Anti-mobile placemaking in a mobile world: rethinking the entanglements of place, im/mobility and belonging

Abstract

In this article I revisit debates about the socio-cultural importance of place and permanence in a hypermobile world order. I zoom in on everyday practices in a small municipality located in the Austrian Nock mountains region which is at once characterized by a history of cross-border mobilities and pronounced support for nativist ideas and parties. I shed light on the experiences and perspectives of village inhabitants who detest liberal ideals about cosmopolitan forms of belonging, instead insisting on tropes of indigeneity and place attachment (Heimatverbundenheit). I argue that rather than writing such sentiments off as backward, traditionalist ways of relating to the world, social scientists need to pay attention to them. They make visible a deepening chasm between scholarly imaginaries about mobile, cosmopolitan identities and people’s lived experiences in an increasingly fragmented global political arena. Taking the lived antagonisms of a hypermobile world order seriously, I aim critically to examine ideas of movement, place and cosmopolitanism pervading modern thought.

Keywords:

• Placemaking
• nativism
• anti-cosmopolitanism
• European Alps
• Austria

A totally local dumpling

In February 2022 I received a phone call from Kathi.¹ ‘Can you come to my place tomorrow afternoon?’ she asked. ‘You will be able to observe something momentous for your research: The birth of our very own local dumpling’. I had been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Kathi’s home village in the Austrian Nock mountains for one and a half years. I had chosen the municipality as a fieldsite to explore the role of questions of belonging, place-attachment and alienation in an increasingly polarized political landscape in Europe. Having spent many years studying the experiences of refugees traversing mobility regimes (Lems 2018, 2022a), the forcefulness of the backlash against the arrival of large numbers of asylum seekers in Europe in 2015 had propelled me to return to the remote rural region I had grown up in to conduct ethnography at/of home. By collaborating with heritage clubs (Traditionsvereine) and residents in an area that has a history of support for right-wing and fascist political parties (Danglmaier and Koroschitz 2021), I tried to understand in how far local, nativist understandings of belonging have something to say about the anxieties of living in a globalized, ‘overheated’ (Eriksen 2016) present.

Kathi, a resolute and energetic woman in her mid-forties, had become one of my main informants. Because of her pioneering role in the highly popular food sovereignty movement, she was an important door opener for my research. Driven by a loose group of farmers, residents and owners of small businesses, the group promoted the resurrection of regional cuisine, small-scale forms of farming, and the creation of sharing and solidarity networks within the villages. Through cooking and gardening workshops and the establishment of marketing structures that enabled farmers to sell their produce directly and for fair prices, these ideas had quickly gained a foothold in the community.

Within a few years, the food sovereignty movement had gathered so much momentum in the municipality that it even received an official listing as a ‘slow food village’. In doing so, the locally-driven initiatives became part of a global grassroots movement in which food features as a key driver for societal change. Villages play an important role in the slow food movement’s visions: it celebrates rural communities as positive counter-examples to fast-paced and hyper-capitalist lifestyles. Held together by empathetic relationships between people and their local environments, the movement sees rural villages as generators of a different, more socially just and sustainable philosophy of living.²

In my research site these ideas were met with positive approval by the residents. In villages which were bruised by decades of out-migration and infrastructural decline, the movements’ call to celebrate their unique cultural heritage and a return to slow-paced, local lifestyles touched a nerve. The new project Kathi told me about on the phone was an attempt to fuel this local pride, or Heimatverbundenheit – a notion commonly used by villagers to express their connectedness to the landscape, mountains, customs and people making up their home environment.

She explained that she had been working on the development of a dumpling recipe for weeks, twisting and tweaking it so that it represented all the eighteen villages making up the municipality. The type of filled dumpling her idea was based on is typical for the region and is called Kärntner Nudel (Carinthia dumpling). Yet, Kathi was adamant that her invention needed to stand out and represent the particularity of the municipality she was from rather than the state of Carinthia at large. The dumpling needed to show the uniqueness of the place, making it visible, and, indeed, palatable, to people from within the community and without.

I soon realized that Kathi’s efforts to show off the villagers’ unique and loving relationship to their home environment, or Heimat, were echoed by many other village inhabitants. When I went to see her the next afternoon, I met Carla and Celine, two fellow campaigners in the local slow food organization. Kathi had prepared several different fillings for her dumpling creation, and she wanted us to taste them and provide her with feedback. As she served the first version, she told us from where she had obtained the ingredients. The eggs came from a farmer in the neighboring village, the quark from the family next door, the flour from a mill close by, and so the list went on. Kathi had carefully curated the localness the dumpling was supposed to transport. Each of the components making it up was sourced locally, nothing came from further away than a 10 km radius.

Given the important role ideas of provenance play in the slow food movement’s campaigns, this insistence on localness was not surprising. As Cristina Grasseni (2005) has pointed out in her research with farmers engaged in the production of slow food in the Italian Alps, food is a crucial arena for the negotiation of ideas about ‘authenticity’ and heritage. Yet, as we started the tastings, I came to realize how strongly the dumpling project was connected to a rooted and immovable sense of belonging to place. Echoing Kathi’s efforts to create a recipe based on native products, Carla and Celine were adamant that every bit of the dumpling needed to be a proven part of their home environment.

