The intersection of lifestyle and ideology in migration

Abstract

The pursuit of cultural authenticity, environmental purity, and meaningful social rela tions has become the global hallmark of the ‘postmaterialist’ middle class (Inglehart, 2018). Beck and Nyíri’s (2022) Chinese interlocutors were attracted specifically to a Euro pean rather than an Anglo-American version of modernity, which they perceive as more capitalistic and therefore more similar to China’s (‘pastoral Occidentalism’ in Fran Mar tin’s term). It stands for a wholesomeness they see as gone from Chinese society. Since the 2010s, the pursuit of authenticity has become increasingly intertwined with the na tivist backlash against liberal democracy. But while the authenticity nativists wish to re claim usually lies in one’s own imagined past, in this case, the nostalgia is projected onto someone else’s imagined past. In this optic, lifestyle migrations may intersect in unex pected ways with currents of ideologies of environmental, cultural, and racial purity. How does a destination country’s symbolic meaning for immigrants relate to ideology? What do we know about the scale of this phenomenon? Is the quest for authenticity/puri ty (both in physical and spiritual terms) an important driver of migration? How should we understand the interplay between economy and ideology, particularly when destina tion countries are on lower rungs of the global development hierarchy? Should we rein -terpret/revise the notion of flexible citizenship as a tool for maximising economic accu mulation (Ong, 1999) in order to accommodate these developments?