Paper short abstract:

Paper long abstract:

'The hotel' has been used as a chronotope for a certain modern lifestyle in the urban centres of the Old World (e.g. Clifford 1997), contrasted by 'the motel' as metaphor for a rather postmodern way of life (e.g. Löfgren 1995). Both metaphors have been criticized because of their biased presentation of travel that does not reflect class, race and gender inequalities, and ethnographic interest has turned to women, servants, and hotel staff (e.g. Adler/Adler 2004) in order to compensate for the predominant travel historiography.

If we turn to the external borders of the European Union in the Mediterranean now, we are confronted with the result of the tremendous tourism development of the last decades and at the same time we may follow the implementation of the European border regime with its consequences for migrants on their way to Europe. Located in this context, 'the hotel' becomes important beyond its metaphorical meaning for a certain lifestyle and its material relevance as working environment.

At the example of one hotel on the Greek island of Crete, this paper localizes different mobility projects that significantly shape the contemporary European landscape. The selected hotel serves as a tourist accommodation for deprived Greek citizens from the North of Greek in summer, and is frequently converted into a detention camp for illegalized immigrants in winter. The author argues that neither the distinction between forced and voluntary mobility (or immobility) nor conventional typologies of tourists as opposed to migrants help to understand the transformative dynamics of mobility in contemporary Europe.

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