مهاجرت فصلی و گردشگری بازنشستگی

This paper suggests that the investigation of tourism-induced seasonal retirement migration can shed new light on issues of anti-tourism, social distinction, and authenticity. Interviews conducted with Swedish retirees, spending their summers in Sweden and their winters in Spain, showed that anti-tourism may involve distinctions from devalued forms of tourism, and also distinctions based on different social roles and positions. The respondents attempted to create a social space for themselves between, on the one hand, tourists and tourism, and on the other hand, the Spanish, Spanishness, and norms of integration. These attempts also produced constructions of authenticity and normality, which challenge traditional conceptions within tourism research.

In today's world, people sometimes move around in ways that question traditional identifications and categorizations based on, for example, tourists and tourism. As Williams and Hall (2000:20) point out, research has paid little attention to “the gray zone of the complex forms of mobility which lie on a continuum between permanent migration and tourism”, although these practices may be of great interest for tourism analysis as well as for social science more generally. This paper investigates the experiences, self-perceptions, and distinctive strategies of a group of people pursuing one such form of mobility—Swedish retirees spending their summer seasons in Sweden and their winters in Spain. This case of tourism-induced seasonal retirement migration evokes several topical issues. Retirement migration to southern Europe, and to Spain in particular, is, to a large extent, the result of mass tourism and involves a range of economic, sociocultural, and demographic considerations (Barke and France 1996; King, Warnes and Williams 1998; Rodrı́guez, Fernández-Mayoralas and Rojo 1998). On the micro level, the experiences of the retirees highlight issues of social categorization and self-identification, which refer, in important ways, to tourism. These latter issues will be the focus of this paper. In spite of the magnitude of tourist flows and the resulting cultural and economic influences in contemporary society, both tourism and tourists are often accompanied by ambivalence, disparagement, and even hostility. “Anti-tourism” is widespread within social science as well as among the general public, with conceptions of tourism ranging from the trivial and artificial to the vulgar or barbarian, and with common stereotypes depicting the industry as exploiting and destroying local cultures, providing but superficial experiences of “sun, sea, and sand” (Crick 1989; Jacobsen 2000). Two interrelated explanations for anti-tourist attitudes and practices are often suggested—one concerns social distinction, the other authenticity. The first explanation holds that anti-tourism reflects hierarchies within tourism and strategies of social distinction (Jacobsen 2000:287; Munt 1994). Arguments along these lines understand tourism in terms of consumption, as a way of acquiring or maintaining “cultural capital” in order to achieve social distinction (Bourdieu 1984). People strive to perform (or consume) those kinds of tourism that are relatively highly valued, while dissociating themselves from socially and culturally devalued tourist activities and orientations. Munt (1994) suggests that with increasing economic resources and improved facilities for long-distance journeys, tourism has become a critical component of the “classificatory struggles” in contemporary Western society, especially among the middle classes. This first explanation suggests that anti-tourists do not necessarily despise tourism in general, but certain forms of it, notably mass tourism. Yet, the fact that tourism is often produced for and consumed by the masses does not seem to entirely explain the persistence of anti-tourist sentiments. In order to understand what makes tourism such an efficient vehicle for social distinction, the second explanation–—authenticity and rupture with normality–—should also be considered. Common definitions of tourism emphasize the distinction between the ordinary and the extraordinary (or nonordinary). The temporary escape from everyday life, with activities, locations, settings, and a “gaze” contrasting with normality, is crucial to the tourist experience (Crick 1989:332; Urry 1990:2–3). Yet, the search for the extraordinary brings along the paradox of authenticity, widely discussed within the field. MacCannell (1976) suggests that the essence of tourism is the search for authenticity not found in people's ordinary life, but that destinations often offer a “staged authenticity” rather than a true one. Indeed, MacCannell claims that “[t]he term `tourist' is increasingly used as a derisive label for someone who seems content with his [sic] obviously inauthentic experiences” (1976:94). However, this second explanation of anti-tourism has been subject to much debate. The underlying assumption–—that some settings or activities are authentic whereas others are not–—has