In the 1990s, the bubble of the Japanese miracle economy burst and the country fell into recession. Following this, Japan experienced considerable economic and social transformation, including a reconsideration of its approach to work and employment. Among the consequences of these changes, such as unprecedented mobility in the labour market and an increase in part-time employment, there was a shift in lifestyle values, particularly those of middle class Japanese. In contrast to the traditional Japanese work ethic and company-orientated lifestyle which prized collectivism and self-sacrifice, new lifestyle values were largely centred on attaining an improved life-work balance which was less structured and more ‘Western.’ These new individualised lifestyle values began to be reflected in a new-found interest in leisure, characterised by a shift from group-oriented leisure activities to more individualised and personalised ones. There has been another very significant change of great relevance to this thesis: an increased and unprecedented interest in overseas tourism and migration. This thesis discusses an intriguing new dynamic between the transformation of the economy and the Japanese engagement with tourism and migration. Until the 1990s, due to the guaranteed lifetime employment and the prevalence of seniority systems of Japanese corporations, there was a relatively stable life model among Japan’s middle class. In addition to healthy demand in the domestic labour market and work-dominated lifestyle, stable work opportunities meant this group rarely considered pursuing individual tourism and migration. However, since the 1990s, increasing numbers of young middle class Japanese began to drift from the safe and assured life model and chose to live abroad. This thesis, based on qualitative methodology and in-depth interviews with 31 Japanese migrants to Queensland, is a study of Japanese lifestyle migration to Australia. It draws upon several important topics and theories in contemporary sociology including globalisation, transnationalism, migration and tourism. The complex linkages between these themes are an important characteristic of this thesis and are discussed in the literature review of Chapter 2. The methodological issues of this research are presented in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 contextualises lifestyle migration against the background of broader history of Japanese migration to Australia. The chapters that follow examine three key themes pertinent to exploring the interrelationship between social transformation in Japanese society in the 1990s, changing lifestyle values and migration to Australia. Chapter 5 considers the implications of social transformation of Japanese society, specifically focusing on the lifestyle value shifts as push factors in a broad sense. Chapter 6 explores the pull factors and focuses on motivations for migration to Australia. Chapter 7 examines the lives of Japanese lifestyle migrants in Australia and highlights a unique settlement process characterised by the lack of upward social mobility, the absence of geographical concentration of Japanese migrants and the impact this has on the formation of a sustainable ethnic community. Finally, Chapter 8 summarises the argument of this thesis and discusses its contribution to the field of sociology. Possible directions for future research are also outlined.

Cette thèse cherchera à comprendre la diffusion de la spiritualité contemporaine dans le cadre d'une série de transformations dans la vie quotidienne d'une partie des secteurs moyens argentins. L'un de ses objectifs sera la compréhension du phénomène de la spiritualité Nouvel-âge. dans les secteurs moyens argentins en tant que composant d'un mode de vie. L'un de ses objectifs sera la compréhension du phénomène de la spiritualité Nouvel-âge. Cela impliquera l'analyse des différentes façons dont les cosmovisions et les pratiques spirituelles s’articulent avec d'autres dimensions de la vie quotidienne, tels que l'éducation, la santé, le lieu de résidence et de la vie économique. Ce problème fait partie de l’augmentation de la visibilité de diverses expressions de religiosité dans les sphères publiques au cours des dernières décennies.À un niveau plus concret, la thèse cherchera à montrer l'influence des réseaux de sociabilité et des espaces de socialisationspirituelle dans la diffusion d'une cosmovision et de certaines orientations de valeur qui affectent les formes prises par les différentes pratiques de la vie quotidienne. Dans un niveau encore plus empirique, cette thèse cherchera à contribuer à la compréhension des processus d'influence mutuelle entre la religiosité, comprise comme un phénomène culturel, et les configurations de l'espace. Pour ce faire, on analysera le cas des acteurs participant à des processus de mobilité résidentielle vers une zone de la partie nord de la périphérie de Buenos Aires a partir des années 1990 en lien avec des espaces et des pratiques spirituelles. Les donnes qui sont analysés ici ont été construites à partir d'une stratégie d'enquête qualitative fondée, principalement, sur une recherche ethnographique. / This thesis aims to understand the diffusion of