When it came down to choosing between the two favorite versions – one flavored with tarragon and one with thyme and oregano – everybody agreed that the one with tarragon was tastier. And yet, Celine passionately insisted that the dumpling with thyme and oregano was our only real option. She argued that tarragon was not native to the region, while wild oregano and thyme could easily be found in the surrounding forests and mountains.

Kathi replied that even though tarragon did not originate from the Nock mountains, it actually grew very well there. She suggested that because villagers had been cultivating it in their gardens for a long time, the plant had gradually inserted itself into the local environment and become a part of it. But this argument did not convince the other two women. Celine insisted that to grow tarragon, Kathi would have to buy seeds coming from somewhere else. Including ‘a foreign herb that doesn’t belong here’, as she put it, risked ruining the dumpling’s claim to represent the place’s unique essence. ‘What we need is a totally local dumpling’, Carla said. ‘It needs to speak of our village’.

At the end of the tasting, the decision was unanimous: to produce a totally local dumpling, all non-native elements needed to be eliminated. Not only did the ingredients have to be sourced from within the boundaries of the municipality, they also had to have a proven history of belonging.

Deciphering anti-mobile placemaking

The immovable ideas of place and belonging captured in Kathi’s totally local dumpling project should not be trivialized or written off as the insignificant deliberations of three women in a remote mountain community. While the vignette captures just a short moment in the everyday happenings of rural village life, it is representative of ideas and sentiments that do not just permeate local discourse but extend far beyond the boundaries of the village. It mirrors the perspectives of a growing proportion of the population in liberal democratic societies across Europe (Szombati 2018; Buzalka 2020) and the wider world (Hochschild, 2016) who reject mobile, cosmopolitan conceptions of belonging, instead insisting on tropes of indigeneity, boundary drawing and territoriality.

The Brexit referendum was the first in a succession of political earthquakes in recent years that revealed how many people are craving the return to an idealized past – a past that they believe to hold a stronger sense of community and social cohesion (Thorleifsson 2016). Brexit campaigners’ infamous rallying cry ‘Vote Leave. Take Control’ hit a nerve for many who felt left behind by the speed of life in a globalized world. This sense of disillusionment cannot be reduced to the United Kingdom alone. In recent years, nativism has turned into a dominant discursive trope in public and political debates in Europe (Bertossi, Duyvendak and Foner 2021). It stands for the ways people utilize history to make claims of belonging whilst demanding the exclusion of individuals or groups determined to be ‘alien’ (Kešić and Duyvendak 2019).

In my fieldsite in the Austrian Nock mountains, such nativist tendencies find expression in the rediscovery of Heimat – a historically burdened notion which has been at the center of moral and political discourses about place and belonging in the German-speaking world for more than two decades (Applegate 1990, 4). Steeped in a conservative local patriotism, Heimat encapsulates ‘the dream of the original nature of life, the dream of an existence without alienation’ (Leimgruber 2019, 145). As Kathi’s efforts to create a purely local dumpling show, these imaginations about a pure and untainted connection to place are often based on the radical exclusion of everybody who is believed to spoil the ‘ingenuous authenticity and beauty’ characterizing this historically grown relationship (Rebel 2010, 123).

Such understandings of place and belonging fly in the face of dominant scholarly debates about identity, in mobilities studies and beyond. The intellectual project many mobilities scholars have been invested in over the last three decades can be described as the exact opposite of the nativist ideas promoted by my research participants. Eager to move away from the ‘metaphysics of sedentarism’ (Creswell 2006, 32) permeating conceptualizations of social life, mobilities researchers have developed models of belonging which are not tied to static, closed off territories, but highlight the dynamic, processual and, indeed mobile, character of identity formation (e.g. Arp Fallov, Jørgensen and Knudsen 2013; Gössling and Stavrinidi 2016; Huang 2022).

This article is an attempt to confront the stubborn persistence of nativist placemaking practices in a world marked by mobility and high-speed transformation processes. Starting from the example of the totally local dumpling project, I want to gain a deeper understanding of engagements with place which can be described as ‘anti-mobile’. In using the term ‘anti-mobile’ I do not intent to insinuate a state of immobility or involuntary mobility. Rather, I aim to capture the ambiguous and often contradictory ways people weaponize ideas of stillness and permanence amid a hypermobile mobile world order.

The practices I look at do not just run counter to inclusive public and scholarly discourses about place, mobility and belonging, but actively seek to undo them. Zooming in on the particularity of everyday life in a municipality in the Austrian Nock mountains, I make visible the ways the people I worked with contested mobile and cosmopolitan imaginaries. By inquiring into the homelessness and rootlessness village inhabitants believed the liberal paradigm to stand for, my aim is to raise broader questions about the role of place in mobilities research.

As the editors spell out in the introduction, this special issue aims to tackle some of the epistemological pitfalls pervading mobilities research by deploying a place-based lens. In line with this collective thought experiment, I test out the value of an experiential approach to place that begins and ends with the manifold ways people experience and make sense of their environment. Informed by phenomenological epistemologies (Casey 1993; Heidegger 1975), I do not treat place as a pre-determined analytical category. Instead, I am interested in the habits, ideas and practices through which people invest their surroundings with meaning, thereby actively making places.

Turning experience into a primary angle for theorization does not preclude the structural factors shaping the everyday politics of place. Phenomenological anthropologists have stressed again and again that lived experience is not situated in an apolitical or ahistorical void (Jackson 1996; Mattingly 2019). To gain a deeper understanding of people’s everyday placemaking practices, it is therefore crucial to pay attention to the political, historical and social elements shaping their lived experiences. This analytical angle allows me to keep the focus on people’s existential strivings for a place in which to dwell while not losing sight of the inherently mobile character of human life. I am therefore careful not to walk into the trap of seeking solace in concepts of place that treat it as a bounded and immobile territory.

