The Movement Beyond (Lifestyle) Migration: Mobile Practices and the Constitution of a Better Way of Life

Abstract

This article revisits my ethnography of the British in rural France to question how mobility in post‐migration life was deemed intrinsic to the better way of life that they sought through their migration. Through the exploration of the migrants’ everyday lives, I reveal that the migrants’ mobile practices and their expectations of mobility contributed towards the perceived success of their new lives and were thus significant to the ongoing process getting to a better way of life. Beyond this example, the article also demonstrates how the findings of mobilities researchers may be mobilized in traditional anthropological fieldwork.

Key Words:

• Lifestyle migration
• ethnography
• mobile practices
• post‐migration lives
• British in rural France

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors of this special section and the participants in the original international workshop for their interest and critical readings of the initial drafts of this article. Furthermore, I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their rigorous constructive criticism.

Notes

1. For the purposes of this article, I will only be discussing the intersection of mobilities with ethnography.

2. While I understand that the mobilities turn, as framed by John Urry, is very much concerned with the production of a post‐disciplinary social science, I do not believe that the boundaries between disciplines have yet significantly been broken down. In the case of social/cultural anthropology, disciplinary identity remains strong and is focused around a commitment to ethnography as a methodology through which researchers strive to understand the lifeworlds of its participants in their own terms.

3. As I discuss elsewhere (Benson, 2009), the sociological characteristics of this population varied. My respondents ranged in age from children (some of whom had been born in France), to elderly migrants in their late seventies and early eighties. They had migrated at different stages in their lives, and while, for many, migration had coincided with retirement, this had often been early retirement. They represented a range of careers back in Britain, from civil servants and teachers, to executives from the City and entrepreneurs. However, there was one thing that they all had in common: their status as members of the British middle class (Benson, 2009, 2010, 2011).

4. All names appearing in this text are pseudonyms.