contemporary spirituality as part of a series of transformations in everyday life within Argentinian middle classes. One of its principal objectives is to study New Age spirituality in Argentinian middle classes as part of a lifestyle. This involves the analysis of the ways in which spiritual worldviews and practices are articulated with the practices of other dimensions of everyday life, such as education, health, places of residence and economic life. This problem has been part of the bigger process of diffusion of this type of religiosity through different public spaces during the last decades. In a more concrete level, this thesis has the purpose of showing the influence of sociability networks and spiritual socializing spaces in the diffusion of new worldviews and certain valorative orientations that impact the way in which social actors carry out their everyday practices. In an even more empirical level, this thesis aims to contribute to the comprehension of the processes of mutual influence between religiosity, understood as a cultural phenomenon, and space configurations. The accomplishment of these objectives will involve the analysis of the case of a series of social actors that have moved to a neighbourhood in the periphery of Northern Buenos Aires’ since 1990 and are involved with spiritual practices and spaces. The data was built by means of a qualitative research strategy fundamentally based on ethnographical fieldwork. / Esta tesis buscará comprender la difusión de la espiritualidad contemporánea como parte de una serie de transformaciones en la vida cotidiana de una parte de los sectores medios argentinos. Uno de sus objetivos será estudiar del fenómeno de la espiritualidad Nueva Era en los sectores medios argentinos como parte de un estilo de vida. Ello implicará el análisis de las distintas formas en que se articulan las cosmovisiones y prácticas espirituales con otras dimensiones de la vida cotidiana, como la educación, la salud, el lugar de residencia y la vida económica. Este problema se enmarca en un proceso de difusión de este tipo de religiosidad sobre distintos ámbitos públicos durante las últimas décadas. A un nivel más concreto, la tesis buscará mostrar la influencia de las redes de sociabilidad y los espacios de socialización espiritual en la difusión de una cosmovisión y de determinadas orientaciones valorativas que impactan en la manera en que se llevan adelante distintas prácticas de la vida cotidiana. En un nivel aún más empírico, esta tesis buscará contribuir a la comprensión de los procesos de mutua influencia entre la religiosidad, entendida como un fenómeno cultural, y las configuraciones del espacio. Para ello, se analizará el caso de actores que desarrollaron procesos de movilidad residencial a una localidad ubicada en la zona norte de la periferia de Buenos Aires a partir de la década de 1990 y que presentan algún tipo de vínculo con espacios y prácticas espirituales. Los datos aquí analizados fueron construidos a partir de una estrategia de investigación cualitativa basada, fundamentalmente, en un trabajo de campo etnográfico.

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The purpose of this study is to examine lifestyle migration as a cultural and everyday practice, with the emphasis being on observing how lifestyle changes from urban to rural are described, practiced and made meaningful by people who have left major Swedish cities behind, in favour of a life on the Gotlandic countryside. The empirical material has been collected through ethnographical methods and is based on observations and qualitative interviews with 13 individuals who all reside on farms and practice animal husbandry. Focus has been placed on the practices, conceptions and other expressions which are related to the informants’ animals and their keeping. The theoretical starting point of this study is phenomenological, where anthropologist Tim Ingold’s ideas of what it means to dwell are central. Also, the term authenticity and the concept of lifestyle migration are important tools to examine the collected material. The result of the study demonstrates that the idea of the rural idyll, in other words, the preconception of the countryside as a calm and harmonious refuge far removed from the stressful life of major cities, plays a large part in the in-migrants lifestyle migration. The informants’ decisions to move to the countryside, as well as their everyday practices once settled in, are characterised by these romanticised notions. The study also shows that the informants’ lives, with animals and their keeping, presents a series of unexpected challenges and difficulties that are not present in the preconception of the rural idyll. In reality, the informants experience more stress and even higher workloads in their rural everyday, than they were exposed to living their previous urban lifestyle. The animals and their care, however, provide a series of positive experiences and the interactions with the animals are seen as authentic and meaningful. The everyday interchanges with the animals become an important part of the informants’ being and wellbeing on the countryside. They are therefore crucial to their lifestyle migration.