been criticized by social constructionists arguing that authenticity is, to a great extent, constructed by the perspective and the interpretations of the observer (Crick 1989:336–337; Wang 1999:353–356). For example, Cohen 1988:374) questions MacCannell's notion of authenticity by claiming that it implicitly equates the authentic with “the pristine, the primitive, the natural, that which is as yet untouched by modernity”, and treats authenticity as an objective quality, searched for by every inhabitant of modern society. Cohen suggests that authenticity is socially constructed and its social connotations are thus negotiable, and that people may differ a lot with regard to how much of it they demand (Pearce and Moscardo 1985; Urry 1995:137–139; in later editions of his book, MacCannell also seems to acknowledge some of these points). The latter argument parallels the conception of tourism as a form of socially stratified consumption (Jacobsen 2000:297), as it suggests that claims of authenticity may be a strategy of social distinction and thus one reason why (some) people do not want to be “tourists”. In a later text, Cohen (1995) goes even further in questioning the notion of tourism as a search for authenticity and extraordinariness. He suggests that in contemporary society, the quest for authenticity associated (by MacCannell and others) with modernity is gradually being replaced by a “postmodern” tourist ethos, which implies a playful search for enjoyment that blurs the distinction between authentic and “contrived” settings (Feifer 1986:259–271). Similarly Ritzer and Liska (1997), following postmodern arguments about the attraction of simulations, claim that much contemporary tourism appears to be a search for inauthenticity rather than authenticity. Many tourists, Ritzer and Liska argue, also seem to prefer highly predictable and controlled vacations, thus following the same rationality and indeed experiencing much the same things as they do in their everyday life. Tourism, seen from this perspective, no longer represents any fundamental rupture with normality; this postmodern challenge of the paradox of authenticity in fact questions the very distinctions of authenticity/inauthenticity and ordinary/extraordinary ( Wang 1999). In spite of this criticism, the concept of authenticity has proved useful in research. Tourists often seem to value destinations perceived to provide authentic settings and experiences. At the same time, their activities are often associated with a lack of authenticity and the very presence of tourists in a place may make people (including the tourists themselves) perceive it as being less authentic (Jacobsen 2000; Waller and Lea 1999). This association with inauthenticity appears to be an important explanation for the persistence of anti-tourist sentiments. However, in order to understand the views and experiences of the Swedish winter residents in Spain—the focus of this paper—their ambivalent social position as seasonal migrants also needs to be taken into account. In their everyday life in Spain, they do not unequivocally belong either to the local Spanish community or to the tourism community. In addition, many researchers claim that today's society is marked by growing (and increasingly diverse forms of) human mobility and migration (Castles and Miller 1998), and by the emergence of new transnational ways of life (Pries 1999). Norms, values, and common understandings of mobility and territorial “roots” are destabilized by this development (King et al 1998; Malkki 1992). On the one hand, traditional understandings within social science regard migration and human mobility as an exception to a normality of immobility, social cohesion, and cultural homogeneity; migration is supposed to be a unidirectional movement followed by integration in the destination society. On the other hand, more recent perspectives understand migration as an ongoing process, involving continuous flows of people, social interaction, and cultural expressions. Seasonal retirement migration, and the social roles and positions that it creates, conform well to these latter perspectives but may come into conflict with traditional understandings of migration and norms of integration. This conflict was, at times, highly apparent in the accounts of the Swedish winter residents in Spain. It will be argued here that the interviewees occupied a marginal social and symbolic space between tourists and local Spanish residents, but also between common understandings of tourism and migration, and that this marginality provides important contextual explanations for their views of tourists and tourism. The purpose of this paper is to examine what strategies the winter residents used in their dissociation from tourists and tourism, to explain this dissociation and to analyze its implications with regard to anti-tourism, social distinction, and authenticity. In particular, this will involve the investigation of how the interviewees regarded tourists, the local Spanish population, and their own relationship(s) with these two groups.

