Going First Class?

New Approaches to Privileged Travel and Movement

Vered Amit

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780857451514, 9781845451967
• eBook ISBN: 9780857453167
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Social Sciences

People travel as never before. However, anthropological research has tended to focus primarily on either labor migration or on tourism. In contrast, this collection of essays explores a diversity of circumstances and impetuses towards contemporary mobility. It ranges from expatriates to peripatetic professionals to middle class migrants in search of extended educational and career opportunities to people seeking self development through travel, either by moving after retirement or visiting educational retreats. These situations, however, converge in the significant resources, variously of finances, time, credentials or skills, which these voyagers are able to call on in embarking on their respective journeys. Accordingly, this volume seeks to tease out the scope and implications of the relatively privileged circumstances under which these voyages are being undertaken.

1

Structures and Dispositions of Travel and Movement

Vered Amit

By design, the title of this collection of essays; Going First Class? New Approaches to Privileged Travel and Movement prompts the question of the type and scope of the “privileges” that should generally be addressed in comparative studies of spatial mobility and, in particular, by the present case studies. To note in response that privilege is relative is to invoke at one and the same time a tired truism and an open-ended set of analytical complications. Thus one of the central emphases in much of the anthropological literature on “elites” has concerned the importance of relating the issue of relative advantage and power to particular social and political contexts. As a result, anthropological writings on elites have featured situations that when compared to each other appear to be highly divergent in terms of relative resources, influence, power, and scale. Thus Carol Greenhouse’s (1983) analysis of elite status concepts among local Baptist, business, and professional networks in a small Georgia suburban town is included in the same anthology as George Marcus’s (1983) study of extremely wealthy American family dynasties. Similarly, the cases included in Shore and Nugent’s compilation (2002) range from mestizo traders in a small rural Peruvian town (Harvey 2002) to the PRI political party machine that governed Mexico for seventy-one years (Gledhill 2002). In other words, anthropologists have dealt with the comparative problems of assessing the general concept of elite by calling upon a flexible notion of the “local” stretched to accommodate a wide range of organizational levels ranging from villages to nations.

Whatever one might generally make of such an accommodation in a discipline that over the last twenty-five years has made increasing efforts to problematize the “local,” it is immediately complicated by an ethnographic focus on travel and movement. After all, the mandate of travel, and especially the kind of long-distance travel with which this volume is concerned, is the movement between different “locals.” Accordingly, many of the chapters in this volume are concerned with the tensions between different hierarchies and criteria of status and privilege as travelers move from one context to another. Highly mobile British cinematographers who work on location around the world bristle at the suggestion that the “visual” expertise of their French, Polish, or Czech counterparts can provide a more innovative and distinctive product for British producers and directors looking to hone their own competitive advantage (Greenhalgh, this volume). Brazilians arriving in Portugal believed that their professional skills and cultural knowledge could ensure their integration into the Portuguese middle class, but to their surprise they discovered that their influence as well as professional and entrepreneurial success often provoked resentment rather than admiration (Torresan, this volume). The members of a middle-class Jamaican family who had immigrated to the United States worked hard to distinguish themselves from the masses of lower-class Caribbean emigrants with whom they were often identified by members of the receiving society (Olwig, this volume). In Indonesia, their common status as “Westerners” brings expatriates together with people from a wide variety of socioeconomic backgrounds, people with whom they would not normally have socialized in their home countries. And while Western status unifies as well as segregates, it has not eliminated the significance that still continues to be accorded to distinctions in corporate rank among these expatriates. (Fechter, this volume)