Det övergripande syftet med denna avhandling är att undersöka förhållandet mellan migration, reflexivitet och social klass. I fokus för den empiriska analysen står högt kvalificerade estniska emigranter. Reflexivitet har hittills inte varit ett viktigt begrepp i migrationsstudier. Även om vissa studier använt ordet reflexivitet, har det i huvudsak fungerat som bakgrundsbegrepp. Det finns en påtaglig brist på empiriskt orienterade studier av reflexivitet i migrationsstudier. Avhandlingen består av fyra artiklar med något olika inriktning. Den första undersöker det empiriska fallet i sin helhet utifrån en survey-undersökning om estniska migranter. Den andra artikeln diskuterar den brittiske sociologen Margaret Archers sätt att analysera migration och argumenterar i hennes efterföljd för ett socialpsykologiskt synsätt på de skiftande motiven att migrera. Den tredje artikeln utmanar tanken på att migranters återvändande i huvudsak kan förstås som saknad efter sociala relationer och känslor av hemlängtan. I den fjärde artikeln föreslås ett sätt för livsstilsorienterade migrationsstudier att hantera frågan om reflexivitet. Här positioneras livsstilsmigranter teoretiskt till andra typer av migranter och hur variationer ilivsstilsmigration kan analyseras. Trots inbördes variation har samtliga artiklar en gemensam nämnare. / This thesis focuses on issues around reflexivity and highly skilled migration. Reflexivity has been an underused concept in migration studies and incurporating it has been long overdue. By reflexivity this thesis understands the capacity of an actor to evaluate his or her position in relation to social structures, to take action in managing those structures and, finally, to critically revise both the position and action taken. There are multiple reasons as to why incorporating reflexivity is a useful endeavor to migration studies. On one hand, using reflexive types in order to understand different migration motivations offers an alternative to otherwise mainly class based explanations behind migration objectives. Migration research has long relied on the idea that migration motivations can be coupled with societal and class background. Similarly, return migration has been described almost unanimously as a result of a homing desire. Both positions, as claimed in this thesis, are oversimplifications. On the other hand, I argue that, reflexivity helps to analyze the importance of class or even society on migration in 21th century. This is why I suggest to analyze all three in concurrence – migration, reflexivity and class. In the following pages I analyze how reflexivity can be operationalized for studying migration. So far, reflexivity has been either used as background concept – mobility studies or for explaining particular kind of migration – lifestyle migration. I argue, that with careful operationalization reflexivity could be useful tool for explaining wide-variety of migrations – family, labour, lifestyle etc. Three articles in this thesis focus on providing such operationalizations, analyzing the relationship between migration motivations and reflexivity. Finally, the first article in this thesis analyzes the background of my particular group of migrants – Estonian highly skilled migrants and positions them in relation to other groups in Estonian society. Moreover, the article also underlines that self-development and lifestyle, if you will, is an important motivation for Eastern European migrants as well.

