Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses the temporalities associated with the mountain in a Swiss touristic village. By looking at the villagers', the tourism actors' and the immigrant workers' experiences, I identify clashing temporal imaginaries provoking feelings of displacement.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how competing "representations of time" (Bear 2014) shape people's understanding of the mountain and its value in a touristic village in the German-speaking Swiss Alps by following the experiences of locals, tourism promoters and immigrant hospitality workers.

In a resort often marketed as a piece of paradise, competing visions of what makes it exceptional collide around two mountains. Around the famous mountain peaks - the "hotspots"- the tourism actors promote a vision of the future where nature stands as capital that needs to be exploited rapidly for the sake of tourism. Against this commodification of the mountain, villagers evoke "their" beloved mountain to be nostalgically reminded of an idealised time before mass tourism, when things were slower and when they felt home in their village. The tourism promoters' hotspots justify future-making practices aiming at accelerating the pace tourist flows while the villagers' evocations of the mountain call for slowing things down. At the intersection of these time representations, the immigrant hospitality workers' role is overlooked despite essential. Displaced from their homes, they work relentlessly to make the village a hospitable place for tourists.

By looking at the tourism promoters', villagers' and immigrant workers' perspectives, I examine what allows for such different representations of time and the mountain to emerge. I focus on how time is "tricked" in such representations, how they clash, how they are mediated and how they provoke a sense of displacement in the present.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses questions of mobility and migration, social relationships and networks as well as of production of locality of young people living in mountain areas in the Swiss Alps. Youngsters take an important role in shaping local identities between images of tradition and innovation.

Paper long abstract:

There are many idealized imaginations about a protected childhood and youth in the natural and wild surroundings of mountain areas, not least supported by children's stories such as the famous "Heidi and Peter" in the Swiss Alps by Johanna Spyri.

However, the lives of young people in remote mountain villages nowadays are affected by different long-term and more recent transformations: Besides influences of touristification of landscapes and economies, newer trends of urbanization and gentrification influence imaginaries, mobilities and local narratives in mountain areas. Youngsters take an important role in shaping local identities finding themselves between the expectations of keeping and maintaining local traditions (or family enterprises) by local actors, the images of "youthful and innovative international vibes" by external visitors and individual wishes and possibilities in connection with local attachment and the own life course.

This paper aims at shedding light at diverse aspects of "coming of age" in the mountains, including questions of 1) economic and lifestyle mobility/migration (who remains in the region, who comes back after higher education in a city and why?), 2) social relationships and networks (what are the roles of family networks, how do social relationships develop in different regimes of mobility?) and 3) production of locality (how are young people attached to places and territories, how do they contribute to the construction of imaginaries of the local?).

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses diverse kind of representations of the mountain, mostly negative, by the asylum seekers when they first arrive in the Alps in Switzerland. It enlightens a specific aspect of urbanisation process in mountain area, from the view of the non-mobile and unwanted migrants.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years in Valais, an alpine canton in the south-western part of Switzerland —bordering France and Italy— the department in charge of asylum seekers reallocated unused municipal buildings situated in altitude to accommodate individuals —examples of such were a former summer camp, an old mountain house, and a previous sanatorium. All of them were sited in diverse touristic mountain zones, and faraway from the main reception centres located on the Rhône plain. For the fieldwork exploration, four of the twelve collective centres were selected due to their location — at more than 1200 meters up in the mountain.

This paper will focus towards the subjectivities and hard feelings of asylum seekers - as non-mobile, non-privileged and generally unwanted migrants - when they first arrive from the Swiss federal centres to the cantonal reception centres located up the mountains. Most of the time, they face a major dissatisfaction that is being placed in the mountain and not in town, while perceiving mountain as a remote place "faraway from everything". Despite being subjective, this idea provokes hard feelings and emotions, especially fear or anxiety that might be destabilizing. Asylum seekers need time to adjust, not only to the physical environment but also to the social landscape.

This paper will explore various ways in which the experiencing of being hosted in mountain centres embodies feelings that go beyond the specificity of the geographical situation. It enlightens some mountain representations that contrast tremendously with the romantic/touristified/gentrified vision of mountain as paradise.

Paper short abstract:

The presentation analyzes the case of a mountain village from Eastern Carpathians. A former industrial settlement (and its generally poor people) that entered into a deep decline in 1990s is facing a wave of wealthy second home owners which inevitably leads to contradictory situations.

Paper long abstract:

The analyzed village, which is located on the eastern border of Transylvania, in the middle of pine forests in the Eastern Carpathians, was established in the late 19th century as a lumbering settlement. It witnessed a rapid growth both economically and demographically being a sort of melting pot for people with different ethnic background. According to local sources, in the interwar period the village had 6-7000 inhabitants attracted by the job opportunities and better salaries. The economic booms, however, were always followed by deep declines: the most recent one occurred in 1990s, after the fall of Romanian socialism and nowadays it seems that the village will be totally depopulated after slightly more than 100 years of existence. Nowadays officially there are around 1000 people in the village and the figures are constantly decreasing.

