Alternativa levnadssätt - Moderna nomader ? Travellers ? det irländska resandefolket
Are different ways of life possible in a world that increasingly becomes "Westernized" or globalized? This study examines and analyzes the diverse and complex way of life that includes socioeconomical nomadism as the Irish Traveller community are availing themselves of on the island of Ireland. In a broader perspective the study of the Travellers is put in context to how modern society emerged, and what characterizes the contemporary western societies. This is to understand the way Travellers nomadic lifestyle has been constrained and how the interrelationship between the dominant society and the extended family group constituting Travellers social composition has affected their livelihoods. Their social role is considered from two identification points ? home and work.Nomadism as a phenomenon, its history, expression and possible motives are being described in this work. Modernization process impact on Western human culture is analyzed on the basis of sociological theory. Travellers culture is taken into account based on the concept of place, where the place is constitute as a cultural or social location in an integrative and qualitative literature study. The modern western society constitutes the thesis framework and is being examined implicitly, while the peripatetic folk group of Travellers is being studied explicitly.The results are interpreted and presented throughout the whole work based on a hermeneutic approach. The study shows that changes in Travellers way of life have been caused by the impact of modernization, something that can be identified in their adaptation to urban areas and their changed livelihood patterns. Still, Travellers in Ireland are a peripatetic people who hold on to their culture and keep to their group despite a policy that has worked against them. The attitude to how they should be treated has gone from assimilation to integration, from perceiving them as a problematic group to noticing them as a discriminated group. For a long time, but not always, they have been considered as a group with their own identity but not as a separate ethnic group.Travellers traditional lifestyle and outlook on life is contrasted to how former traditional values have become replaced towards a more "free like" life, which in turn can lead to no values at all making their presence valid, how morality shifts in pace with an increasingly rational society, and how the collective leave precedence to the individual. The consequences of modern society may therefore pose an existential emptiness based in that the choices we are offered are not meaningful. Travellers with their culture go against such development where their nomadic mind-set permeates every aspect of Travellers? lives. ?Nomadism entails a way of looking at the world, a different way of perceiving things, a different attitude to accommodation, to work, and to life in general?.