Suchergebnisse

1. Introduction : ethnography as practice -- 2. Where to begin -- 3. Ethical ethnography -- 4. Participating and observing -- 5. Interviews : asking questions of individuals and groups -- 6. Practical issues in interviewing -- 7. New directions in ethnography -- 8. Ethnographic analysis -- 9. Writing and representation.

This paper makes the argument that ethnographic returning, in which ethnographers return to their field over time, and which is an engaged and long-term ethnography, can be considered a form of longitudinal qualitative study that can inform a reflexive analysis of the practice, or unfolding, of social life. Longitudinal qualitative studies have been designed as longitudinal at the outset and therefore have a specific focus on temporality, processes and social change. They often have an implicit theory of social change informing the analyses. Re-studies revisit the field site or community, and update or challenge the work of earlier researchers. These also tend to focus on change, if not so much on processes or time. Though their work is rarely labelled longitudinal, it is also quite common for ethnographers to return to the field and their (changing) communities over time, and here some focus on change is also inevitable. I call this ethnographic returning. All such temporal approaches require a constructive and positive approach to reflexivity, in which research is enhanced by acknowledgement that the social world, the academic world and the personal world of the researcher are intermingled and co-created through the ongoing process of social life. But, more than this, reflexivity needs to be relocated within a theory of the reflexive nature of social life (a theory of practice). I illustrate, through my own work, and drawing on the wider field of study on British migration to Spain, the contribution that participant observation and ethnographic returning can make to this endeavour.

This is a chapter from the book, Local Lives: Migration and the Politics of Place [Ashgate © Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich and Catherine Trundle] http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409401032 ; This chapter draws on ethnographic data from a small East Midlands town in England to demonstrate that local community is a resource for identity formation and expression, as well as collective claims for place-based material resources and emplaced social networks of daily relationality. Community is brought more into play in times of anxiety, such as when urban restructuring, flexible labour markets, globalising processes, and increased levels of migration impact on people's daily, lived experiences. The expression of community boundaries, however, is not (necessarily) drawn foremost along ethnic/foreigner/immigrant lines, but along the lines of mobility and instability. Migration, in the situation I describe, is thus feared not for the immigrants it brings but for the changes it promises, and especially the transience and loss of continuity. Disputes about the symbolic borders of the community often play out with regard to disputes over the real geographic and physical borders of the town, and disputes over the economic and political boundaries and the material resources these enable or disable. Emplaced memories and narratives of the past are central tools through which people recreate community identity and belonging in public spaces on a daily basis and effectively encourage locals (of all backgrounds) to collectively fight for or defend resources. Overwhelmingly these narratives deploy notions of both victimhood and a community of engagement as a counter to the threat of transience.

European migrants to Spain's coastal areas could be described as the archetypal elite transmigrant. Embodying Papastergiadis' spectre of placeless capital and the homeless subject, `residential tourists' make creative use of modern communication technologies and increasingly accessible air travel to construct fluid migration trajectories, employing transnational affective and instrumental networks. However, research on British migrants to Spain has revealed a high incidence of social, cultural, economic, and political exclusion. Following a dream of star ting a new life in a new place, some migrants do not wish to transcend the assimilationist model, nor have the resources to depend on transnational ties. Their dream is integration, but the tensions inherent in the mobility—enclosure dialectic — the contradictions between freedom of movement and the reasser tion of the nation state, an ambiguous status in Spanish society, their own ambivalent attitudes — constrain both assimilation and their ability to transcend it and lead to marginalization.

This article explores Britain's changing relationship towards the outside in the context of contemporary British migration to the Costa del Sol. Historically, the British abroad have (apparently) retained a myth of the glorious homeland, to which they will eventually return, but the critique of colonialism both challenged the ethno‐centrism of the colonisers and questioned the validity of the descriptions of colonial life. More recently, Britain has been forced to shed some of its 'great nation'/uncontaminated island mentality and to attempt to embrace both Europe and the rest of the developed world. At the same time the 'race relations' approach has been exchanged for a multiculturalist one at home. But the relationship with the outside remains ambivalent: Europe is embraced one day and spurned the next; racism remains a problem in Britain; and the British abroad seem to retain a 'little England' mentality. The British who have migrated to Spain in the last few decades are especially interesting. Their compatriots back home denigrate their behaviour and impute to them a longing for home which they do not have. They, themselves, fail to integrate into Spanish society yet talk of Spain as their home and construct new identities based on symbols of Spanishness. Dangling between two countries and two cultures, the British in Spain are, in many ways, symbolic of Britain's ambivalence to the outside and to its self.

Leading scholars in the sociology of migration, Michaela Benson and Karen O'Reilly, re-theorise lifestyle migration through a sustained focus on postcolonialism at its intersections with neoliberalism. This book provides an in-depth analysis of the interplay of colonial traces and neoliberal presents, the relationship between residential tourism and economic development, and the governance and regulation of lifestyle migration. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken by the authors among lifestyle migrants in Malaysia and Panama, they reveal the structural and material conditions that support migration and how these are embodied by migrant subjects, while also highlighting their agency within this process. This rigorous work marks an important contribution to emerging debates surrounding privileged migration and mobility. It will appeal to sociologists, social theorists, human and cultural geographers, economists, social psychologists, demographers, social anthropologists, tourism and migration studies specialists.--