Paper short abstract:

In a Swiss Alpine touristic village that can be described as a "contact zone" (Pratt 1991), I discuss the key role of locality in tourism imaginaries, localist politics and for mountain dwellers who identified as local "natives", negotiating between progressive ideals and social conservatism.

Paper long abstract:

Touristification processes in the Alps have often been described as vehicles of modernity that radically transformed the life of mountain dwellers thanks to technological progress and increased mobility flows in areas that were previously isolated and poor.

Based on 13 months of fieldwork in a German-speaking village in the Swiss Alps, I discuss how one could conceive the village as a “contact zone” (Pratt 1991), made of great variety of actors whose trajectories intersect in the resort. In spite of my fieldsite's transnational connections, I show how imaginaries of locality continued to play a key role in the village. On the one side, locality shaped the region's peculiar “tourism imaginaries” (Salazar and Graburn 2014) of Alpine simplicity and purity that could be sold to guests. On the other, it was playing into localist identity politics celebrating the village's "natives".

By drawing on the experiences of different mountain dwellers, I show how they negotiated their positions as locals between progressive, cosmopolitan ideals tied to tourism development and political tendencies for social conservatism and nationalist and/or localist nativism. Far from contradictory, these two tendencies were rather complimentary as they both celebrated the figure of the “genuine native” as that of the only authentic mountain dweller, albeit for different purposes. While the village was a complex and fluctuating "contact zone", a rather rigid hierarchy of belonging structured who was allowed to identify and feel like a “real” local.