There are many forms of retirement migration and of spontaneous retirement communities but one dominates contemporary European and North American popular and academic understanding, the southerly displacement of retirees from northern countries and US states in search of more light and warmth in winter and of lower housing and living costs. The archetypal destinations are both coastal resorts on the Spanish or Florida coasts and French, Italian or Mexican rural areas with attractive landscapes. Such moves are actually a minority form, for more retirees move from metropolitan areas to rural and coastal areas within a few hours' drive, and more return to countries of origin (e.g. from the UK to Ireland and the Caribbean, and from Germany to Austria, Italy, Spain and Turkey). At least five times more UK state pensioners move to Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States than to southern Europe, either to live near family members who have emigrated before or following birthplace, marital or working-life connections, and there are more UK state pensioners in Germany than in either France or Italy.
The biased understanding derives more from the visibility of the clustered settlements of amenity-seeking or (as Caroline Oliver has it) ‘aspirational’ migrants than their numerical supremacy or their developmental or risk characteristics. Television soap operas and ‘lifestyle’ programmes reinforce the perception, and social research has done the same. To survey or conduct an ethnography of an expatriate retiree cluster in a Mediterranean, Florida or Arizona resort, where their presence and ‘otherness’ is proclaimed by associations and group-oriented services, is much easier than studying those who disperse across Australia, Canada, Germany or Ireland.
This book reports an ethnography of (mainly) British retirees resident in and around a coastal town to the east of Málaga, Spain, that was undertaken for a doctoral thesis. Oliver began in 1998 by lodging with a Spanish household, and in the following year rented her own property. She conducted 67 open-ended interviews with migrants and 15 with Spanish residents ‘using a snowball strategy that started with key figures in club life and Spanish acquaintances’, and ‘participated in countless other informal social conversations’ (p. 13). Her work has affinities with Karen O'Reilly's (Reference O'Reilly2000, Reference O'Reilly2007), although the interest in identity change and patterns of interaction with the local Spanish population was less direct, and she pursued a more open inquiry of the migrants' attitudes and behaviour in reaction to their displaced situation and new social environment.
After two conceptual and methodological review chapters and one that introduces the setting and the study population, the next four report the ethnographic observations under four themes: ‘The time of our lives: temporality and the life course’, ‘Does age matter: positive ageing and place?’, ‘Community and the individual in migrants’ Spain', and ‘Cultural identities, ageing and death’. These chapters have much that is original and fascinating. Oliver is particularly perceptive of the tensions, incompatibilities and paradoxes in the retirees' lives and in their own understanding of their situation. The understated theme throughout is how the retirees' awareness of ‘a [finite] time left to live’ powerfully informs the imperative [they perceive] ‘to live for today’ (p. 66). As was her aim, the author has produced an ethnography that reflects critically and compassionately about the lives she came to know' (p. 17).
Chapter 4 introduces the theme with its focus ‘on time and how it is perceived, experienced and reflected upon, in both people's lives and their imagined trajectories of life’. Chapter 5 elucidates another irreconcilable tension in the retirees' lives, one that is hardly discussed in prescriptions for ‘positive ageing’. Oliver observed that, ‘not only is there pressure to be active and look good in contexts where new “younger-old” people arrive all the time, but the regular activity, voluntary commitments, socialising and consumption of alcohol and rich food risk … “overdoing it”’ where state provision of care is limited and the peer group has limited ability to provide care (p. 84). Chapter 6 discusses several ‘contradictions experienced in the reality of the “community” ideal. … The egalitarian communitas downplays the former achievements and certainties on which individual identities have been built … and requires people to trust others at “face value”’ (p. 108). Oliver shows how gossip and reputation-management processes ‘are fundamental to enable expressions of individuality, expose infringements of the egalitarian ethos, force information about self and others to be made public and aid the process of validation of others' trustworthiness. These practices are paradoxical; both risking the fragmentation of the community yet are wholly necessary to maintain the egalitarian ‘community’ of strong-minded individuals' (pp. 113–4). Chapter 7 has a subtle discussion of the ambivalent attitudes many British expatriate retirees have about their national identity and a short discussion of their reactions to the Spanish funerary custom of niche tombs. Oliver reflects that ‘dealing with grief may be particularly hard … in a context of sociability, where people have a relatively small shared past with other migrants’ (p. 157).
This book is a welcome addition to the few book-length ethnographies and community studies of retired migrant lifestyles. The author's skilful interpretations draw eclectically from previous work and her data. She accepts that her method, as with most research on expatriate retirees, probably favoured the inclusion of those who participate in voluntary social clubs and associations. More than once, however, I was disappointed that an interesting point was not developed and illuminated more. The introductory review chapters have reflections on both ethnographic methods and themes in current social gerontology. At times they read as dutiful and disconnected to an understanding of the informants' realised and unconscious attitudes and behaviour about which Caroline Oliver has written so well.
