Markets, Globalization & Markets, Globalization &
Development Review Development Review
Volume 6 Number 1 Article 2
2021
Nomadland: The New Frontiers of the American Dream at the Nomadland: The New Frontiers of the American Dream at the
Periphery of the Market Periphery of the Market
Aleksandrina Atanasova
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
Giana Eckhardt
King's Business School, King's College London
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Recommended Citation Recommended Citation
Atanasova, Aleksandrina and Eckhardt, Giana (2021) "Nomadland: The New Frontiers of the American
Dream at the Periphery of the Market,"
Markets, Globalization & Development Review
: Vol. 6: No. 1, Article
2.
DOI: 10.23860/MGDR-2021-06-01-02
Available at: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/mgdr/vol6/iss1/2
This Dialogue is brought to you by the University of Rhode Island. It has been accepted for inclusion in Markets,
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Nomadland: The New Frontiers of the
American Dream at the Periphery of the
Market
“I am not homeless. I am just houseless. Not the same thing, right?” (Fern
9:55)
Introduction
It is a cold winter day in Nevada, sometime in late 2011, not long after the
ghost town of Empire lost its zip code. Residents have fled since the
gypsum mine that sustained the community shut down as a casualty of the
Great Recession. A woman sifts through possessions that have been
hastily thrown in a storage unit. She places a box of old dishes wrapped in
newspaper in the back of a van to take with her. Other possessions, such
as a box of men’s clothes, which she clutches overcome with grief and
sorrow, will stay. So begins the story of Fern, a 61-year-old widow who
has lost everything – her home, her husband, and the life that she has
known – and begins living in a van, travelling through the American west,
searching for work.
Nomadland (2020), adapted from Jessica Bruder’s (2017)
nonfiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-first Century
(2017), was one of the most critically acclaimed films of 2020/1. Situated
in the aftermath of the economic collapse of 2007-2009, the film offers a
portrait of a growing community of older Americans who, forced out of the
workforce or facing insufficient social security checks and lack of
retirement savings, live nomadically in vans, chasing after low-wage jobs
for a chance to make ends meet. In 2021, the film collected three
Academy awards, alongside a long list of other accolades, including
Golden Globes and BAFTAs. Since its release, viewers and critics alike
have been captivated by the film’s poignant tale of grief, resilience,
desperation, and hope, all blending together in the life stories of these
unlikely new American nomads: 55+ year-olds, once middle-class, now
“workcampers,” whose golden years are spent chasing back-breaking
temporary work around the country, living with few possessions and
sleeping in makeshift homes on wheels. Not in RVs, which are designed
to be lived in, but regular vans, jerry-rigged with the bare minimum to
make them habitable, like buckets for going to the bathroom.
Dubbed the modern Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck 2017: 1939), in
many ways, Nomadland is a familiar story of the search for a better life in
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the face of despair, where the role of the solitary hero is romanticized. It is
also, however, a novel story of the dystopian economic dispossession of
an aging population for whom retirement is an out-of-reach illusion
(Brooks 2021; Bruder 2014). In this Dialogue contribution, we explore the
complex portrait of these nomads as consumers and the role of the
globalized marketplace in their lives as portrayed in the film and beyond.
The Tyranny of the Marketplace
The emotional gravitas of the film slowly emerges, as the viewer follows
Fern, one of the few fictional characters among a cast of many real-life
nomads, as she upends her life and becomes nomadic after losing her
husband to cancer, and her job and her savings to the Great Recession.
