A Bourdieusian Analysis of Class and Migration

Abstract

This article explores the phenomenon of lifestyle migration from Britain to Spain to interrogate, empirically, the continued relevance of class in the era of individualizing modernity (Beck, 1994). Lifestyle migrants articulate an anti-materialist rhetoric and their experiences of retirement or self-employment diminish the significance of class divisions. However, as researchers who independently studied similar populations in the Eastern and Western Costa del Sol, we found these societies less ‘classless’ than espoused. Despite attempts to rewrite their own history and to mould a different life trajectory through geographical mobility, migrants were bound by the significance of class through both cultural process and the reproduction of (economic) position. Bourdieu’s methodological approach and sociological concepts proved useful for understanding these processes. Employing his concepts throughout, we consider the (limited) possibilities for reinventing habitus, despite claims of an apparently egalitarian social field.

Campsite Migrants: <i>British Caravanners and Homemaking in Benidorm</i>

“…Whilst recent work on lifestyle migration has pointed to the questionable theoretical grounding in the reflexiveindividualism and liquid/late modernity fronted in the work of Giddens and Bauman (Benson & Osbaldiston 2014, 2016Korpela 2014), Oliver and O'Reilly (2010) have more specifically problematised what they see as a clear absence of social class. In their studies of British in Spain, the authors note their own 'discomfort with leaving class behind' in favour of individualisation theories.…”

“…Oliver and O'Reilly's way forward is based on the work of Bourdieu by fronting issues of social reproduction through by now familiar concepts of the field, habitus and various forms of capital. However, rather than taking migration motivations and aspirations as the point of departure for disentangling such questions (see Oliver and O'Reilly 2010), focusing on homemaking in the migratory setting provides a different entrance point for understanding in which ways class remains important. Class in the caravan migrant setting is both reproduced and transformed in a transnational environment wherein national sameness and unity is reinforced in the presence of other nationalities and -perhaps more importantly so -where the on-going creation of an informal economy builds on conventional working-class labour and leisure.…”

International migration and social theory

“…But I, too, have tended to restrict my gaze to a phenomenology of the agent with far less focus on independent structures. This chapter will concentrate on two monographs O'Reilly 2000) and to a lesser extent two papers (Oliver andO'Reilly 2010 andO'Reilly 2007), the work of several other authors, such as Mantecon (2008), Rodes (2009), Casado Díaz (2006 and the edited collection of Rodríguez, Casado Díaz and Huber (2005). Again, the goal is to try to understand a given migration trend by piecing together a practice story about it.…”

“…The other two papers referred to here (Oliver andO'Reilly, 2010, andO'Reilly, 2007) draw on data collected then as well as during two further periods of intensive fieldwork in 2004 and 2005 and numerous shorter visits in the intervening years. I have been a peripatetic migrant and second home-owner in Malaga province for over ten years and have been both a member and an ethnographer of the British community in Spain for that time.…”

British migrants and Irish anxieties

“…Despite the obvious importance of emigration as a social process in Britain, there is limited academic literature on the topic, with some exceptions. There is a growing body of work on retirement migration and lifestyle migration (Benson, 2010;King, Warnes, Warnes & Williams, 2000;Oliver, 2008;Oliver & O'Reilly, 2010;O'Reilly, 2000), student migration (Findlay, King, Stam & Ruiz-Gelices, 2006;King & Ruiz-Gelices, 2003) and return migration from Britain . There is also a small body of work on elite migration: on the transnational elites who populate the global cities so beloved of urban studies (Beaverstock, 2002(Beaverstock, , 2005Scott, 2006;Yeoh & Willis, 2005), while a recent focus on 'postcolonial migration' includes work on British migration to former colonies such as Hong Kong and Dubai (Coles & Walsh, 2010;Leonard, 2010).…”