‘Mobile’Contexts/‘Immobile’ Cultures

Abstract

Communication technologies and cheap air travel have profoundly reshaped the patterns of international circulation and migration, blurring the distinction between travellers, tourists and migrants. Some tourists have selected their former recreational area as permanent place of residence while other people are choosing or are being forced into visiting or ‘consuming’ multiple places at regular or irregular intervals. These multiple practices of places and contexts, which entail new modes of living and bring different people together, could be regarded as ways of improving one's communicative competence with other cultures. Drawing on field work conducted by linguists among retired or active British migrants to different regions of France and also on the work of sociologists, anthropologists, economists, geographers and tourism scholars in other countries of Europe or the world, this paper considers how the most mobile individuals in our modern societies shift contexts but seem to keep cultures at a standstill.