The chapters in this volume deal with very different types of voyaging: occupational journeys, migration, corporate-sponsored expatriacy, life-cycle transition. But they feature certain commonalities of privilege that may well point to broader developments in the global scapes of travel and movement. First, all of the chapters deal with instances of voluntary movement and with people who have the resources -variously of money, time, or credentials—to undertake these journeys. Second, if on a global scale the availability of these resources may demarcate these people as among the world’s relatively affluent, they could not be described as members of its most powerful elites. They surely do not command the kind of resources or influence of the extremely wealthy ethnic Chinese entrepreneurial “astronauts” participating in the “Pacific Shuttle” described by Aihwa Ong (1999). Micklethwait and Wooldridge have contended that globalization has encouraged the formation of a “cosmocrat” ruling elite, although their description of a densely networked set of corporate executives with an almost “pathological need to remain in touch,” hopping around the world, consuming sea bass from Chile, reading magazines like Wallpaper or Condé Nast Traveler (Micklethwait and Wooldridge 2000: 232–33), seems to owe more to the overworked caricatures promoted by these kinds of popular media outlets than to a rigorous analysis of global economics. In any event, not only do the travelers described in this book not participate in these kinds of lifestyles or occupy these types of socioeconomic positions, but also their more modestly prosperous situations likely reflect a much broader reorientation of global long-distance travel and movement around middle-class rather than either very affluent or very poor voyagers.

There are various impetuses for this reorientation that are as much about the strengthening of existing trends as about entirely new developments. On the one hand, as Angela Torresan notes in her chapter, migration outflows have always tended to select for people with access to the kind of resources and skills that would facilitate their mobility, whether these are personal network connections, financial resources, youth, education, and so on. Thus even those migrants who may appear relatively disadvantaged in respect to the hierarchies of their destination countries possess “above-average levels of education and occupational skills in comparison with their homeland population” (Portes and Rumbaut as cited in Torresan, p 106). Voluntary migrants are not usually drawn from among the poorest and most destitute sending populations. As industrialized countries have reoriented their economies (or at least their economic aspirations) toward knowledge-based industries, their immigration policies have featured an increased emphasis on recruiting highly skilled and well-educated newcomers, even as their sources of recruitment have shifted from the global North to the South.

On the other hand, as Sawa Kurotani’s chapter illustrates, an intensification of global competition has forced many corporations to reorganize the nature of their overseas job assignments away from the elite cosmocrats described by Micklethwait and Wooldridge. Facing American trade restrictions, the Japanese firms with which Kurotani is concerned moved their production sites to the United States and, subsequently recruited a wider variety of less elite company workers. To cut the cost of these foreign assignments, Japanese companies have identified a specific group of workers as generic, longer term, overseas specialists and redefined these kinds of assignments from “prestige” to “routine,” thereby allowing them to reduce the salary and special benefits that had previously been granted these expatriates. Along similar lines, a recent “how to” guide (Malewski 2005) for young expatriate workers notes that the efforts of corporations to reduce the costs of maintaining dispersed transnational operations has led to a greater tendency to recruit younger, more junior and hence cheaper workers for foreign assignments. Another corporate tactic noted by Malewski has been to formally redefine these assignments as “local” rather than overseas, thus eliminating the requirement to pay out the special benefits previously accorded “expat” professionals.

Leisure travel has always been and continues to be the province of the world’s relatively affluent, those people with sufficient disposable income to expend on these discretionary diversions. But over the course of the second half of the twentieth century and now into the twenty-first, as tourist opportunities and venues have diversified, the numbers and strata of people who are involved as both consumers and purveyors of these services have dramatically expanded, forming the largest industry in the world (Sheller and Urry 2004: 3).

Internationally there are over 700 million legal passenger arrivals each year (compared with 25 million in 1950) with a predicted 1 billion by 2010; there are 4 million air passengers each day; at any one time 300,000 passengers are in flight above the United States, equivalent to a substantial city; one-half of British adults took a flight during 2001 . . . (Ibid.)

By the time we reach this scale of mobility, we are dealing with many active participants whose wealth may be relatively modest. Thus, all of the Canadian travel enthusiasts included in Julia Harrison’s study were working or had worked at professional or managerial jobs and most had some postsecondary education, but their annual incomes ranged from about $20,000 to well over $180,000 (2003: 8–9). As Harrison notes:

The frequency and variety of the travels they took was imagined at one time to fall only within the grasp of the upper classes, those of established, money backgrounds. . . . For some of these travel enthusiasts, their ability even in retirement to bite at the heels of those in the social strata above them was the source of many a wry smile. As Neil said “We are living proof that you do not have to be rich to travel.” (2003: 11)