Down the road, as Fern finds her footing in this new way of life that is both
challenging and liberating, she crosses paths with Linda May and
Charlene Swankie, real-life nomads who are central figures in Bruder’s
book and who play themselves in the movie, sharing the stories of
precarity and struggle from their biographies. As the film unfolds, we meet
other real nomads, such as Bob Wells – a well-known van dweller who
runs the popular Cheap RV Living YouTube channel and is the president
of a non-profit he founded, Home on Wheels Alliance (Paiella 2021). In
real life, Wells is considered to be the guru of van dwelling, having
inspired and guided an entire generation of economically precarious
elderly folks to find an alternative path in life. His celebrity status is easy to
notice in the movie, as the nomads are visibly engaged while he speaks at
the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous events that he organizes, which take
place each year in Arizona and attract thousands of van dwellers. Sharing
various tips, which he labels “commandments” (e.g., “10 commandments
for how to stealth-park”), Wells has a single purpose: to offer know-how to
those “who need help now” – the outcasts of the modern capitalistic
machine, left to fend for themselves on meager social security. In one
scene, Wells offers a candid description of the broader socioeconomic
conditions that have led to the necessity of van dwelling as a way of life:
“And the odd thing is that we not only accept the tyranny of the dollar,
the tyranny of the marketplace, we embrace it. We gladly throw the
yoke of the tyranny of the dollar on and live by it our whole lives. The
way I see it is that the Titanic is sinking, and economic times are
changing. And so, my goal is to get the lifeboats out and get as many
people into the lifeboats as I can.” (Bob 18:30).
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It is against this backdrop that Nomadland offers a critical vantage
point on the new frontiers of the American Dream. A dream which for
these nomads is a seasonal job and a functioning van, rather than a
house filled with material possessions. In times of hardship and
uncertainty, the utopian impulse to escape to a better place intensifies
(Bauman 2007). Nomadland, however, portrays a reorientation from
utopian dreams for abundance and permanence to a nomadic utopian
imaginary, where the desire for a better way of living and being is
materialized through emancipation from normative life trajectories. This is
a reorientation that is part of a larger shift in the social imaginary from
solid to liquid utopian thinking, where the only way to devise betterment is
in transient, individually pursued, and short-lived moments of envisioning
and enacting life in the present, rather than pursuing collective, long-term
change in the future (Atanasova 2021). Even though they have worked
their whole lives chasing after an idealistic aspiration of what the good life
looks like, these nomads cannot afford to get there. The promises of the
marketplace are far out of reach – either because of illness, or overwork in
unfulfilling corporate jobs, or simply lack of stable employment. Nomadic
living thus emerges as a liberatory act of emancipation from the tyrannic
marketplace, imbued in an ideology of self-sufficiency and empowerment
– values which have and continue to propel individuals toward achieving
the American Dream, albeit this time a precarious one.
Consuming and Being Consumed
As consumers, these nomads are portrayed at the periphery of the
marketplace – consuming little and, when they do, mostly bartering, where
one nomad’s discarded possessions become another nomad’s treasure.
Still, it is easy to see that this minimalism is a learned behavior out of
necessity. Fern, Linda May and Swankie all laugh when they see that the
expensive, brand-new RVs, which they sit in just to experience what life
with money would feel like, have washers and dryers – symbols of
domestic comfort they have long parted with. Fern and her companions
are often seen trying to re-create what would be hedonic consumption
episodes. For example, as Fern meets the New Year alone in her van,
eating a modest meal, she wears a “Happy New Year” tiara on her head in
an attempt to normalize the moment and link it to familiar consumption
practices and artifacts. Such moments of connect and disconnect with the
normative affordances of the marketplace are abundant in the movie. In
another scene, Fern is organizing a spa moment for Linda May and
herself; after a hard day’s work cleaning a campground, they playfully
lounge on camp chairs with cucumbers over their eyes and self-made
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moisturizing sheets over their faces. Such scenes remind us that despite
the liberatory cloak over nomadism and the portrayed romanticization of
living with little (e.g., showing pride in having repurposed old items to be
functional in a small space), these nomads long for the hedonic
consumption their precarity has denied them. As Atanasova and Eckhardt
(2021) point out, even in the absence of ownership, materialistic logics of
consumption persist.