Lifestyle migrants from the affluent North move to the Mediterranean region intensively from the 80's. Lifestyle migration to Spain takes different forms: here we meet rich yacht owners in Marbella, retired people in the housing complexes in Almuñecar, or surfers in Tarifa. This work focused on people, who chose their new place in the region of La Alpujarra. They live in the remote houses called cortijos, which gave name to their inhabitants - cortijeros. Their lifestyles are the subject of this work, together with more general strategies practiced in lifestyle migration, the skills needed in such a move, and values they pursue. Ten years of research enabled to get together both, opinions and plans of the newcomers in the region, and their activities, stories, and imprints in the real world. I try to present different perspectives: the lens of lifestyle migration, counter-urbanization, material culture anthropology, history, positive psychology. At the end, I propose to think a positive anthropology that would focus on studying such practices that seemed to work towards understanding "the good life"; that work towards both individual well-being, and creating social structures considerate to humans and the environment.

Lifestyle migrants from the affluent North move to the Mediterranean region intensively from the 80's. Lifestyle migration to Spain takes different forms: here we meet rich yacht owners in Marbella, retired people in the housing complexes in Almuñecar, or surfers in Tarifa. This work focused on people, who chose their new place in the region of La Alpujarra. They live in the remote houses called cortijos, which gave name to their inhabitants - cortijeros. Their lifestyles are the subject of this work, together with more general strategies practiced in lifestyle migration, the skills needed in such a move, and values they pursue. Ten years of research enabled to get together both, opinions and plans of the newcomers in the region, and their activities, stories, and imprints in the real world. I try to present different perspectives: the lens of lifestyle migration, counter-urbanization, material culture anthropology, history, positive psychology. At the end, I propose to think a positive anthropology that would focus on studying such practices that seemed to work towards understanding "the good life"; that work towards both individual well-being, and creating social structures considerate to humans and the environment.

This research on the forces and forms of urbanization in the Costa Blanca, in the Mediterranean West coast, aims to rethink the collective creation of landscapes by putting side by side top-down landscape planning instruments with everyday activities of things and people that change landscapes in practice. Placed in the hyphen between the disciplines of anthropology and architecture, it is based on fieldwork done by the method of participant observation and, also, participant design. Landscapes transformed by mobile populations are a perfect site to study the difficulties in implementing the democratic approach of the European Landscape Convention. The convention defines landscape as it is perceived by its inhabitants while they constantly take part in its transformation from the inside. Though, the tools available for planners and landscape designers are heirs of a political and aesthetic understanding of landscape that fixes it either as a territory to govern or a view to admire. The research departs from the moment in which these tools are taught to architects in the school. It describes a series of courses about the topic of tourism in which students and teacher made together several experiments with the profession. An experiential methodology that continues along all the chapters wich are all practice based research. After setting the stage of the Costa Blanca in a non-representational way, through an exploration on the potential of narrative to recreate places, it develops a series of variations on the tools of the architect to work with planning. The research does not define a priori what should count as ‘tourism’, ‘spoiled’, ‘valuable’, ‘agricultural’ or ‘natural’ landscapes. Interested in the moments of enjoyment, it does pay special attention to the temporalities of landscape. Fictions, maps, summer houses, events, catalogues and agendas are all in the toolbox of the architect but here they are played in the minor key, to make variations to the major key that has a tendency to prevail. Each chapter pulls a different string from mesh of landscape ecologies of practice, and follows where it leads. The tools are thus presented anew through what was learnt in the fieldwork with lifestyle migrants that seek their place in the sun and local inhabitants that have had an active role in the urban transformations of the area. Building on scholarship in landscape architecture, anthropology, science studies, tourism, planning and speculative philosophy, it follows how actors learn to be affected in the material performance of different relations between people and landscapes. The chapters are built in counterpoint to one another, using narrative and different formatting to stress the accounts of practice and more traditional ethnography. The process of writing and presenting them becomes part of the research. Also, as ways of practice that emerge from landscape transformation related to tourism are described, the question of what making the landscapes of enjoyment does to the political and professional ways of knowing about landscape becomes a central thread of the thesis. In this, it explores how enjoyment cannot be produced, enjoyment can only happen in the collective co-production of landscape, in an undercommons where it becomes 'a task to do' - an agenda for keeping us indebted and thus engaged to each other in a shared landscape.