The main argument of this paper is that the study of tourism-induced seasonal retirement migration provides new understandings and interpretations of anti-tourism, social distinction, and authenticity. Previous research has regarded anti-tourism as an attempt at a distinction from devalued forms of the industry or as a more general rejection of the inauthenticity associated with the tourist role. The present study of retired Swedish winter residents in Spain showed that anti-tourist attitudes and practices might involve not only distinctions between different forms of tourism, but also distinctions referring to other social categories (such as seasonal migrants and local resident populations). In academic as well as in lay understandings, tourism is commonly conceived as a temporary escape from the normality of everyday life, whereas migration is often expected to be a unidirectional movement followed by integration in the receiving society. The seasonal retirement migration examined here fitted neither of these images, and thus the social position and categorization of the winter residents became ambivalent. This ambivalence was reflected in the interviewees' experiences of being neither tourists nor Spaniards, and in their strategies of distinction from these two social categories. The distancing from tourists was often stronger and more important to the respondents than the distinctions from the Spanish, and several reasons for this were identified. First, their dissociation from tourism reflected their inability to live up to the norms of integration (in Spanish society) present in common understandings of international migration. By comparing themselves with tourists rather than with immigrants or with local Spanish populations, they made their sometimes limited efforts of integration appear in a more favorable light. Second, the winter residents were often taken to be tourists in their everyday life in Spain, whereas they ran little risk of being confused with the local Spanish population; hence their distinctions from tourists became more important. Third, their accounts also represented attempts at dissociation from those socially and culturally devalued mass tourism types that predominate in the Spanish coastal areas and thus reflected the hierarchic valuation of different forms of tourism. These explanations clearly show that anti-tourism may reflect several social distinctions, depending both on the forms of tourism and on the social groups or categories involved. Jacobsen (2000) distinguishes between anti-tourist attitudes and practices, suggesting that the former are expressed by those who visit places where they meet a lot of tourists, but feel uneasy about doing so, whereas the latter imply tourism during off-peak seasons or at destinations attracting few tourists. In the present study, strategies related to time, space, activities, behavior, knowledge, and abilities were used in the respondents' attempts to distinguish themselves from tourists. The analysis of these strategies demonstrates that both anti-tourist attitudes and practices may be found in settings marked by tourism, although the anti-tourist practices in that case are necessarily more fine-grained than the radical temporal and spatial distancing suggested by Jacobsen. The winter residents' claims of authenticity and normality provided another expression of their specific social position in Spain. Although constructed in different and sometimes ambivalent ways, these claims converged in two respects. One, the respondents claimed access to some kind of authentic Spanishness that was inaccessible to tourists; two, they defined their own life in Spain in terms of normality, in opposition to the extraordinary situation of tourists. These findings represent an additional explanation for the winter residents' strong dissociation from tourism; they also throw an interesting sidelight on the issue of tourism and authenticity. To begin with, they lend support to constructionist propositions about authenticity (Cohen 1988). The interviewees' accounts of tourism, Spanishness and their own life in Spain, the claims of authenticity made in these accounts, and their importance for social distinction aptly demonstrate that notions of authenticity are socially constructed and their meanings negotiable. The analysis showed, just as Cohen suggests, that authenticity may be constructed differently, even among the winter residents themselves, and that some people demand more than others. However, the interviewees generally regarded authenticity as something desirable and also regarded tourism as inauthentic and as a divergence from normality. Despite the alleged emergence of a postmodern tourist ethos (Cohen 1995; Ritzer and Liska 1997), the present study suggests that distinctions of authenticity/inauthenticity and ordinary/extraordinary may still be highly relevant in popular understandings of tourism, and useful in tourism-related strategies of social distinction. Yet, the interviewees' claims of authenticity and normality did indeed challenge the paradox of authenticity, although from a different perspective than the research cited in the paper. The respondents claimed to have access to authentic Spanishness while living an ordinary life—indeed because they lived an ordinary life—whereas they regarded tourism as extraordinary and hence inauthentic. By dissociating authenticity from the extraordinary, they could, in their distinctions from tourism, simultaneously make claims of authenticity and normality. In doing so, they questioned the very foundation of MacCannell's (1976) argument—the assumption that ordinary life in contemporary Western society is necessarily inauthentic. This questioning was partly made possible by the respondents' position as retirees, as the work/leisure dichotomy was of limited relevance to most of them. Indeed, as large numbers of tourists today are retirees, this points towards a limitation in common theoretical arguments about authenticity, which is rarely discussed in the literature. In addition, as the present analysis demonstrated, the winter residents' specific claims of authenticity and normality were also heavily influenced by their seasonal migration between Sweden and Spain, by their ambivalent social categorization in Spain, and by their distinctive strategies vis-à-vis tourists. Thus, the social construction of authenticity in tourist settings is highly dependent on the social groups involved and on their strategies for social distinction. More generally, this paper supports the argument made by Williams and Hall (2000), that tourism research may benefit from studies of those forms of mobility that lie between tourism and permanent migration. The distinctive strategies examined here, as well as the constructions of authenticity and normality, reflect the efforts of the respondents to define and defend a social and symbolic space for themselves between tourism and migration, and between the well-established social categories of tourists and Spaniards. Tourism, migration, and various intermediary or mixed forms of human mobility in contemporary society bring along problems and ambiguities with regard to social roles, social categorization, and self-identification and, as a consequence, various individual and collective strategies for dealing with these problems. In a world where mobility and transnationalism appear as increasingly important social forces, these issues constitute a fruitful area for further research, within this and other fields of social science.