The film also offers a delicately crafted portrait of the paradoxical
interdependence between the marketplace and those for whom the
marketplace is out of reach. Working long hours on the hard concrete
floors of places like fast-food restaurants, factories, and Amazon
warehouses, these nomads are portrayed as essential workers who, with
their hard and cheap labor, sustain big business. Amazon, for instance,
has a prominent presence in the film, as Fern works there alongside other
nomads as part of the Amazon’s “CamperForce” – a temporary workforce
mostly comprised of poor elderly nomads that is mobilized during the
holiday season only to be quickly disposed of after. Amazon provides free
parking space for the vans and pays what Fern describes as “great
money” (8:50) (up to $18.05/hour depending on location, per Amazon’s
own website https://www.amazondelivers.jobs/about/camperforce/). The
‘tyranny of the marketplace’ is easy to discern as Fern is shown packing
numerous boxes filled with holiday gifts on the last day of the season, New
Year’s Eve. With the end of the busy holiday season comes the end of her
employment. She retreats to her van to meet the new year ill with a cold,
and alone, her paid-for parking spot to expire in a few days. The implied
wastefulness of consumerism seeps through the images of the numerous
Amazon boxes as Fern works her last shift and is easy to perceive
through the contrast with Fern’s precarious life outside of the warehouse.
Amazon is portrayed as both savior to and exploiter of these nomads. A
behemoth that has transformed virtually all corners of the marketplace
(Kahn and Hamilton 2019), Amazon has not only monopolized the
consumption behaviors of the masses, but also the elderly years of the
economically precarious and their bodies as workers.
Possessions and Materiality
Nomadland offers a gripping image of what life looks like in the absence of
solidity and material possessions. With everything solid and stable in her
life gone, Fern creates a micro-world in her van, maximizing every inch of
it for the greatest utility the space can offer. Everything in the van has a
high use-value and has a purpose. Still, many of her minimal possessions
are imbued with meaning. In the first half of the film, Fern’s possessions
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are depicted as extensions of her identity and means to create meaning in
migration (Belk 1992; Peñaloza 1994) that sustains her symbolic
connection with her roots and past life. For instance, we learn that the old
dishes she packed in the opening scene have been given to her by her
father; yet, as her nomad friend and possible romantic interest accidentally
breaks them, the impracticality of such possessions as carriers of
emotional value is easily seen. As Fern becomes more comfortable with
her nomadism, the emotional distance between her present life and her
past widens, and her relationship with her possessions liquifies, becoming
characterized by detachment and flexibility (Bardhi, Eckhardt and Arnould
2012).
At the very end of the movie, Fern returns to Empire. Back in front
of the garage that holds all her possessions, she meets with the man who
runs the storage unit. This time, his pick-up truck is loaded with her things,
not her van. “Are you sure you don’t need any of this stuff?,” he asks. “No,
I don’t need any of it. I’m good,” Fern replies, “I’m not going to miss one
thing” (1:38:48). At this point, her possessions are no longer an integral
part of her self-identity, and the loss of these possessions is not felt as the
violation of herself (Belk 1988) that she experienced earlier when her
beloved plates got broken. As has been shown in consumer research on
the meaning of possessions for the homeless (Hill and Stamey 1990), the
lack of material objects is compensated with processes of self-restoration
that entail perceptual changes in the interpretation of what a “home”
should be in a physical sense. Early in the film when asked if she is
homeless, Fern replies assertively that she is not homeless, but houseless
(9:55). And a co-worker at Amazon shows Fern her tattoo, which says,
‘home is what you carry with you.’ This arc in the narrative comes full
circle as we see Fern, in the last minutes of the film, visiting her former
house, now empty, deserted, and void of meaning, not to reminisce but to
part with it for good. With her possessions gone, and her worldview as a
consumer re-oriented toward flexibility and detachment, rather than
permanence and rootedness (Bardhi and Eckhardt 2017), the viewer is at
last convinced that she is houseless, not homeless, and that there is
indeed an important difference.
