Retirement Migration: Paradoxes of Ageing

This book describes how people invest migration with hopes for enjoyable experiences of retirement and contrast their lives with a marginality they imagine to be experienced by older people at home. They anticipate freedom from responsibilities through shedding the restrictive shackles of their former selves in a time of life dedicated to fun, friendship, healthy activity and individual fulfilment. However, the book documents a number of contradictions underpinning the pursuits of such a lifestyle and shows the negotiations that individuals undertake to manage the conflicting messages. It shows how they must balance time-use to achieve both freedoms and busy social schedules, their activities, to challenge themselves as well as relax, their relationships, to be able to start afresh yet still trust others in the new context, and their cultural identities, to balance both the security of nationality with the discovery of the new. The first ethnographic study of international retirement migration, this bookoffers a sometimes surprising picture of the potentials, seductions and limitations of the lifestyles and gives a critical insight into the new ways ageing identities are experienced by a growing number of older people in Western societies today.