Meantime, however, in spite of the still unpaved road, the surroundings attracted new settlers: wealthy people from nearby cities and even from Bucharest and Budapest built new style villas mainly on the fringes of the village and hidden in the forests. While they prefer to live a secluded way of life, they cannot avoid to interfere with the locals and two worlds collide in discourses and lifestyles. The presentation analyzes the contradictions of this new 'conquest': the memories of the better past, the sorrows of the present and the promises of the future brought by the potential tourists, the sympathies and antipathies towards them are all mixed in this process.

Paper short abstract:

In this presentation we will try to investigate new forms of social and cultural Otherness which occurs in the encounter of young strangers who came to live in Žumberak and the old people who already live there and their different narratives and imaginaries about living in this mountain area.

Paper long abstract:

In this presentation we will pay attention to the mountain area of Žumberak, a range of hills and mountains at the border of Croatia and Slovenia. Selecting Žumberak highlands as the location of our research was primarily associated with the fact that this very region often comes up in everyday discourse as the most depopulated one, as well as spatial and social periphery. It is an area characterized by a large number of small and scattered villages and a range of hills and mountains without any urban settlements. Demographic data provide good insight and show that during the 20th century the population in Žumberak area continuously declined, over the course of 40 years the population slumped by 74 per cent. The last census of 2011 showed that the area of Žumberak was populated by less than 3,000 persons (in the area of 430 square kilometres) mostly aged from 70 to 79. For most of them, staying in Žumberak was not a matter of choice, but "destiny". Žumberak has become unattractive and repulsive to the domicile population. However, during recent years we have witnessed the "discovery" of Žumberak by foreigners (mostly young people from Central and Western Europe). They regard life there as a possibility to live in harmony with nature, fascinated by the wildness and freedom that Žumberak provides. A Dutch family that lived in Žumberak for a few years, has inspired us to investigate new forms of social and cultural Otherness that recompose the mountain population nowadays.

Paper short abstract:

This work takes place in two distinct mountain communities of Oaxaca, Mexico. Both are responding differently to migration and urbanization. We try to discern how those changes affect linguistic, cultural and biological diversity, and if TEK is lost with biodiversity is lost.

Paper long abstract:

The state of Oaxaca has the greatest ethnic and linguistic diversity in Mexico; and is growing in notoriety as a tourist destination. Our work focuses on two mountain communities, San Pablo Etla in the Sierra Norte and Santa María Tlahuitoltepec in the Sierra Mixe. As Oaxaca State positions itself to be more integrated into the global economy through tourism and trade, indigenous communities in the state are experiencing a multitude of cultural changes that are reducing Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). The changes of greatest concern are the increase in monolingual education system and moving from agricultural to service occupations. The ways in which these communities have the capacity to respond to these changes has many different facets. With regards to land stewardship , San Pablo has a state recognized conservation program combined with Payment for Ecosystem Services, while the sacred mountain of Zempoaltépetl in Tlahuitoltepec, has been protected and honored by the community without a state defined conservation program. In both communities change processes are experienced, modifying the TEK, biodiversity and language. The main changes are migration and urbanization. The first occurs in both ways, native people leaving the community, and new incomers (marriage, tourists, etc.). The linguistic, cultural and biological diversity are sometimes threatened by the same causes, and the loss of diversity has serious health, economic, linguistic and social implications for them. This research seeks to discern the changes that have occurred in both communities, how they affected TEK, indigenous languages and biodiversity.

Paper short abstract:

This article focuses on the management of infrastructures by local communities in Daghestani mountainous villages. I puts the familiar scholarly narratives of post-socialist 'state failure' or 'zones of abandonment' in perspective.

Paper long abstract:

This article focuses on the management of infrastructures by local communities in Daghestani mountainous villages. In this peripherial mountainous region, state authorities have little say and infrastructures such as roads or electricity are neglected and crumbling. Rather than complain about their abandonment by the state, however, local inhabitants actively take charge of developing and maintaining infrastructure. Officially state-owned and state-managed, roads and utility networks are funded by private donors. The donors are locally-connected entrepreneurs who pass funds to the community as alms given to the tomb of the local 'saint'. The autonomous management of infrastructure is a source of pride to the village communities and a foundation of moral order. Managing their own infrastructures frees them from state attempts at controlling time: the villagers do not long for a lost past of state care, nor do they need to look up to the state to provide for their future. In the state margins, the usual categories can be inhabited in unexpected ways. "The forms of illegibility, partial belonging, and disorder that seem to inhabit the margins of the state constitute its necessary condition as a theoretical and political object" (Das, Poole, 2004).