Lifestyle migrants, the linguistic landscape and the politics of place

Abstract

This chapter takes a critical approach to the discursive construction of a privileged form of place-identity in the linguistic landscape of a particular lifestyle migrant destination in Portugal. ‘Place-identity’ is taken here to mean the potentially multiple dialectical relationships between the identities of places and the social identities of those who inhabit and use them, as constructed in and through discourse. The term ‘discourse’ is used in its broadest sense, as a multi-modal social practice which therefore encompasses other semiotic systems besides language, such as visual images (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996). By taking a socio-cognitive approach to discourse (van Dijk 2008, 2009), this means that collective identities (as well as certain identities of places) are understood as being shared socio-cognitive representations which are established and negotiated via discursive practices (Koller 2008a,b). Finally, the ‘critical’ part of doing critical discourse analysis (CDA) involves not merely identifying and describing the structures and strategies of discourse that may establish identities, but also interpreting and explaining them in relation to the broader socio-political contexts in which they are embedded (Wodak 2008; Wodak and Meyer 2009). In this way, an analysis of the discursive construction of collective place-identities inevitably leads to issues related to spatial power relations, since it involves exploring the ways in which different collective identities are discursively positioned in relation to places. Lifestyle migrants (as a collective social group) are positioned in manydestinations as ‘desirable’ migrants, particularly in places that are heavily dependent on tourism. In many destinations, including Portugal, the term ‘residential tourism’ is often used in the media and in official planning documents to describe the phenomenon of lifestyle migration, meaning that it is simply construed as an extension of tourism and therefore generally considered to be economically beneficial (Mazon et al. 2009; Mantecon 2010; Nudrali and O’Reilly 2009). This clearly helps in the construction of privileged place-identities for lifestyle migrants. It also reinforces hegemonic discourses on the legitimacy (or otherwise) of certain types of migration; discourses that are generally based on economic arguments (Mazon et al.2009; Mantecon 2010) but which may also have ethnic underpinnings: affluent, northern European migrants might be positioned differently from affluent migrants from other parts of the world, for instance. The question for discourse analysts is exactly how such discourses are established and reproduced to the extent that they eventually become ‘common sense’ worldviews – or ideologies, in other words (Billig et al. 1988; van Dijk 1998). This is, of course, an enormous task, and the scope of discourse analytical work is invariably limited to the close examination of a relatively small number of texts1 which are viewed as being representative in some way of the social world (Meyer 2001), with detailed attention being paid to the context(s) in which discursive practices are embedded (Wodak and Meyer 2009).