Retirement Migration

Paradoxes of Ageing

By Caroline Oliver

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About the Book

The book is the first ethnographic study of international retirement migration and offers a sometimes surprising picture of the potentials, seductions and limitations of the lifestyles. People envision retirement as 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 fulfillment. However, as Oliver documents, a number of contradictions underpin the pursuits of such a lifestyle. She shows how retirees must balance time-use to achieve both freedoms and busy social schedules -- their activities, their relationships, and their cultural identities – to balance both the security of nationality with the discovery of the new. Retirement Migration gives a critical insight into the new ways aging identities are experienced by a growing number of older people in Western societies today.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Flirting with Freedom 2. Cultural Contexts: Positive Ageing, Migration and Place 3. Location, Location, Location: Retiring in Spain 4. The Time of our Lives: Temporality and the Life Course 5. Does Age Matter?: Positive Ageing and Place 6. Community and the Individual in Migrants’ Spain 7. Cultural Identities, Ageing and Death 8. Conclusion: Paradoxes of Ageing in Retirement Migration

About the Author(s)

Caroline Oliver is currently a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, and has held lecturing posts in Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Universities of Hull and Newcastle-upon Tyne, UK