At the same time, I want to show why the neglect of place in our concepts and thinking might lead to another, equally as dangerous, trap. By focusing on the ways central ideas and concepts are put to the test in the realm of the everyday, I aim to shed light on a deep chasm that has opened up between intellectual takes on movement and belonging and people’s experiences of them. While social scientists have been invested in the promotion of ever-more elaborate mobile and cosmopolitan conceptual models, a growing number of people feel threatened by the placeless and restless visions of belonging they entail. Rather than ignoring such anti-mobile worldviews, or explaining them away, I join the growing chorus of scholars arguing that we need to pay serious attention to them (Hochschild 2016; Buzalka 2020; Pasieka 2022) as they provide important insights into processes of societal fragmentation.

The entire article can be read as an attempt to shed light on the anti-mobile perspectives permeating the totally local dumpling project. Starting from this one mundane moment in the everyday life of a mountain community, I aim to uncover the social and historical processes underlying nativist engagements with place. I approach this task in four interconnected steps.

In a first move, I highlight my conceptual points of departure. By sketching the entwined genealogy of place and mobility in modern thought, I make visible a theoretical impasse that does not just haunt the field of mobilities studies, but the social sciences at large. In a second step, I paint a more detailed picture of the place I base this thought experiment on. Sketching the community’s mobility make-up, I embed the antagonisms marking the totally local dumpling project in a socio-political and historical context.

In a third step, I show how the efforts to create a totally local dumpling tie into commonly shared engagements with Heimat in the region. Zooming in on the activities of a local heritage club and the food sovereignty movement, I point out the ambivalent relationship to place and mobility encapsulated in the rediscovery of Heimat. In a final move, I zoom out again to think through the lessons that might be learned from my case study. By revisiting debates about the antagonisms of placemaking in hypermobile capitalist societies, I show how the anti-mobile worldviews encapsulated in the totally local dumpling project link into historically embedded anxieties of loss and ruination.

From the closed world to the infinite universe

Analytically making sense of anti-mobile placemaking practices is not an easy undertaking. Despite or (perhaps because of) their political brisance, there is a lack of scholarly vocabulary to grasp conceptually the antagonisms that are swept to the surface in people’s everyday engagements with a global world order. Dominant social theory models offer little in the way of deciphering them. Repelled by the ugly racist and exclusionary sentiments they carry, scholars studying social transformations have long tended to turn their backs on or even make invisible such antagonisms.

Part of this lack of engagement has to do with social scientists’ longstanding reluctance to study ‘unlikeable’ (Pasieka 2019) groups and individuals promoting worldviews they are opposed to. It goes hand-in-hand with a pronounced scholarly desire to speak out against dominant regimes of power (Ortner 2016) and visions of the political as driven by dialogue (Mouffe 2005). It has led to the commonly shared conviction that expressions of antagonism are remnants of an archaic past that need to be eliminated through the progressive tools of democratic exchange (Mouffe 2005, 2–3). But the root causes for the lack of vocabulary capable of analytically deciphering placemaking projects, such as the totally local dumpling project, lie deeper. They are inextricably linked to dominant conceptualizations of place and belonging, in mobilities studies and beyond.

In the past three decades, the overwhelming scholarly focus has been on highly mobile phenomena. This was propelled by a crucial shift that occurred in the humanities and social sciences in the 1990s, when scholars moved away from stable, rooted and mappable identities to fluid, transitory and migratory forms of belonging (Clifford 1992; Bhabha 1994). Much of what is now known as the new mobilities paradigm can be seen as an exercise in sketching the social, historical, intellectual, cultural and political trails ‘key figures of mobility’ (Salazar 2017) leave behind as they move through space and time.

While the interest in mobile phenomena reached its climax in the early 2000s, when the mobility turn took hold of the humanities and social sciences, the fascination with nomadic and mobile forms of belonging can be described as a new variation of a quintessential theme that has preoccupied thinkers in different shapes and forms for several hundred years. It can be traced back to a moment of radical change in European thought in the seventeenth century when ideas of an ordered cosmos with fixed stars gave way to the notion of an infinite universe – an infinity which was defined both in temporal and spatial terms (Koyré 1979).

Starting with Copernican theory which placed the sun rather than the earth at the centre of the universe, to the revolutionary new astronomy of Galileo and the idea of absolute space and motion introduced by Newton – the mobile shift of thinking I am aiming at did not just transform our conceptions of the universe. Importantly, it also revolutionized conceptualizations of humans’ emplacement within it. Space came to take on the characteristics of something non-local and non-particular and the objects and beings moving through it came to be thought of as inherently mobile.

Koyré (1979) described this transformation of thought as one ‘from the closed world to the infinite universe’. Throughout these developments place was dissolved into space as the dominant term of Eurocentric discourse (Casey 1997, 288; Lems 2018, 97). Even though authors have repeatedly commented on the close affinity between modernity and mobility (e.g. Creswell 2006; Bissell 2007; Rammler 2008), the consequences of this shift have largely remained under-theorized. Yet, it influenced understandings of the links between mobility, place and belonging to a great degree. Mobility was no longer conceptualised in terms of a linear journey from place A to B. It came to be thought of in terms of a complex set of vectors propelling people’s movements across an open, fluid and non-descript space rather than through affectively and materially delimited places.