Along with the augmentation of who can afford to travel for leisure at all, and who can afford to tour frequently, there has also been an interesting shift in who can afford to travel for longer. As Rodman’s chapter in this volume illustrates, the increase in the numbers of people who can embark on extended travel, away from their usual places of residence, has been achieved through a blurring of the boundaries between leisure and work. The “resident volunteers” in the Kalani Oceanside Retreat on the big island of Hawaii, paid a maximum of $500 a month for their stay, as opposed to the $1,500 paid by guests. In return for these reduced charges, they worked 30 hours a week for at least a three month period. Their visits occurred on the margin between the categories of guest and staff who also stayed at this spiritual-education retreat, a boundary that was regularly blurred through shared participation in daily activities as well as the movement of people between these categories. “Some who came as guests went on to become resident volunteers and then paid staff; former staff and volunteers have returned to visit as guests” (Rodman, p 146).

Similarly, there is now a significant global workforce of young travelers, many voyaging as a break before or after completing postsecondary studies, who are supporting journeys of several months, occasionally even years, by working at the destinations they are visiting. Ironically, many of these young adventurers are supporting their own tourism by working in service industries serving other tourists. Thus, today, a tourist visiting a London café or pub during the summer might well be served by a young traveler from his or her own country even as young Britons themselves leave their country for “gap year” sojourns abroad.

Overlapping Categories of Travel

This kind of overlap between different categories of spatial mobility is hardly a novel innovation. The transnational dispersal of the two family networks on which Karen Fog Olwig’s chapter focuses, was formed through an initial stream of emigration from the Caribbean in the 1940s. Among the sets of siblings who were the progenitors of these networks, their respective departures from Jamaica and Dominica were initially prompted by a desire to pursue postsecondary educational opportunities abroad with an expectation of an eventual return in order to practice their acquired profession in their homeland. While some of these siblings did in due course return to their country of origin where they pursued successful careers, others settled abroad.

The immigration and border controls of most countries have traditionally stipulated a strict legal distinction between different categories of visitors, between migrants, tourists, students, temporary workers, and so on. But nonetheless the siblings with whom Olwig is concerned will hardly have been the first and certainly are not the last travelers to embark on temporary sojourns in one capacity only to end up staying in another. More generally, the overlap between different categories of travelers has been a significant aspect in the formation of unofficial migration channels. And most countries have always allowed some movement between these different statuses, offering amnesty to unofficial migrants, extending new visas to former students, converting temporary work permits into more permanent immigration standing, and so on.

What is more novel is the implementation of official categories of visitors that explicitly and intentionally incorporate an overlap between different forms of movement. Hence a number of countries now extend “working/holidaymaker” visas to young travelers, usually stipulating either an age restriction or student status. At the same time, international student exchanges may incorporate “co-op” work-study programs or internships, as well as opportunities for simple tourism. Thus three previously distinct statuses—guest worker, tourist, and visiting student—are now converged through visa programs underpinned by international agreements between governments, educational institutions, and travel consortia. An increasingly important segment of “guest” workers, a status once identified with relatively disadvantaged migrants, is thus now ironically comprised of middle-class Western youths who can at one and the same time be wooed as tourists and serve as cheap, compliant, and temporary labor.

At the other end of the life cycle we find a parallel development that also complicates the distinctions between categories of movement, in this case between migration and tourism. Caroline Oliver’s chapter focuses on one segment of the burgeoning numbers of middle-class older people in Western countries who view retirement as a “a sphere of new opportunities, increasingly exploited through travel, marking a de-differentiation of tourism into retirement” (Oliver, p. 130). Accordingly, the seaside resorts of Spain, Florida, or Mexico, along with other sunny, coastal climes, have become the venues for an eclectic mix of short-stay tourists, long-term retirement residents, and so-called “snowbirds,” retirees who divide their year between winters in warmer locales and summers in their less temperate countries of origin. So significant are these movements of retirees that the government of Canada recently made special efforts to encourage and enable their snowbird citizens to cast absentee votes during the January 2006 federal elections.

