressively more important even as we recognize that the significance of lifestyle to a sense of identity has a longer history (Bell and Hollows 2006). Whether we are encouraged to ‘play’ with consumption to construct a sense of identity (Poster 1998) or make a ‘project of the self’ (Giddens 1991), what is inferred is that our choice of lifestyle affects our sense of self and that our sense of self affects our (mobility) consumption choices. As such, the emphasis is now on change, choice and reflexivity in and through lifestyle choices.

Yet freedom of choice is limited in that ‘forces, mechanisms and institutional arrangements’ limit our ability to choose (Warde and Martens 1998: 129) and so restrict our access to lifestyle choices. As Skeggs (2004: 49) argues, pursuing an individualized lifestyle ‘exists for a privileged few’, and Bourdieu (1984) notes when discussing class – ‘some’ are evidently more equal than ‘others’ in the decisions and freedom to make choices. Likewise, privileged citizens often see mobility as part of the everyday. Mobility is both familiar and, to some extent, taken for granted. Mobility depends on access to economic conditions, power, technology and networks that facilitate movement across borders and cultures (Cresswell 2001, 2010).

Lifestyles can be seen as mostly fashioned through the consumption of sets of goods and services as a source of meaning or identity in everyday life (Chaney 1996, Shields 1992), and, by some, are taken ‘more seriously than their careers’ (Binkley 2004: 72). Therefore, a particular ‘assemblage of goods, clothes, practices, experiences, appearance and bodily dispositions’ come together into a lifestyle (Featherstone 1987: 59), and as we suggest, can be uniquely distinguished by elements of corporeal mobility. Consequently, as corporeal mobility has become more commonplace (Urry 2002) and lifestyles have become pivotal in the constitution of self-identity (Giddens 1991), lifestyle choices and forms of mobility increasingly co-mingle in ways that can be crucial to the lives of those who are privileged enough to access them. For such individuals, lifestyle mobilities are performed as embodied everyday practice. This includes the inherent ambiguities, complexities and meanings of these movements and moorings. Thus, despite reflecting elements of travel, leisure, migration, tourism and work, such corporeal mobility, as we now discuss, is not captured by any one of these often bounded terms.

Blurring travel, leisure and migration

We argue here two main points. Firstly, Coles, Duval and Hall (2004) suggest that tourism geography’s utilization of temporary mobility has provided an important point of intersection – between tourism and geography – that allowed for a broader approach to understanding the meaning behind a range of corporeal mobilities. Particularly, Hall (2005) uses time, space and distance to demonstrate how the movement of tourists throughout their life courses can blur the boundaries with other forms of temporary mobility, including migration, travel for work, return migration and diaspora. For instance, Cohen’s (2011) lifestyle travellers exemplify how tourism can ‘tip’ into an on-going lifestyle, wherein extended episodes of tourism, or temporary mobility, blur into conceptions of geographic migration. We contend that this distinction separating tourism and migration is better grasped through a lens of lifestyle mobilities.

Secondly, Bell and Ward (2000) endeavour a comparison of temporary mobility with permanent migration, defining temporary mobility as a non-permanent move of varying duration (which assumes a circular return to a usual residence) and permanent migration as a permanent change of usual residence. We suggest that this division is too simplistic. Even factoring in Bell and Ward’s (2000) further dimensions of duration, frequency and seasonality, there lacks an acknowledgement of the range of mobilities associated with both temporary and more permanent moves (see McIntyre, this volume).

Instead we expand their comparison (see Figure 1.1, Cohen et al. 2013). Alongside the questions of usual residence and return we have added the concept of belonging, and a fourth dimension of temporality. Figure 1.1 therefore illustrates, when compared to temporary mobility and permanent migration, how our conceptualization of lifestyle mobility, defined here as on-going semipermanent moves of varying duration, offers a lens into more complex forms of corporeal mobility that may involve multiple ‘homes’, ‘belongings’ and sustained mobility throughout the life course.

Figure 1.1 Comparison of lifestyle mobility to temporary mobility and permanent migration

Source: Cohen et al. 2013 (adapted from Bell and Ward 2000).

We argue that lifestyle mobility differs from temporary mobility in that it is sustained as an on-going fluid process, carrying on as everyday practice over time. The higher significance placed on physical mobility itself as a defining aspect of one’s identity, is another aspect that differentiates lifestyle mobility from temporary mobility. This identification with mobility contrasts to both temporary mobility and permanent migration, as the performance of identity in these latter two has closer links to place, whether one’s old or new residence.

Unlike permanent migration, lifestyle mobility does not pre-suppose that there is no intention to return. A return to point of origin, or to any other point in the on-going movement process, may be part of lifestyle mobility and so we contend that a return to any identified ‘origin’ cannot be presumed. Compared to temporary mobility, lifestyle mobility also differs as there is not an assumption of a return (to ‘a’) home. Instead, lifestyle mobility presumes the intention to move on, rather than move back. Thus over time, there may be multiple ‘homes’ that one can return to and/or re-visit. However, whilst someone who has permanently chosen to relocate (for example lifestyle migrants, second home owners) may also have multiple moorings and diasporic associations, we suggest the destabilization of home and away is particularly pronounced in lifestyle mobilities due to the constant intention to move on.

Therefore lifestyle mobility reiterates O’Reilly’s (2003) arguments that migration and tourism (which are often considered separately) need to be brought together within research in order to better understand the interrelationships between these two types of movement. Moreover, Williams and Hall (2000) highlight that the differences between tourism and migration have often been weakly conceptualized; there has been considerable neglect of ‘the grey zone of the complex forms of mobility which lie on a continuum between permanent migration and tourism’ (Williams and Hall 2000: 20).

However, in the last few years, there has been a growing body of scholarship that explores the conceptual relationships between migration and tourism, with a particular focus on grasping the social-orientated aspects that may underlie migration. Benson and O’Reilly’s (2009a) work on lifestyle migration is one example of approaching the relationships between migration and tourism through a social lens. Lifestyle migration (Benson and O’Reilly 2009a: 1) examines how migration may be motivated by seeking ‘a route to a better and more fulfilling way of life, especially in contrast to the one left behind’. It is often preceded by one or more tourism-related visits, again illustrating how tourism might ‘tip’ into migration. This approach to understanding some forms of migration as lifestyle-led is based on the notion that ‘lifestyle migrants are relatively affluent individuals of all ages, moving either part time or full time to places that, for various reasons, signify, for the migrant, a better quality of life’ (Benson and O’Reilly 2009b: 609). Here, we maintain that to privilege any chosen way of life as ‘better’ is to potentially offer a romantic reading of it, and that links between romanticism and mobility have a long and critiqued history in nomadology (Cresswell 2006, Hannam 2009), embodied in the subject position of the nomad or ‘neo-nomad’ (for example D’Andrea 2006).

It is also worth considering McIntyre’s (this volume) conception of lifestyle mobilities in relation to lifestyle migration. Both McIntyre and we understand lifestyle mobilities as a more fluid and dynamic process than lifestyle migration, yet McIntyre’s approach remains enmeshed with lifestyle migration as ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introducing Lifestyle Mobilities
• SECTION I CORPOREAL PERFORMANCE
• SECTION II APPLYING MOBILE METHODS
• SECTION III MOORINGS, MOBILITIES AND BELONGING
• SECTION IV COMPLEXITIES OF WIDER IDENTITIES
• Index