Throughout these processes, place receded from view. Being immobile and in situ was increasingly deemed to be a morally dubious expression of being left behind (Xiang 2007). It contradicted modern ideas about societal progress as a continuous spatial forward movement: ‘In the modern concept of mobility the imagination of a mouldable society and the idea of humans as subjects on their way to perfection melt together with the idea of physical, that is, spatial movement as the dynamic factor, the vehicle or “instrument” for it’ (Canzler, Kaufmann and Kesselring 2008, 3–4).

Ever since its birth as a research field, there have been a range of critical engagements by mobilities scholars with this placeless bias in modern thought. They have spoken out against the ‘flow speak’ (Bude & Dürrschmidt 2010, 482) permeating mobilities research, arguing that it has led to a flattening out of social processes and a neglect of ‘the complex rhythmicity of the social and temporalization of the local’ (483). Other scholars have emphasized the importance of analysing the multi-scalar trajectories of people’s emplacements and displacements within diverging networks of power (Cağlar and Schiller 2018), called for the de-exceptionalization of displacement (Cabot & Ramsay 2021) and for more scholarly engagement with the consequences of mobility on different people and places in the ‘slow and fast lanes of social life’ (Hannam, Sheller and Urry 2006, 11). These interventions have led to fine-grained engagements with the dialectical relationship between mobility and immobility (Gaibazzi 2015; Schapendonk 2020) and a more pronounced interest in stasis, displacement, disruption, boredom and decline as key diagnostics of our time (O’Neill 2017).

Despite the weight of these critiques, they have not led to the reappraisal of place as a central unit of socio-cultural analysis. This reluctance might be linked to a generally shared worry amongst social scientists that bringing place back into the analytical picture risks reintroducing parochial notions of belonging through the back door (Lems 2016, 320–321). This dilemma illustrates the grave difficulty to think beyond modern analytical categories in which movement lies at the very heart of the world as we know it.

Yet, I would argue that the refusal to engage properly with place and its antagonisms is a risky undertaking. While for decades scholars have tirelessly highlighted the ‘social fluidification of societal structures’ based on the increased mobility of people, goods and ideas (Kaufmann, Bergman and Joye 2004, 746), place-based notions of belonging have long since entered the discursive arena again. As the exclusionary engagements with place presented in the opening vignette show, they have not done so via the academic backdoor, but head-on, via discursive conventions located in the realm of the everyday. They speak of an urgent need to dissolve the conceptual impasse that has haunted modern social theorizations of belonging – a conceptual move that requires nothing less than a mode of thinking that goes beyond modern thinking (Allen 2017; Savransky and Lundy 2022). It is a mode of thinking that does not turn its back on the antagonisms brought about by accelerated global connectivity, but actively confronts the ‘ruinous philosophical, political and ecological histories of modern progress’ (Savransky and Lundy 2022).

Mobilities research occupies a crucial role in gaining a deeper understanding of these highly complex and often contradictory processes. By deploying a place-based lens on peripheral communities, it does not just become possible to capture the ways rural im/mobilities patterns tie into global transformation processes. It also enables shedding light on the localized processes of boundary drawing people develop in response (Charmillot and Dahinden 2022). My contribution to this special issue is an attempt to do precisely this. By zooming in on the lifeworlds of people whose placemaking practices are directed at keeping mobile figures and ideas out, I hope to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the lived antagonisms marking people’s engagements with place and belonging in a mobile world.

The antagonisms of the global village

My observations are based on two years of ethnographic research in a municipality in the Upper Carinthian Nock mountains. The roughly 4000 residents live spread over 18 villages, the majority of which are in remote mountain areas and have between 600 and 70 inhabitants. To gain a deeper understanding of the ways ideas about place, mobility and belonging are anchored in the everyday, I collaborated with heritage clubs (Traditionsvereine) aimed at the preservation of local cultural customs, conducted participant observation in the food sovereignty movement and interviewed farmers, club members, local politicians and residents.

Anchored in phenomenological approaches to ethnography (Jackson 1996), my focus was on the micro dimensions of human existence – the everyday acts of meaning-making driving people’s engagements with the world. Such an approach, however, does not disregard the importance of structural factors. Rather than treating the experiences ethnographers observe as closed up in themselves, they need to be embedded in a politically and historically determined time and space. This means that human life needs to be approached as always already situated in something (Lems 2018, 51). Before I return to the placemaking practices underlying the totally local dumpling project, it is therefore important to consider the historical and socio-political horizons against which the villagers’ actions and experiences took place. By zooming out onto the structural dimensions playing into their experiences of im/mobility, it becomes possible to make visible the social fault lines underlying anti-mobile placemaking.

A closer ethnographic look at my fieldsite’s social and economic make-up shows that for many people living in the region, contemporary discourses about mobility are not linked to ideas of progress, but to experiences of decline and loss. These negative connotations are driven by the disappearance of family members and friends who left the villages in search for work in the city, and by the increased presence of a wealthy, urban class of retirees who bought many of the houses that the out-migration of residents have left vacant.

