Searching for a Good Life in the Global South. Migrants In the Informal Tourism Sector in India

Migration motivated by searching for a good life is usually associated with the privileged citizens of the Global North. This is even more apparent if we look at the intersections of migration and tourism. These are usually ‘expatriates’ from the Global North in the Global South who fulfill their quest running lifestyle oriented small tourism businesses. Meanwhile, migrants who originate from the Global South are imagined as homo economicus, motivated predominantly by better earning opportunities. I challenge this assumption by scrutinizing the informal tourism sector at the Hampi World Heritage site in India. The majority of small entrepreneurs in this sector are seasonal migrants. When asked about the reasons for choosing Hampi, they point at the category of shanti (i.e. tranquility), which they use to counter capitalist notions of profitability. I seek to answer the question of how ‘tranquility’ is defined by them and how this affects their migratory decisions.

State Effect and Well-being: Social Climate in Impressions of the Polish Migrants in Dublin

The paper draws on an ethnographic fieldwork among the Polish migrants in Dublin who decided not to return to Poland in a predictable future. I describe the relation of a state effect and wellbeing as a sphere that can be perceived as the social climate by the transnational migrants. The imaginaries and retrospective rationalisations of experiences, feelings and memories connected to a quality of state functioning and a society’s openness / oppressiveness impressions create inter-connected space for comparisons of two realities known to the migrants who have left Poland for Ireland over a decade ago, on the eve of their economic self-responsibility, and who are currently justifying their choice to continue their living there.

The purpose of this text is to critically discuss the method of collecting source materials as part of the Polish Ethnographic Atlas project and the ways to interpret them and to develop innovative interpretation strategies for these data, which until now are stored in the archives of this Atlas. These strategies will allow to use messages that have been rejected in ethnogeographical analyses and interpretations so far. These are primarily the records of spontaneous representations of narratives and the memory of the inhabitants of the village. What determined their significance and the role they played in learning about the reality examined was the fact that they constituted an individualized form of narrative. They were not triggered by a question in any way, so they were unique. These features made comparative studies impossible. Nevertheless, thanks to them, the interpretation of reality contained in the performances gained a context. Understanding the significance of these performances during the research was almost impossible, it took place at the level of the researcher's intuition. The change of the paradigm allowed to extract new cognitive value from them and gave the possibility of their redefinition and re-evaluation.