It is important to note that in all three types of situations identified above—the “resident volunteers” (Rodman, this volume), the “working holidaymakers,” and the retiree migrants and tourists (Oliver, this volume)—geographic mobility has been initiated, in major part, as a vehicle for engaging with a significant life-cycle transition. While, as I will argue below and as others have also noted (Harrison 2003: 11), scholarly literature on tourism has sometimes exaggerated its transformative potential, I would like to suggest that the much more particular instances of life-cycle transition being pursued by a variety of contemporary travelers, while distinct, share a convergence between three different strategic opportunities for repositioning and affiliation.

Travel has a long-standing cachet of cultivated tastes; that is to say, it has been one of the grounds for demarcating or claiming, first, elite status (as in the European Grand Tour of the nineteenth century) and, more recently, middle-class standing (Harrison 2003: 11). This association has been further heightened by the elaboration of a public discourse within many industrialized countries that trumpets the importance of “international experience” within a globalizing economy. The importance of this source of status enhancement is heightened during a period of life-cycle transition in which other sources of cultural capital might well be jeopardized. People on the verge of retirement are losing one of the most critical indicators of social status, namely, a work identity, and are in most cases facing the diminishment of their financial resources. On the other hand, young people leaving home to pursue educational or career opportunities are shifting from the comfortable if secondhand affiliation of their parents’ class position and resources to the much more precarious path of establishing their own claims for status and independent incomes. Finally, many of the volunteer residents seeking an educational retreat at Kalani were facing the uncertainties associated with leaving secure if unsatisfying jobs. In these circumstances, extended travel can both offer an escape from situations of potentially jeopardized status and provide its own source of cultural capital. It may well be more prestigious to be a retiree in a Spanish costal village than in Bolton. Similarly, a fairly mundane service occupation can be invested with more cosmopolitan overtones if it is represented as part of an exotic “coming of age” journey.

Second, the overlap between traveler statuses, which occurs in all three types of journeys, provides practical economic advantages. Many of the “snowbird” circuits involve a move to destinations with cheaper costs of housing, land, food, and other services from more expensive locales. In other words, the movements of retirees can serve to stretch further pensions accrued and paid out in one country, thus achieving a higher standard of living in another locale. As I have already noted above, working tourism, whether oriented toward youths or older voyagers, allows people to spend an extended stay away from their usual homes with a relatively small initial commitment of resources. In the case of the “resident volunteers” in the Kalani resort, it was likely cheaper to live in this educational retreat than “at home.”

Third, as Caroline Oliver has noted in her chapter in this volume, this kind of “aspirational” movement offers the possibility of constructing new identities. But it combines the potential vested in a “blank slate” of initial anonymity with the comfort of relatively familiar companionability. Many of the snowbirds are moving to expatriate and tourist settlements set up to provide services for migratory retirees. Young travelers are moving through circuits of movements that are increasingly institutionalized and organized to attract and service mobile Western youths. By definition and design, the Kalani retreat offers an organized framework for sociability. This kind of movement therefore offers the possibility of change and self-development, but it encapsulates this potential within a structural bubble of people in similar circumstances. Thus the deliberate convergence between previously officially separate categories of travel has created new, sharply demarcated cir...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Chapter 1 Structures and Dispositions of Travel and Movement
• Chapter 2 Middle-Class Japanese Housewives and the Experience of Transnational Mobility
• Chapter 3 Living in a Bubble: Expatriates’ Transnational Spaces
• Chapter 4 Globalization through “Weak Ties”: A Study of Transnational Networks Among Mobile Professionals
• Chapter 5 Traveling Images, Lives on Location: Cinematographers in the Film Industry
• Chapter 6 Privileged Travelers? Migration Narratives in Families of Middle-Class Caribbean Background
• Chapter 7 How Privileged Are They? Middle-Class Brazilian Immigrants in Lisbon
• Chapter 8 Imagined Communitas: Older Migrants and Aspirational Mobility
• Chapter 9 Privileged Time: Volunteers’ Experiences at a Spiritual Retreat Center in Hawai’i
• Notes on Contributors
• Index