Businesses in the region have been struggling to keep up with the high pace set by global capitalism, with Carinthia forming the most indebted state of Austria³. This economic downturn has left noticeable marks on the municipality. In the last decades the two largest employers in the region (a magnesite plant and a shoe factory) outsourced their production to lower-cost countries, contributing to one of the highest unemployment and emigration rates in Austria.⁴ The emergence of a new, wealth-based form of tourism that is driven by the growing interest in a remote Alpine property market has led to the inflation of house prices. The omni-presence of secondary residences (Zweitwohnsitze) whose highly mobile owners live in Munich, Vienna or Zürich for most of the year has turned the villages into ghost places, which, in turn has led to the involution of key infrastructure.

These recent developments greatly impact on people’s capacity to be socially and geographically mobile. The disappearance of shops, pubs, cafes, bus routes, workplaces and schools in the last decades means that villagers need to be more spatially mobile, as they have to drive longer distances or migrate to cover basic needs. At the same time, these dynamics have slowly drained the villages of the social activities that filled them with life and meaning, thereby reducing inhabitants’ existential mobility – a sense that their life is going somewhere (Hage 2021, 44–45).

The immovable notions of belonging encapsulated in the totally local dumpling project can be seen as a response to these conditions. They hint at the trail of loss and dispossession (Cağlar and Schiller 2018) that accelerated forms of global capitalism leave behind, and the uneven experiences of mobility they produce. The increased presence of anti-mobile ideas and practices can be read as signifiers of the antagonistic and often-times contradictory ways people create a sense of belonging amidst a world which is marked by the unequal distribution of what mobilities scholars have poignantly described as ‘mobile social capital’ (Hage 2000; Kaufmann, Bergman and Joye 2004). It encapsulates the different and asymmetrical ways individuals can ‘access and appropriate the capacity for spatial-social mobility’ (Kaufmann, Bergman and Joye 2004, 750), including the social competence to enjoy mobile, cosmopolitan forms of belonging (Hage 2000, 205).

While the wealthy owners of second residences in the Nock mountains possess enough mobile social capital to embrace cosmopolitan lifestyles and denounce antiquated ideas of belonging to place, village residents struggling to make ends meet often lack the capability to do so, instead feeling excluded, alienated and looked down upon (Ibid). Anti-mobile placemaking should therefore not be confused with immobility. Rather, it reveals the experiences of people for whom the speed of globalization is not connected to excitement and opportunity, but to loss and a feeling of temporal and existential vertigo (Knight 2021).

It provokes a contradictory interplay between mobility and immobility. Whilst their everyday lives are determined by the rhythms and demands of a globally interconnected world order, people cling to ideas about belonging that positions them in an immovable relationship to the places they see themselves as historically anchored in. Anti-mobile placemaking does not, therefore, relate to an actual state of stasis. It captures both an idealized state of being and a weapon that people level at a world in which they increasingly feel left out.

There are historical antecedents to this ambiguous interplay between mobility and immobility in the Nock mountains. On the one hand, mobility is a determining factor of social life. The communities I study are located in the wider geographical area of the Alpe-Adria region, an Alpine border triangle between Austria, Slovenia and Italy. The region has thus always been characterized by mobility and cross-border exchange (Valentin 1998).

The family histories of the people I work with paint an interesting picture of the inherently mobile make-up of seemingly remote mountain village life. They show the intense transnational and interregional movements marking peasant pasts as well as the essential role of tourism and work migration in the present, confirming the widely shared scholarly view that social life in the European Alps is and has always been deeply mobile (Albera 2014; Cottino 2021).

This mobile set-up, however, is counterpoised by an equally long history of opposition against the cosmopolitan views emanating from urban centres. Throughout the centuries Carinthia has been depicted as the backward periphery, leading to fractious relationships with the changing centres of power. The formative period of the Austrian nation state after World War One made visible just how pronounced was this hostile stance of Carinthians towards the political elite in Vienna. Propelled by the slogans ‘Away from Vienna’ and ‘Carinthia to the Carinthians’, a grassroot guerrilla movement even briefly fought for the state’s independence (Valentin 1992).

The anti-mobile placemaking practices I am aiming to sketch thus link into a historically engrained suspicion towards the liberal worldviews being ordered from ‘above’. While these ideas play a crucial role in Carinthia’s modern political make-up, it is important to note that they are by no means restricted to my case study. Beyond the specific Carinthian case, they tie into a pronounced history of anti-cosmopolitan thought and practice in the German-speaking world which is based on a critique of the cosmopolitan visions proposed by liberal modernist projects (Lems 2022b).

The Alps, and particularly the figure of the rural mountain inhabitant, play a crucial role in these anti-cosmopolitan currents of thought. Since the nineteenth century, Alpine dwellers have been celebrated for their stubborn refusal to exchange locally anchored traditions and identities for the mobile and restless character of modern lifestyles. From the high culture of Lord Byron and Schumann to the mundane world of tourism advertising – the inhabitants of Alpine villages have continuously been portrayed as shielded from the corrupting influence of modern city life, which, in turn is depicted as ‘essentially pathological and pathogenic, as part of a “sick” and degenerate society’ (Dickinson 2010, 583). In these currents of thought, mountain dwellers emerge as the bearers of hope: they possess a ‘wild’, exciting, and untamed kind of knowledge (Dümling 2020, 9–10) that has the potential to challenge the supposed emptiness of cosmopolitan identity models.

