Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the ‘colonial imagination’ and changing perceptions of lifestyle migrants in the Philippines. It asks how lifestyle migrants’ understandings of Other are reproduced through interactions with the local community; and how relationships are contoured by surfing communities.

Paper long abstract:

Western lifestyle migrants to former colonies bring with them imaginings of the host destination, and by extension the host societies, which are informed by patterns of past colonial and current neo-colonial relationships. Anthropological literature on this form of lifestyle migration shows that such migration typically does not lead to a re-orientation of colonial imaginings through increased interactions but rather, through selective interactions, actually strengthens such perceptions. This paper focuses on the changing perceptions of lifestyle migrants living in a rural fishing-turned-surf tourism village on Siargao Island, Philippines. I begin with the question: how is the ‘colonial imagination’ and associated perceptions of Other coloured by and reproduced through lifestyle migrants’ experiences of and interactions with the local community? In answering this question, I consider how lifestyle migrants perceive time and work ethics in the Philippines. I then draw upon the notion that different types of relationships form in tourist locations, and consider how some relationships and affective experiences may foster deeper and increasingly nuanced understandings of the host society. In considering lifestyle migrants’ perceptions of and changing attitudes towards the local Philippine people, I focus on surf culture and community. I explore the role of surfing’s ‘collective consciousness’ (Stranger 2011) in transcending social differences and promoting understanding; and how surfing’s ‘shared intensity’ promotes intimacy in masculine spaces (Green and Evers 2020), even as such understanding and intimacy may be bounded by the parameters of the surf community.