Paper short abstract:

House is sometimes seen as a solid basis representing traditional values of family continuity in the modern mobile world. Research among British lifestyle migrants in Spain, however, reveals how ambiguous the house is becoming personal expression of preferences among kinship relationships.

Paper long abstract:

In an era when people, as well as money, are becoming more flexible and less bound to their place of origin (also known as globalization), the house is often seen as that last stronghold of those unbreakable family values. This research, however, demonstrates that the nature of home-building is much more flexible and very uncertain in many ways. Instead of being a strong symbol for the societal family institution, homes are more often redefined by possibilities of excluding the immediate family from both everyday arrangements and legal testaments.

The field where I am carrying out my research is south-eastern Spain, where many British lifestyle migrants reside full-time. An empty house that the British come to reside in becomes an apotheosis of such uncertainty of the materialisation of kinship relationships. Unlike in much classical anthropological theory, people are not automatically subjects to the many relational forces which are habitually transferred into material arrangements with and within the house. Rather, they find themselves in-between social tensions and personal anxiety. On one hand, they are confronted with their new destination community where the house is traditionally seen as a symbol of continuity and inviolability of the family. On the other hand, the British have their own much more personal understanding of who is their family and what role the house plays in those relations, like intergenerational contracts. By challenging the more traditional Spanish rules of all-children bequeathing, the British take advantage of relative testamentary freedom, exercising the power of benefiting only certain relationships they consider worth investing into.