The anti-mobile placemaking practices I encountered in my fieldsite therefore tie into a history of anti-cosmopolitan practice in which the Alps champion as a space of spiritual and moral purification of the stresses caused by modern, hypermobile life (Dickinson 2010, 583). As I turn to my ethnographic observations, I will make visible the antagonistic engagements with mobility and belonging they entail. Whilst deeply embedded in a mobile and globalized liberal world order, they push and shove against the very foundations of that world.

Slowness as a political weapon

While the anti-mobile placemaking practices I encountered are historically and socially anchored in anti-cosmopolitan currents of thought, the fact that they came into view with such force during my fieldwork cannot be divorced from the pandemic moment and the crisis regimes of im/mobility (Salazar 2021) it produced. I first started to notice the prevalence of these ideas during the second national Corona lockdown in Austria in the winter of 2020. The countless over-the-fence conversations I had with my research participants in this early period of the Covid-19 pandemic revealed a strong sense of opposition against the lockdown rules enforced upon them by political decision makers.

I started to detect dominant themes within these daily conversations – a common-sense kind of knowledge that drove everyday meaning-making (Lems 2022b). Many centred around the entanglement of mobility, place and belonging. People endlessly complained about the political and intellectual elites in Vienna, Brussels or elsewhere, describing the rules they imposed on ‘ordinary men and women’ as out of touch with reality. The Corona measures were often brought up in the same breath with the government’s cultural diversity policies: just as politicians had been corrupted into accepting large numbers of refugees in 2015 by powerful cosmopolitan elites, so had they been coaxed into strict lockdown rules.

Arno, a representative for the right-wing FPÖ party in the local council, commented: ‘What’s going on around us is sick, totally sick and corrupt. Why doesn’t it surprise me that the people agreeing with the Corona measures are exactly the ones bemoaning every single deported asylum seeker?’ People were convinced that they needed to act against the soulless and rootless ‘multikulti’ (multicultural) lifestyle that had been propagated by governments throughout the past decades. This rejection of ethnic diversity did not correlate with the actual presence of migrants. Only eight percent of the people living in the Nock mountains region are not Austrian citizens, and the majority of this already low number of foreign residents are not refugees but wealthy retirees from Germany, Switzerland or the Netherlands.

The suspicious attitude towards the cosmopolitan ideals imposed upon rural areas by the city elite translated into a wave of support for projects and initiatives promoting a sense of local identification. This localism went hand-in-hand with the performance of a decidedly emplaced, immobile ethos. This became particularly apparent in the overwhelming support for the so-called self-service huts (Selbstbedienungshütten) that sprung up like mushrooms within the municipality and across the region.

Initiated by farmers or agricultural collectives, these wooden huts are often positioned in front of farms or at private properties. They enable farmers to sell their produce directly, without having to accept price cuts or get caught up in the pressuring tactics of international supermarket chains. The huts work on a trust basis – they are open 24 hours a day with no staff present. Customers can choose what they need and leave the money in a jar. Residents welcomed these initiatives so enthusiastically that the nearest-by supermarket chain even considered putting up a self-service hut selling locally-sourced produce itself to prevent customers from changing their shopping habits permanently – an idea which was stopped dead in the tracks by the widespread wave of protest by the farmers’ union, the food sovereignty movement and their customers⁵.

The success of these activities attracted the slow food organization’s interest, resulting in the establishment of Carinthia as a model region for slow food villages. Initially many members of the local food sovereignty movement were suspicious about the collaboration with the slow food organization. The use of a foreign word to describe their work and the trendy, highly educated delegates from the slow food organization showing up in the villages were perceived as signifiers of a global, cosmopolitan class they felt alienated by.

Yet, over time, the farmers, food producers and artisans came to identify with the idea of slowness encapsulated in the slow food label. Twisting the movement’s original ideas and political motivations, they came to imagine slowness as a weapon against the hypermobile and cosmopolitan paradigm they hoped to undo. For rural communities that have been plagued by decades of emigration and dwindling infrastructure, the slow food movement represented an opportunity for harbouring a sense of local pride and solidarity. The slow food projects came to act as important signs that the village was still alive. More so, they acted as laboratories of placemaking, as sites for the celebration, negotiation and active creation of ideas about heritage, history and belonging.

To gain a deeper understanding of how these ideas were negotiated and made sense of in the everyday, it is helpful to take a closer look at one of the projects initiated by Kathi under the slow food label. Kathi is an interesting example for the anti-mobile placemaking I am aiming at. Born and grown up in the municipality and married to a man from the neighbouring village, she was proud to be completely and utterly immersed in local social life. Kathi often liked to say that her home village (Heimatdorf) was all she needed, no matter how small and seemingly insignificant it was in the bigger picture.

Village life was her universe, and she was neither interested in going on a holiday to the Italian coast nearby nor to see other parts of Austria. In her stories, places such as Vienna appeared as the polar opposite of the kind of Heimat she was envisaging through her work: overcrowded, dirty, dangerous and on the verge of being besieged by migrants. Like many other villages she often denounced the stuck-upness of people who had a more mobile lifestyle. This included refugees, whom she believed to be outright opportunistic for occupying places they were not supposed to be, but also people such as the wealthy Germans or Swiss who had bought houses in the village, as well people like me – former locals who had left the village years ago and lost touch with the local order of things. Kathi made a point of refusing to give in to the pressures of the cosmopolitan paradigm by staying put and investing all her energy into fostering a place-based sense of belonging. It was this anti-mobile ethos that propelled her engagement with the slow food movement.

