PUNTO Y BANCA

As was discussed in the previous chapters, Bauman’s notion of liquid love has been resisted, if not rejected, by several scholars pursuing a relational approach to relationships within academia. While meanings of tourism and culture may be blurring, we need an approach more in tune with capturing the relational complexity of relationships. Important to note though, is how his notions of dissolving social structures link to debates and focus within academia that have brought intimacy and belonging into focus. As was described in the last chapter, Gidden’s (Giddens, 1992) argument highlighting the importance of intimacy over structures of meaning and authority acted as a precursor to an explosion of research on emotion, affect, performance and practice within the social sciences. Theory exploring relational ontologies has put intimacy and the emotional intimate worlds humans construct with each other, with objects, and virtual and natural environments center stage. In psychology, there is also research that has sought to decouple images of intimacy in popular culture predominantly related to sexuality. Instead, scholars argue that different forms of intimacy connect all types of relationships in different ways and become crucial to developing life skills across the life course (Skyler & Bayer, 2010).

Thus, intimacy has become a core concern for researching social and cultural life.

The work of John Urry and others, in relation to mobilities research significantly aided in calling attention to a focus on intimacy, VFR and ICTs by focusing on co-presence. Resisting Bauman’s work, Larsen, Urry and Axhausen (2006a) focused on the co-presence formed through strong ties. They argue that co-presence is made up of five mobilities: physical travel, the travel of objects, imaginative travel, virtual (internet) travel and communicative mobilities as with letters, email messages, and Skype. Their work contributed to viewing relationships not as objective or constituted from essentialist selves but made and un-made through practices that constitute (im)mobilities of migration, tourism, leisure, working life, virtual and physical spheres. In parallel Urry (2000) argues for viewing feelings of belonging not in terms of a single place of dwelling but as created while circulating in and between places. His arguments echoed other notable concepts like elective belonging (Savage et al., 2005) that understands belonging as fluid, or where people attach themselves to multiple locations and see places as sites for performing multiple identities or belongings. Elective belonging also parallels arguments within media studies that electronic media and mobility have contributed to making the borders of the

private and public spheres permeable (Morley, 2000). In addition, this work reflected other scholars work on co-presence as mediated by emotion in that increased mobility entails the development of important emotional capacities and management that situates different forms of migration through the emotional labor required to negotiate lives on the move (Baldassar, 2008;

Elliott & Urry, 2010). These scholars have highlighted how notions of self, linked to personal identity and collective belonging are mediated through forms of co-presence and emotional management while on the move and through moments of stillness.

Furthermore, the focus on practice, co-presence, and networks contributed to problematizing borders between the extraordinary and every day. Researchers linked intimacy and globalization to the blurring of the exotic and familiar, arguing globalization was fostering new relations of cultural intimacy with others that challenges notions and borders of belonging on an on-going basis (Herzfeld, 2005). This process underscores how the body and embodied mobilities have risen in importance to interrogate the insider/outsider divide through intimate cultural encounters such as those between leisure travelers and residents (Allon & Anderson, 2009). Thus, in researching VFR and ICTs as they pertain to migrant personal communities, this study is in part aimed at understanding how the exotic and extraordinary are constructed in intimate lives and between selves and others that may destabilize borders of the local and non-local and belonging and unbelonging.

Through this blurring we can begin to understand how different identities, notions of belonging and social relations are constituted. Scholarship related to tourism and migration, and to VFR has produced fruitful exploration of these processes of blurring. Williams and Hall (2002) began the discussion by detailing how shifts in production and consumption, related to tourism and migration, were connected to changes in economic and social trajectories due to the globalization of labor markets and the expanding circulation of capital and labor. The authors detailed new intricacies where, for example, tourism consumption can ‘tip into’ migration, migration can lead to tourism through instances like VFR or second home ownership can become a form of circulating consumer oriented migration. Building on this argument, O’Reilly (2003) questioned the ambiguity surrounding identities of tourist and migrant by stipulating that the inter-articulation of tourism and migration raises the question of ‘when is a tourist’? She cited examples such as UK retirement migration in Spain where her informants shift from practices

related to integrating into the local community to visiting places in the surrounding area or hosting and visiting the local environment with guests from the UK.

