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Abstract
Through the examination of British migration to rural France, the article explores how imagination is put into practice and aims to determine what it is that makes some individuals act on the basis of these imaginings to improve their quality of life. It becomes clear that, for lifestyle migration to occur and in order to explain the timing of migration, it is necessary to question and consider the other factors—structural, cultural and biographical—that might drive people to act on the basis of their imaginings. Through recognition of the various contingencies that need to be in place for lifestyle migration to occur, the paper argues for a theoretical approach that accounts for the dialectic between structure and agency in the act of migration.
Notes
1. All respondents’ names are pseudonyms.
2. As Bousiou (Citation2008) described them, this is a group of regular visitors to the island of Mykonos who, over the last 35 years, have formed an alternative community.
3. Lifestyle migration is arguably at the intersection of tourism and migration, ‘blurring the boundaries’ between the two (Benson Citation2011: 13) and, while the discussion is pertinent to the examples presented here, there is not the space to do the argument justice. For a comprehensive review of the argument, see Williams and Hall (Citation2000); for an account of the relationship between lifestyle migration and tourism, see Benson and O'Reilly (Citation2009).
4. Although there has been some suggestion that a large proportion of British migrants in France return to the UK (see Buller Citation2008), this was the only case that I came across during my fieldwork.