After the great success of a self-service hut, which she had established in front of her house, together with a farmer’s collective, she wanted to go a step further and think about ways to strengthen a sense of local belonging in the community. With the help of the collective, she started a community-run café in the heritage museum (Heimatmuseum) of the neighbouring village. Previously buzzing with life and activities, the village had experienced a period of decline. Whereas in the 1990s, the village counted three pubs, a small grocery store, a bar and a bank, the only thing left from this was one pub, which, however, was only opened during the summer months.

Kathi’s idea of creating a community-run café was an attempt to respond to these pressures by fostering a local sense of solidarity and communality. That she chose the Heimatmuseum as the location for this undertaking was not a coincidence. The museum represented exactly the ideas of local belonging, permanence and slowness she wanted to promote by attaching herself to the slow food organization.

Initiated in the 1980s by a group of locals who formed a heritage club (Heimatverein), the museum aims to represent the cultural and historical roots of the people living in the municipality. The museum is run entirely by amateur historians – local farmers and residents who have taken an interest in collecting historical objects and stories from the past. Like most of the other social institutions in the village, however, the museum went through a period of decline, both in terms of locals engaging with the museum and the club itself which was struggling to recruit new members.

Throughout the summer months of 2021, I participated in the community café by working shifts there and giving Kathi a helping hand whenever she needed it. I also collaborated with the Heimatverein by joining their regular meetings, tagging along as they planned the relaunch of the museum. It allowed me to observe the remarkable transformation of the formerly abandoned and decaying space of the Heimatmuseum into a vibrant social and cultural hub. The café and store were welcomed enthusiastically by residents. Within a few weeks, the café turned into a well-frequented meeting place for people from the mountain villages. This steady stream of visitors also led to a renewed interest in the museum and the narratives about belonging to place it offered.

The placemaking practices reverberating throughout the interactions I observed in the museum and café were anchored in the notion of Heimat. It is a notion which is notoriously difficult to translate as it contains many different overlapping meanings, including home, homeland, belonging, but also region. Heimat is often used to express a deep connection between people and the natural environments they inhabit. Places and the humans living in them are seen as ‘inextricably intertwined both historically and spiritually’ (Dickinson 2010, 582), leading to an assumed correlation between culture and landscape.

Because of the racialization of these ideas by the national socialists, Heimat has turned into a heavily contested notion in Austria. The Nazis promoted the Alps as a space of national belonging, suggesting a ‘causal connection between physical/aesthetic qualities of landscapes and the “racial” qualities of the peoples who inhabited them’ (580). Due to its violent history, Heimat turned into a tabooed word in the postwar era. Many heritage clubs have since refrained from using the notion, eager to distance themselves from its exclusionary potentials.

Contrary to these dominant renunciations of Heimat, Kathi and the members of the Heimatverein hoped to actively resurrect it through their work. The attachment to place and loving relationship with the natural environment encapsulated in the notion mirrored the sentiments expressed by the local slow food movement, which saw the preservation of the populations’ natural or ‘indigenous’ cultural ties to place as its core task.

Yet, as evidenced in the totally local dumpling project, this project of cultural preservation carried a strong exclusionary undertone. Place was seen as a historically and culturally enclosed vessel made up of clearly delineated affective boundaries. To belong to place was to be totally and irrefutably emplaced there. Mobile elements were indicative of a foreignness which risked alienating this sense of belonging.

For Kathi and her fellow campaigners their work was not just about saving the world from an environmental or economic catastrophe. It was also directed at saving the community from the threat of cultural extinction. Amongst the participants of the grassroots projects promoting a return to slowness, the idea of a hypermobile, cosmopolitan paradigm attempting to destroy local traditions and lifestyles was widespread. Anti-capitalist ideas blended with racialized anxieties of the planned great replacement of the local population by migrants. While some participants of the slow food movement sympathized with green party politics, the majority saw it as their task to act against left-leaning cosmopolitan elites and work towards a migrant-free future.

These ethnographic observations reveal the social currents propelling the totally local dumpling project. The attempts to create a pure and immobile sense of belonging that is anchored in place echoed commonly shared sentiments in my fieldsite which fundamentally questioned cosmopolitanism as a viable way of life. Slowness, rootedness and tradition – the antecedents of modern imaginaries about progress – were used as weapons against the liberal world order, chiselling away its fundaments.

That these ideas extend well beyond the boundaries of the village became apparent as I started to talk to ‘newcomers’ who had recently moved to the region. Consider the story of Bas, a Dutch migrant. At the outbreak of the pandemic, he decided to leave behind his successful business in the Netherlands to buy the local pub in one of the mountain villages. In his mid-fifties, he had to learn German, establish new social ties and start a business from scratch in a very difficult economic environment. Paradoxically, he described these mobile acts as necessary to achieve an immobile, place-based and ethnically uniform state of belonging.

These modes of belonging, Bas believed, had been made to disappear by political and cultural elites across Europe who had welcomed migrants and refugees – a development, which, as he put it, turned his country into a ‘hellhole’. His mobile yet anti-mobile ideas resemble the countless conversations I had with German, Swiss and Dutch retirees who moved to the Nock mountains region in the last years. They often explained their decision to migrate with the search for a place-based sense of belonging that could only be found in this part of the world. The municipality was not just attractive to them because of the beautiful natural environment, but also because of the locals’ longstanding resistance against cosmopolitan ideals.

