The Nomads Of Mykonos

This is the ethnography of the Mykoniots d'élection, a 'gang' of romantic adventurers who have been visiting the island of Mykonos for the last thirty-five years and have formed a community of dispersed friends. Their constant return to and insistence on working, acting and creating in a tourist space, offers them an extreme identity, which in turn is aesthetically marked by the transient cultural properties of Mykonos. Drawing semiotically from its ancient counterpart Delos, whose myth of emergence entails a spatial restlessness, contemporary Mykonos also acquires an idiosyncratic fluidity. In mythology Delos, the island of Apollo, was condemned by the gods to be an island in constant movement. Mykonos, as a signifier of a new form of ontological nomadism, semiotically shares such assumptions. The Nomads of Mykonos keep returning to a series of alternative affective groups largely in order to heal a split: between their desire for autonomy, rebellion and aloneness and their need to affectively belong to a collectivity. Mykonos for the Mykoniots d'élection is their permanent 'stopover'; their regular comings and goings discursively project onto Mykonos' space an allegorical (discordant) notion of 'home'.

Presenting a ground-breaking study of the emerging phenomenon of location-independence, this book examines the way in which the practices of 'global nomads', who live on the road, without fixed abode, place of employment or localised circle of friends, question many of the unwritten norms and ideals that characterise settled life in societies. With the lifestyles of global nomads blurring the boundaries between travel, migration, and dwelling, Global Nomads and Extreme Mobilities draws on in-depth interviews with a worldwide group of location-independent travellers, together with virtual and instant ethnography and discourse analysis, to show how lives oriented around extreme forms of mobility offer researchers in migration, tourism and mobilities a unique opportunity for examining the complex subjectivities and power relations associated with multi-mobility. With close attention to the nationalistic, political, and travel-related attachments of global nomads and the ways in which their own representation and justification of their lifestyles and subjectivities constitute a power negotiation, the book examines 'global nomads' social and intimate relationships and the forms of exclusion and discrimination that they encounter, raising the question of whether they live inside or outside societies - and indeed, whether there can be any life outside societies. A re-assessment of much contemporary research in the fields of mobility, migration and tourism studies, Global Nomads and Extreme Mobilities will appeal to scholars across the social sciences.

Lifestyle Migration and Residential Tourism represent a major trend in individualized societies worldwide, which is attracting a rapidly growing interest from the academic community. This volume for the first time, critically analyses the spatial, social and political consequences of such leisure-oriented mobilities and migrations. The book approaches the topic from a multidisciplinary and international perspective, unifying different branches of research, such as lifestyle migration, amenity migration, retirement migration, and second home tourism. By covering a variety of regions and landscapes such as mountain and coastal areas, rural and inland communities this volume productively engages with the formal and analytical variations of the phenomenon resulting in an enriching debate at the intersection of different areas of research. Amongst others, topics like political contest and civic participation of lifestyle migrants, their impacts on local communities, social tensions and inequalities induced by the phenomenon, as well as modes of transnational living, home and belonging will be thoroughly explored. This thought provoking volume will provide deep analytical and conceptual insights into the contested geographies of lifestyle migration and further knowledge into the spatial, social and political consequences of leisure-oriented mobilities. It will be valuable reading for students, researchers and academics from a plethora of academic disciplines.

This book draws on social theories to understand lifestyle migration as a social phenomenon. The chapters engage theoretically with themes and debates relevant to contemporary social science such as place and space, social stratification and power relations, production and consumption, individualism, dwelling and imagination.

This book is the first attempt to rethink and appraise the role of temporary commoning experiences that develop in contexts of crisis. Activist and urban planner, Angelos Varvarousis, argues that there is a certain type of commons – the liminal commons – which despite their often short lives play a crucial function in contemporary societies; they demarcate and facilitate transitions at the individual, collective and ultimately the societal level. Through an intense exploration of grassroots projects such as occupied squares, self-organised refugee camps, solidarity food structures and social clinics in crisis-ridden Greece, the author observes that humans still invent such collectively performed rituals in order to prepare, symbolize and practically explore the possibility of transformation and transition. In a period in which traditional rites of passage have faded away but many changes are urgently needed, liminal commons can be a key element in the process of claiming awareness and control over the mechanisms of individual, collective and societal emancipation.

This book offers the first in-depth analysis of Lawrence Durrell’s entire poetic opus, from his early collections in the 1940s up to his last one published in 1973. Thirty years of Durrellian poetry are brought together in order to unveil the genesis of Durrell’s writing, both poetic and fictional, drawing links to his novels and residence books, which he kept writing at the same time. Durrell thus appears as first and foremost one of the greatest late modernist poets whose literary and epistemological investigations are to be understood in the light of a worldwide network of literary brotherhoods including T. S. Eliot, Michael Fraenkel, Henry Miller, and David Gascoyne. Simultaneously, this book shows why Durrell must also be read as the heir to the greatest English romantic poets (Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth) as well as to the French symbolists and modernists (from Baudelaire to Nerval, Valéry, and Cendrars).This comparative approach opens up a brand new perspective on Durrell that has not yet been broached by North American and English scholarship. The symbolic patterns, the stylistic ploys, and the aesthetic and philosophic tenets that characterize Durrell’s poetics account for the necessary back-and-forth reading that connects prose and poetry, the fictional and the lyrical, the descriptive and the abstract. Poetry excerpts, extracts from his residence books, novels, and essays highlight not only Durrell’s complex literary strategies but also the ontological quest of a writer who, although never at home with the world he lived in, strove to create a life-world, what semiologists call the “Umwelt.”

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. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Z odprtjem internih mej v EU in zavoljo hitrega razvoja lahko dostopne navigacijske tehnologije je v okviru Mediterana opaziti naraščanje števila ljudi iz zahodne Evrope, ki so razvili poseben življenjski stil – združevanje dela, potovanja in vsakdanjega življenja na jadrnicah. V knjigi so etnografsko osvetljena sledeča vprašanja: Kako konceptualizirati te nove oblike gibanj, ki zavzemajo neudobno, vmesno pozicijo med standardnimi dihotomijami znotraj migracijskih študij kot tudi širše družbenih ved: notranje / mednarodne migracije; začasne / trajne migracije; migracije / turizem? Kako teoretično in metodološko umestiti tovrstne posameznike, ki so statistično pogosto nevidni in za katere se zdi, da se uspejo izognejo standardnim kategorizacijam mobilnih oseb (migrant, turist)? V iskanju odgovorov na zgoraj zastavljena vprašanja avtorica s pomočjo etnografske metode raziskuje povezavo med morjem, imaginariji morja in življenjsko-stilskimi migracijami. V ospredje postavlja šest etnografskih portretov, skozi katere osvetljuje podrobnosti iz življenj posameznikov v daljšem časovnem obdobju, imaginarije morja in fizične izkušnje z morskim okoljem. Na ta način lahko bolje razumem pričakovanja, aspiracije in izkušnje pomorskih življenjsko-stilskih migrantov in poglobimo razprave o začasnem nepripadanju v praksi.