Mobility, Stasis and Transnational Kin: Western Later-life Migrants in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Studies of transnational families tend to filter understandings of mobility and stasis through a bi-national framework that juxtaposes the movement of migrants across international borders with the immobility of in-place kin within equally static national spaces. This article examines the concept-metaphors of mobility and stasis through the eyes of later-life (over 50 year-old) Western migrants living in Penang, Malaysia and Bali, Indonesia. By treating “in-place” kin as mobile subjects I examine the extent to which the movement of individuals and families within and across a range of national borders affects the lives, concerns and movements of these older, Western migrants and retirees in Southeast Asia. By examining the concept-metaphors from the perspective of these migrants I illustrate the extent to which such people both succumb to yet exceed scholarly imaginings of im/mobility and juxtapositions between mobile selves and immobile others. Migrant thinking about these concept-metaphors, I suggest, complicates an ongoing tendency within the field of transnational family studies to view mobility and stasis as categorical opposites and offers fresh insights into the role and relevance of these concept-metaphors in the lives of Western migrants in Southeast Asia and their transnational relations with teenage and adult children, ageing parents and grandchildren.