Nomadism as a Way of Modern Life
From a sociocultural point of view, nomadic ways of life, subject to logics
of detachment and impermanence, are often stigmatized. Nomads have
traditionally been perceived as a “wandering threat,” challenging the
established ordering of life, shattering classifications, and occupying
undefined spaces where along the way they embrace difference and
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resistance (Engebrigsten 2017). In the wake of widespread digitalization
and globalization, however, mobility has become an underlying feature of
the contemporary experience. Nomadland brings to the forefront the
growing prominence of nomadic living at the intercept of precarity and
insecurity. While the elderly nomads in the movie are at the periphery due
to their economic precarity, other generations such as Millennials and
Gen-Zs are not spared from the looming insecurity of the present moment.
Digital nomadism, for instance, is emerging as an increasingly popular
lifestyle among large cohorts of consumers who are facing an overarching
sense of discontent with normative life in the context of omnipresent
insecurity and seek ways to renegotiate their position within the global
market economy (Atanasova and Eckhardt 2021; Woldoff and Litchfield
2021). Digital nomads are people who travel with minimal possessions
around the world while working from their laptops, taking their jobs with
them wherever they go (see Mancinelli 2020; Woldoff and Litchfield 2021).
While they do not make a living through manual labor, as do the van
dwellers in Nomadland, but through work done in the digital space, many
of them are no less precarious as they roam between inexpensive
locations around the world, trying to maximize their incomes that, in major
cities, cannot afford them the lives they wish to lead (Atanasova and
Eckhardt 2021; Woldoff and Litchfield 2021).
Other, more “conventional” workers have also begun to move
towards digitally nomadic set-ups, choosing to work from beach cottages,
forest cabins and suburban houses outside expensive city centers (Lufkin
2021), a trend which has intensified during the normalization of ‘working
from home’ amid the ongoing covid pandemic. There is much to suggest
that for many, nomadism is becoming a means for escaping the bleak
present reality and pursuing better ways of being in the world (Atanasova
2021). For example, Fern has multiple opportunities to give up her
nomadic life in the movie. Her potential romantic partner invites her to
move in with him at his son’s house, and Fern’s sister invites her to move
in with her. Despite the privations of van dwelling, Fern ultimately finds a
solidarity in living within the nomadic community and sees it as a way to
protest against a way of life that is no longer sustainable in contemporary
America. Fern articulates this when she is at her sister’s house and
speaking with her brother-in-law, who is a real estate agent, and says,
“Real estate makes people buy houses they can’t afford” (Fern, 1:13:18).
Ultimately, Fern chooses a life, however precarious, which allows her to
live without being mired in the stress that come with living a life one
cannot afford, a reality for more and more people within the United States.
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Precarity, Mobility, Liquidity in Global Settings
Going beyond this film, it is useful to reflect briefly on these issues in the
wider global setting. We are witnessing an inflection point in the modern
lived experience where universal precarity and loss of hope in the future
have become prominent features of the sociocultural landscape (Beck
1986; Berlant 2011; Lorey 2015). What used to be enduring and solid
structures and traditions are increasingly being replaced by their
ephemeral, liquid alternatives (Bauman 2000; 2007). While they can be
liberating for some, they are also challenging to manage (Bardhi and
Eckhardt 2017), giving individuals no choice but to be on the move to cope
with the fluid logics of contemporary life. In this liquid modernity, defined
by ambivalence (Bauman 2000), mobility is relational to new emergent
forms of power and inequality. In today’s global world, mobility might be
omnipresent, yet not all on the move are equal; some are “tourists,”
effortlessly able to travel light and pursue opportunities, and others are
“vagabonds,” moving out of necessity (Bauman 2000). Against this
backdrop, consumers are being pushed to part with traditional ideals and
familiar ways life and to seek alternative forms of security and legitimation
in an act of detachment from conventional and illusionary fantasies of the
American dream that are quickly dissolving in the “landfill for
overwhelming and impending crises of life-building” (Berlant 2011: 3).
