As a result of opening of internal borders within the EU and rapid development of affordable navigation technology, there is a constantly increasing number of people in the Mediterranean who have ...adopted a lifestyle that revolves around living working and traveling on sailing boats. On the ground of ethnography among liveaboards in Greece the book discusses the following questions: How can we conceptualise these novel forms of movements that seem to sit uncomfortably in between the standard dichotomized division of work within migration studies and wider social sciences: internal/international migration, temporary/permanent, migration/tourism? How do we theoretically and methodologically situate these individuals that are statistically often invisible and seem to evade the common categories of describing a mobile person, such as migrant or tourist? In order to answer these questions, the author explores ethnographically the connection between the maritime environment, sea imaginaries and lifestyle migration. It puts forward six crew portraits in order to highlight details from individuals’ lives on a longer time perspective but also to place the individual stories, sea imaginaries and people’s experiences with the maritime environment in dialogue with each other. This makes it possible to better understand the expectations, aspirations and experiences of maritime lifestyle migrants and to discuss further the idea of temporarily unbelonging in practice.
The article addresses the topic of coastal transformations through the lens of the critical heritage approach. It focuses on fish as a vehicle to assess how heritage as a particular type of imaginary ...and discourse conveys the social, cultural, political and economic transformations of the area. The two fish chosen to represent the heritage imaginaries in the Northeast Adriatic Bay of Piran are the wild mullet and farmed seabass. Both species are seen as local but each in its particular way. Mullet has acquired a local status by appearing annually in the Bay of Piran where local traditions developed around its catch. Farmed seabass became local through the process of domestication after it traversed large distances across the land to arrive in the Bay
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s meshed cages. Through detailed ethnographies and textual and visual discourse analysis, the authors find an array of competing and complementary heritage imaginaries surrounding both fish. These imaginaries highlight frictions as a central part of the present-day life on the coast as well as unease about the future, and can be discerned in the tense relation between fishing and mariculture, the competing ideologies of the local, national and the global and the disappearance of previous ways of life in the face of rapid coastal transformation.
In the context of the Anthropocene, the social sciences and humanities are faced with numerous challenges. How to decentre the human in the "Age of Humans"? What ontologies, epistemologies and ...practices emerge, re-emerge or disappear when faced with new climate and environmental realities? How to include morethan- humans in our participatory research? How to go beyond "human horizons" (Mittermaier, 2021) when we are stuck with the human perspective? In order to touch on these challenging issues the paper brings to the fore ethnographic experiments with the Rižana River in the NE Adriatic region, posing the following question: how should the river be approached ethnographically? The paper first discusses conceptual orientations in academic more-than-human research, highlighting the experimental approaches of walking and writing. In the next step, it presents ethnographic experiments with the Rižana River, using walking and writing as two methods of doing ethnography with the river. The conclusion summarizes some of the findings and considerations related to the initial questions.
REFLECTIONS ON MARGINAL MOBILE LIFESTYLES Juntunen, Marko; Kalčić, Špela; Rogelja, Nataša
Nordic Journal of Migration Research,
03/2014, Volume:
4, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This article focuses on mobile people who are largely overlooked in the contemporary studies of migration and mobility. Today, a rather limited but constantly growing number of people from Global ...North and Global South are wandering along transnational trajectories, without extended settlement anywhere in particular. They remain mobile because of inability to make the living they hoped for in the place of their origin, or because of being dissatisfied with the values or way of living in home society. Based on our fieldworks among Western liveaboards in the Mediterranean, new European nomads who engage in a mobile life between Europe and Africa, and popular class (sha’bi)1 Moroccan men in the transnational space between Morocco and Spain, we demonstrate the central characteristic of these lifestyles that we prefer to conceptualise as “marginal mobilities”: they are highly mobile, not entirely forced nor voluntary lifestyles, which occur along loosely defined travel trajectories; they generally lack politicised public spheres; and they are marked by the sentiments of marginality, liminality and constant negotiation with the sedentary norm of the nation state.
REFLECTIONS ON MARGINAL MOBILE LIFESTYLES Juntunen, Marko; Kalčić, Špela; Rogelja, Nataša
Nordic Journal of Migration Research,
03/2014, Volume:
4, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This article focuses on mobile people who are largely overlooked in the contemporary studies of migration and mobility. Today, a rather limited but constantly growing number of people from Global ...North and Global South are wandering along transnational trajectories, without extended settlement anywhere in particular. They remain mobile because of inability to make the living they hoped for in the place of their origin, or because of being dissatisfied with the values or way of living in home society. Based on our fieldworks among Western liveaboards in the Mediterranean, new European nomads who engage in a mobile life between Europe and Africa, and popular class (sha’bi)1 Moroccan men in the transnational space between Morocco and Spain, we demonstrate the central characteristic of these lifestyles that we prefer to conceptualise as “marginal mobilities”: they are highly mobile, not entirely forced nor voluntary lifestyles, which occur along loosely defined travel trajectories; they generally lack politicised public spheres; and they are marked by the sentiments of marginality, liminality and constant negotiation with the sedentary norm of the nation state.
As a result of the rapid development of navigation and communication technology, boat building technology, popularity of travel and the sea, increased living standards, mobile work opportunities, as ...well as recessions and disillusionment with the nation-state system and postindustrial economy, a constantly increasing number of people adopt mobility on the sea as a way of life. The paper explores the connection between sea imaginaries and maritime lifestyle migration, discussing the process by which sea imaginaries are translated into practice but also how the physical maritime environment influences the experience of lifestyle migrants. In doing so, the concept of liminality, as previously tailored to the lifestyle migration literature and initially introduced by Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner, will be put in a dialogue with the ethnographic material. First, the paper explains the theoretical foundations of lifestyle migration, emphasizing the relation between the social construction of places and choices of lifestyle migrants, while also introducing the debate on liminality; second, it discusses the importance of these cultural dimensions in the specific ethnographic setting among Westerners in the Mediterranean who live, travel and work on sailing boats. Finally, the sea images, the maritime environment and details from individualized biographies will be put in a dialogue with each other in order to discuss in-between practices and places.
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