This work was furthered in relation to practices of physical VFR. VFR should not only be defined as a series of different typologies of visits enacted at different moments (Backer, 2007;

Baldassar, 2008). Instead, VFR is better understood as consisting of different practices that are blurred (Janta et al., 2015) and often a cause of tension (Humbracht, 2015). For example, because visiting friends and family have limited holiday time and have to invest money in tickets (despite the fact that lodging can be free), they expect to be able to engage in leisure activities and enact tourist identities. Therefore, migrant hosts are often expected to package their daily lives into tourist experiences to be consumed by guests (Humbracht, 2015). Return visits are also marked by a tensions between familial expectations and personal interests like tourism, as migrants seek to balance a need to visit family and a desire to have some aspect of tourism (von Koppenfels et al., 2015). Thus, there is a fundamental ambiguity over mobile identities and how to attach identities and meanings of belonging and unbelonging within transnational networks.

There has been, however, little research within tourism and migration that links the blurring of the everyday and extraordinary, intimacy and belonging to ICTs. Considering the integration of ICTs into daily life, this thesis maintains that the nature of the subject, as it pertains to the constitution of tourist, migrant, or mobile identities, its situatedness in shifting social, cultural and economic structures, is significantly more complicated than has been represented thus far. A crucial point is that there is a need for attention to the manner in which people replicate everyday practices within seemingly exotic contexts and situations (Duncan et al., 2014) that provides a sense of familiarity and that can be made and remade across different contexts. Thus, migrants can be at ‘home in practice’ (Corvellec & O'Dell, 2012) through how they develop routines and rhythms of VFR and ICTs. In relation to VFR, Larsen has argued that intimacy and familiar practices shared on tourist trips with family or during VFR, fundamentally confound divisions of the everyday and the extraordinary (Larsen, 2008). In addition, Haldrup and Larsen (2010) have argued that ICTs have contributed to significant changes in perceptions of the everyday and exotic that draws together and co-mingles tourism practice with everyday life. These scholars have argued for understanding how technology and material objects create circuits of performance - where production and consumption processes converge and overlap in

complex ways both in everyday life and at tourist sites (Haldrup & Larsen, 2010). In doing so, they make the important point that one of the key features of contemporary social life is the persistent presence of the ‘Other’ in consumption and everyday life, that is connected to processes of touristification of everyday life and the colonization of everydayness in tourists’

performances (Haldrup & Larsen, 2010). In the context of this research, this work points to understanding migrant or distant others that are continually present through ICTs and VFR, as consumption, and how everyday practices from eating at local cafes to showing loved ones a local neighborhood during visits are framed through tourism.

The blurring of the extraordinary and the everyday has been further discussed in the VFR literature and in relation to tensions surrounding the public and private. VFR tourism can be a context in which both ‘home’ and ‘away’ are muddled together, including aspects of extraordinary and everydayness that can create difficulties surrounding privacy and the negotiation of intimacy (Ashtar, Shani, & Uriely, 2016; Shani & Uriely, 2010). Visits are contexts in which family and friends politics and expectations can cause tensions related to personal routines as well as challenges related to the everyday lives of hosts in migration contexts (Humbracht, 2015). This research, however, argues that binaries like home and away may not stand up to scrutiny when applied to different members of personal communities across time. By researching personal communities, this study will be better able to grasp how the extraordinary and mundane or home and away are constructed differently across relationships.

Furthermore, the implementation of programs like Skype, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest into the daily lives of highly skilled migrants and friends and family (but not only the affluent) equates to the continuing presence of the lives of Others in daily life, the continued touristification of migrants daily lives and the injection of everyday life into VFR tourism.

Cultivating elements of daily life for consumption occurs in VFR trips and can be bound up in the everyday through ICTs and notions of daily life that continue to be recoded and intertwined through channels of performance within relationships. Thus, visits may be about the renewal or affirmation of ethnic identities or roots (Duval, 2004; Janta et al., 2015) but VFR and ICTs are also crucial to creating notions of belonging through lifestyle migration (Duncan et al., 2014).

We do, however, need to pay attention to the manner in which they are used for generating familiarly and Otherness in parallel to each other, before, during and after visits. Particularly in

regard to social media and the use of Skype, aspects of daily lives for both migrants and friends and family are regularly or selectively observed, discussed, and commented upon by migrants, juxtaposing alternative life scripts into daily life that then inform return visits and visits from friends and family.