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Accepted Paper:

Ambiguous Foreigners:Neighbours share more than geographical space  
Jacqueline Waldren (Oxford University)

Paper short abstract:

I would like to focus on the appropriation of places and practices of localising by foreign residents in Deia, Mallorca and suggest that nostalgic constructions of ‘communities’ do not consider adequately the diverse interests

Paper long abstract:

Resident foreigners own the majority and the largest properties in Deia, a village of 700-1000 inhabitants on the northwest coast of Mallorca and draw on their 'superior' wealth, knowledge and cosmopolitan experience to manipulate or orchestrate what they deem as 'village' landscape and activities, often in contrast to those experienced by Mallorquins. Foreigners have appropriated local and space-specific symbols as their own ( landscape, climate, architecture, celebrations, food, cafes, etc) and 'share' these with other foreign visitors. The diverse and expanding foreign population claims to represent 'local people and a particular place' and it is these images that are projected in conversations, and in the British, German and other European press.

In anthropology landscape has been used to refer to the meaning imputed by local people to their cultural and physical surroundings - how a particular landscape looks and feels to its inhabitants. It is important to clarify from the beginning that the landscape in Deia means different things to the diverse population of this cosmopolitan village. To some it is not just land but families, work, social and religious associations, time, space and location carried in the mind and mediated in experience. For others it is leisure, beauty,myth, and social encounters with like minded people. Deia is formed and reformed overtime. The landscape is redolent with past actions, history, ancestors and myth which are used in defining social groups all of whom inhabit their various creations of 'the village'

Panel P32
Rediscovering the local: migrant claims and counter-claims of ownership
  Session 1