Travelling beauty: diasporic development and transient service encounters at the salon

For post-migrant generation Moroccans from Europe, the annual summer holiday in Morocco might be discursively characterised as a ‘return’ visit to a ‘homeland’ – more specifically, to the homes and localities of extended family there. Other researchers have approached what individuals from similar family histories of migration do during visits to a homeland as ‘diasporic tourism’ (Coles and Timothy 2004; Basu 2007; Reed 2014), focusing on activities of cultural or heritage consumption and how ‘the Diaspora’ participates in ‘Development’. While many examples describe configurations of diasporic-ness in various homelands that become instrumental in purposeful, directed Development (cf. Markowitz and Stefansson 2004; Scheyvens 2007; see also Berriane 1992; Stafford et al. 1996; Berriane and Popp 1999 on Morocco), participants in my research only seldom pursued such explicitly ‘cultural’ activities referred to in this directed heritage ‘Development’. Rather, they were often pursuing leisure consumption of everyday facilities – in many ways ‘dwelling-in-mobility’ in this second-home environment (Haldrup 2004; Veijola and Falin 2014) – that focused more on restful, embodied leisure than cultural consumption.