For Love, Labour, and Lifestyle: European Men Moving to Northeast Brazil

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article debates the specific case of the migration of European men to Northeast Brazil and its relation to the creation of intimacy bonds with local women that have been made possible by previous tourist visits. The analysis has the principal objective of understanding the dense framework of social conditions and circumstances that cause the transatlantic mobility of men, and gives particular emphasis to the emotional and marital factors that fuel this type of movement, trying to show that they also migrate for intimacy reasons, and not only for economic reasons as studies based on a neoclassical approach have often seemed to indicate. While central, in these examples of international mobility, the intention to marry is not as determining a factor as the concept of ‘marriage migrations’ would suggest. Poetic motivations related to passion coexist dynamically with a much wider set of (micro)political economy and existential drives, related not only to employment and investment but also to recreation and the minutiae of everyday life. For this reason, it is important to avoid any unicausal schema based on exclusive or dichotomous conceptual frameworks that foreground migration for marital, lifestyle and/or employment motives. The migrations in question tend to be motivated, simultaneously, by the desire for matrimony and to secure assets, and even by what we might call ‘civilisational’ issues. The material that sustains both this and other perspectives presented in the article is the result of a multisited ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in various spaces within Euro-Brazilian configurations of intimacy.