While Nomadland is clearly a story about the vagabonds of liquidity
who have no other choice but to embrace mobility, it reminds us that many
nomads choose to detach from rootedness and solidity to escape the
dead-end trajectory of conventional life surrendered to capitalistic and
materialistic logics. As shown in the film, this is true for many of the elderly
nomads who jump into the lifeboats of nomadic living to escape unfulfilling
corporate jobs and the ‘tyranny of the dollar.’ It is also true for the growing
cohorts of digital nomads (Atanasova and Eckhardt 2021; Mancinelli
2020), many of whom seek to circumvent the same woes of modern life. In
a globalized world, however, true freedom inheres in the ability to evade
the limitations and economic implications of geography. Digital nomads do
so by living seemingly luxurious and abundant lives in countries with
cheaper costs of living where they can afford to work less hours
(Atanasova et al. forthcoming; Woldoff and Litchfield 2021). These digital
nomads are tourists on the global stage, wandering about free, capitalizing
on various forms of privilege (Atanasova et al. forthcoming, Mancinelli
2020). Yet, similar to the elderly in Nomadland, these digital nomads have
left the 9-to-5 office life because they cannot see themselves ever able to
own a home or afford to retire, and do not want to toil as office drones for
the rest of their working lives (Woldoff and Litchfield 2021). The precarious
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elderly in Nomadland roam desperately searching for whatever job can
allow them to stretch to the end of the month. Still, however precarious
their nomadic living might be, through it, they too, along with digital
nomads, seem to find freedom and solidarity outside of a normative,
settled life, where rootedness is increasingly out of reach and mobility is
redefining social structuration. The rising prominence of nomadic living
foregrounds that globalization is not only an ‘out there’ phenomenon, far-
removed from the individual, but also an ‘in here’ phenomenon that
influences the most personal aspects of life (Gane 2001; Giddens 1994).
Concluding Comments
Nomadland is unambiguous in its depiction of modern-day nomadism as
both a choice for some and inevitability for others. Regardless of one’s
entry point to this way of life, however, nomadic living is built around trade-
offs: conventional comforts for a better chance at making ends meet;
material possessions for finding meaning in oneself, not the things one
owns. As one Rubber Tramp Rendezvous leader says, “I love this lifestyle.
It is a lifestyle of freedom, and beauty, and connection to the Earth. Yet
there is a trade‐off. You got to learn how to take care of your own s**t.”
(25:00). In many ways, Nomadland is an ode to the resistance of dominant
market logics of accumulation and ownership. Although at the periphery of
the marketplace, however, nomadic life is also a life that is increasingly
commodified through YouTube channels, how-to-guides, and blogs.
Navigating between the extremes of lack and social displacement, and
community and newfound ability to live life with little, the nomads in
Nomadland and the many others like them are thus finding ways to carve
a new path in the face of despair and disenchantment. Nomadland is
ultimately a critique of the death of the American dream at the hands of
Amazon and similar behemoths, while at the same time a story of
solidarity amongst the dispossessed who have taken a chance on bucking
the system and living with a sense of freedom at the end of their lives.
In today’s global economy of intermittent and flexible labor regimes,
not just the traditionally poor, but also the middle class are dwelling on the
periphery (Han 2018). Against this backdrop, for many, true nomadic living
emerges as the only viable path to stability in a globalized world long
detached from bounded logics of stasis and rootedness. Reflecting on the
average white-collar worker who, in a liquid world that demands mobility
and flexibility, is tethered to their cubicle, one might wonder, who are the
vagabonds, the suffering victims of the global economic system, and who
are the privileged tourists? Perhaps it is the nomads at large who have
figured out how to manage in a post-home ownership, post-American
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dream landscape, who are able to be one step closer to horizons of
opportunity through their mobility.
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