These wealthy newcomers were happy to put up with the stand-offish and at times even openly mocking ways longer-term residents reacted to their presence. They invested a tremendous amount of energy in order to be accepted as ‘true locals’, often by becoming involved in the local heritage clubs and mimicking the ideas of slowness and anti-mobility they promoted. This created a paradoxical dynamic: while the presence of a highly mobile and economically well-off group of newcomers with similar ideological aspirations contributed to the revitalisation of local initiatives aimed at the protection of Heimat, locals simultaneously voiced anxieties over this Heimat being subverted by foreigners whose lack of proper connection risked upsetting historically engrained rights to place ownership.

These difficult negotiations about localness and belonging between newer and longer-term residents show that the anti-mobile placemaking on which I have zoomed in is not an isolated practice. Projects such as the totally local dumpling are not the remnants of a parochial past promoted by villagers who are out of touch with the reality of a hypermobile, globalized world. These anti-mobile imaginaries link into widely spread social practices of placemaking, which do not imagine belonging as a moveable, open process, but actively work towards a model of belonging that is fixed in time and place.

Conclusion

This article has shed light on the deeply antagonistic engagements with mobility, cosmopolitanism and belonging characterising everyday life in a small Alpine municipality. By zooming in and out of the activities of the local slow food community I have made visible the social, historical and political horizons against which such placemaking practices take shape. These forms of placemaking do not just question the hegemony of mobile, cosmopolitan concepts of belonging, but destabilize dominant modern narratives about place, mobility and identity.

As an anthropologist whose intellectual upbringing has been characterized by theoretical approaches that highlight the pluralistic and processual nature of social life, I was often taken aback by the decisiveness with which my research participants rejected these ideas. I struggled with the question of how and whether to include their everyday theories in my theorization. Yet even though they are detrimental to enlightened, modern models of knowledge production, I believe that such common sense ways of relating to questions of mobility, place and belonging cannot and should no longer be ignored by social scientists. They lay bare the dangerous political consequences of the neglect of place in modern thinking, showing what happens if this field is left to reactionary forces.

The anti-mobile and anti-cosmopolitan views encapsulated in projects such as the totally local dumpling and the renewed Heimat movement do not appear in the form of clearly formulated political programs or ideological statements, but in the articulation of a commonly shared sense that with the spread of mobile ideas and practices people’s cultural roots are in question. As politically contentious as these engagements with place might be, scholars need to take them seriously, as they form crucial ingredients to people’s everyday ways of explaining and critiquing the world.

Like many environmental grassroots movements across the world, the participants of the projects that I focused on seek ways to undermine destructive forms of global capitalism. However, their activities are not based on progressive ideas about mobile, travelling and borderless forms of belonging. To the contrary, many of the people I worked with see progressive parties as representative of the very liberal paradigm they seek to undo. Whilst aiming for more sustainable and slower paced lifestyles, their relationship to slowness is linked to very specific ideas about who does or does not have the right to call this place a home.

Rather than writing such ideas off as backward, traditionalist ways of relating to the world, I believe that researchers need to take seriously the pervading sense of alienation such anti-cosmopolitan and anti-mobile placemaking practices reveal. It should make us inquire into the anxieties about horizonless and homeless ways of being-in-the-world. Importantly, it should provoke a renewed critical look at the political entanglements of mobility, place and belonging and raise questions about scholarly fears to properly engage with the existential importance of confines, horizons and limitations in a mobile world order.

Ethics statement

The research this article is based on was funded through the independent research group scheme by the Max Planck Society in Germany. Whilst undertaking research for this article, the author was employed as head of the research group “Alpine Histories of Global Change” at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. Neither she nor the Max Planck Society has any financial interests they need to declare. The research was conducted in compliance with the ethical standards stipulated in the guidelines for ethical research practice by the German Anthropological Society from 2019. Participation in the research project was based on informed consent. To protect the research participant’s privacy, all people and place names appearing in the article have been anonymised. Due to the sensitive nature of the data this article is based on and the protection of privacy the researcher agreed on with her research participants, the author cannot make original materials available to third parties through public repositories.

Notes

1 To protect the privacy of my research participants, the names of the individuals in this article are pseudonyms.

2 https://www.slowfood.com/what-we-do/themes/slow-food-villages/ (access date June 28, 2022)

3 “Kärnten hat weiterhin die höchste Pro-Kopf-Verschuldung,” Kleine Zeitung, July 6, 2022. https://www.kleinezeitung.at/kaernten/6162160/Im-Bundeslaendervergleich_Kaernten-hat-weiterhin-die-hoechste (access date July 19, 2022)

4 “Oberkärnten schrumpft stetig,” Mein Bezirk, March 12, 2019: https://www.meinbezirk.at/spittal/c-lokales/oberkaernten-schrumpft-stetig_a3245439 (access date: July 20, 2022)

“Bezirk Spittal hatte 2021 die höchste Arbeitslosenquote,” Mein Bezirk, February 1, 2022: https://www.meinbezirk.at/spittal/c-wirtschaft/bezirk-spittal-hatte-2021-die-hoechste-arbeitslosenquote_a5127877 (access date: July 20, 2022)

5 “Regional-Boxen von Billa sorgen in Kärnten für Sturm der Entrüstung,” Kleine Zeitung, April 16, 2021. https://www.kleinezeitung.at/wirtschaft/5966273/Direktvermarkter-besorgt_RegionalBoxen-von-Billa-sorgen-in (access date: January 25, 2022).