For centuries, locals in many Swiss Alpine villages have depended on visitors’ wanderlust to sustain their livelihoods. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a German-speaking village and tourist resort between 2017 and 2023, this book explores people’s everyday experience of tourism as a volatile yet vital industry, where successes and failures in the past, present and future intersect in puzzling ways. Following ‘native’ locals, migrant hospitality workers from (mostly) Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as tourism lobbyists in this globalized mountain village, it examines how power imbalance among those dependent on tourism elicit different responses to the dilemmas of tourism.
In the era of the Anthropocene, tourism represents both the threats of ruthless capitalism and the ideals of a good life. Nothing Without Tourism explores this paradox from the perspective of those who depend on tourism in the Swiss Alps, as they reflect on a long history of ‘touristification’ and face an uncertain future.
Arvustused
This is a well-written, engaging, sophisticated and thought-provoking book that takes an innovative approach to the topic of how local populations are affected by tourism dependency. Naomi Leite, SOAS, University of London
Introduction
Chapter
1. From Farming to the Business of Foreigners
Chapter
2. Accelerating into the Future
Chapter
3. Nostalgic Scenes
Chapter
4. Navigating Tourism Dependency
Chapter
5. Never Like Them
Chapter
6. An Industry Where One Cannot Grow Old
Conclusion
Index
Danaé Leitenberg is a social anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Basel. Prior to this, she was Research Fellow in the research group Alpine Histories of Global Change at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle and Lecturer at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg.
