The Role of the Social Imaginary in Lifestyle Migration: Employing the Ontology of Practice Theory

Abstract

Academics in recent decades are developing diverse sets of concepts as part of the endeavour to understand, illustrate and systematically account for the interaction of structure and agency in the ongoing production of social life. The concept of the social imaginary, discussed by many of the authors in this volume, is one such concept. It is an attempt to grapple with the creative, individual and ever-changing nature of the imagination, with the socially shaped ways in which a place or lifestyle can be imagined, and with the social outcomes of people acting on their imagination in terms of both their own lives and the shaping of places (and new imaginaries). We have seen in this volume how the social imaginary is of central importance to lifestyle migration — a migration seeped in imaginings and romanticism. But ‘the social imaginary’ is an ambitious concept with an ambitious project, and it has the tendency to become what Billig (2013) has termed a ‘noun phrase’: imprecise jargon that reifies complexes of things, while discounting people and actions. I argue that scholars employing the concept would benefit from thinking through its various elements (and actions) more systematically. It is useful to examine the grand ideas, distant structures, sweeping changes, discourses and significations, that pre-exist given agents, and then to relate these to an examination of the level of the daily practices of agents, their tactics and negotiations, in the context of cultural communities. In turn, the concept of the social imaginary can be employed to understand the shaping of new material and social structures and significations, through the ongoing interaction of structure and agency.