Résumé en anglais

Communication technologies and cheap air travel have profoundly reshaped the patterns of international circulation and migration, blurring the distinction between travellers, tourists and migrants. Some tourists have selected their former recreational area as permanent place of residence while other people are choosing or are being forced into visiting multiple places at regular or irregular intervals. Whether their motives are related to the increasing labour flexibility or globalisation of the labour market and of the property market, to lifestyle and welfare migration in their old age or in their working life, to long term backpacking or tourist mobility, all of them are “consuming” multiple places, changing or exchanging geographical, social and environmental contexts. These multiple practices of places and contexts, which entail new modes of living and bring different people together, could be regarded as ways of improving one’s communicative competence with other cultures. But as people are changing contexts, commuting, migrating or “transmigrating” to their own dreamland, the ideal land to be offered to their children or the ideal land in which to spend their old age, it seems that a majority of them are forgetting about the people who inhabit their dream. Drawing on field work conducted among retired or active British migrants to different regions of France and also on the work of sociologists, anthropologists, geographers and travel writing scholars in other countries of Europe or the world, this paper will consider how these highly mobile people shift contexts but seem to keep cultures at a standstill.