‘In and out of time’: Towards an anthropology of the mundane experiences of modern and capitalist time

ABSTRACT

The Swiss Alps have been a tourist destination for the past two centuries, promising guests extraordinary holiday experiences and providing local populations with a means of subsistence. Based on field research in a Swiss German-speaking touristic village, this article discusses the mundane experiences of capitalist time in a wealthy yet uncertain context. By analyzing the temporal debates permeating the valley, I argue that modern, capitalist time has a slippery or disorientating quality for those who experience it, especially in Alpine regions, which are either dominated by tourism or prone to outmigration. In a second turn, I bring the question of inequality back into the temporal equation of capitalist time by dwelling on the experience of migrant hospitality workers who are made ‘temporal others’. I conclude on the unevenly distributed capacity to temporally reason between insiders and outsiders as well as the unequally disorientating quality of life under capitalist globalization.

KEYWORDS:

• Swiss Alps
• tourism
• modernity
• capitalist time
• inequality

Introduction

On the road to the Alpine village of Grindelwald, at the foot of the Eiger mountain (3969 m), billboards advertise a ‘time off’ (Auszeit). For centuries and thanks to the sublime beauty of the Swiss Alps, tourism has promised travellers coming to this region from all over the world experiences removed from the ordinary.

For the inhabitants of this valley,¹ tourism has long shaped the everyday. Following the Romantics’ reappraisal of the Alps at the end of the eighteenth century, the ‘business of foreigners’ (Fremdenverkehr, a synonym for tourism in German) became the village’s main industry, providing locals with new means of subsistence. Two hundred years later, German, British and, more recently, Indian or Chinese guests crowd the trains, lifts and streets of this municipality of 4000 inhabitants. ‘Without tourism, we would be nothing’, villagers would say regularly, referring to the long history of touristification and the ongoing significance of tourism for virtually every dweller in this region.

When I arrived in the valley to conduct fieldwork in 2017, business seemed to be thriving. Next to the visibly overcrowded popular spots, the resort drew on growing numbers of visitors and bed occupancy rate. In the last few years, Grindelwald had even broken its annual visitor record multiple times (1,200,000 overnight stays in 2017) and the formerly calmer months of April, May or October were now busy, too. Local and national media outlets reported how the village was doing better than most other comparable resorts in the Swiss Alps and had a bright future ahead.

Expecting to find confidence in the resort’s success among those who depended on tourism to make a living, I was surprised by the locals’ concerned takes on the state of Grindelwald. Inhabitants often longed for the valley’s better past and expressed dread about the future as they pointed to the historical hotel ruins in the middle of the village. Built at the beginning of the twentieth century, these buildings were once renowned palaces. They now stood for their owners’ bad ‘business sense’ and the challenges posed by tourism as an industry. Adri,² a local whose job it was to maintain one of the prestigious but empty hotels in a condition that would allow for new investment, told me ‘In tourism, you need to innovate constantly, otherwise you’re out!’ The rubble that surrounded us in the hotel ruin tragically embodied the consequences of his former boss’ lack of entrepreneurial spirit and investments in a global context of constant acceleration.

For Adri and many of his peers in the village, the hotels were symbols of the exhausting, incessant race for innovation, to be in sync with the accelerating international tourism market, in which rival destinations compete with lower prices and better offers. Until recently, guests stayed for weeks, sometimes months, in historical hotels and they came back season after season. Nowadays, day-trippers made up the majority of the resort’s guests. Locals wondered where the endless growth would lead a village that had already lost its mountain ‘spirit’ (Dorfgeist). Some even sensed that development could not go on exponentially forever and predicted that a crisis was going to hit the valley. Three years later, their fears would be confirmed with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Well before and after March 2020 and the Coronavirus crisis’ unprecedented impact on the industry of tourism globally,³ my field research in the village of Grindelwald, consisting of various stays between September 2017 and April 2023, was suffused with uncertainty in spite of the resort’s flourishing appearance. In this article, I propose to look at the experience of living off tourism in a wealthy region that seemingly thrives off capitalist globalization. Based on the temporal debates that took place in the valley between the glorification of the past and speculation on the future, I argue for an anthropology of time attuned to the mundane, yet unequal, experiences of (spatio-)temporal disorientation that are part of modernity and capitalism.

To do so, in a first step, I review the contributions of a scholarship on the anthropology of time and its recent focus on technocrats and precarious or marginalized populations, which I claim has tended to oversee everyday experiences of hypercapitalist, wealthy and Western contexts like Switzerland. I then go back to analyze the temporal debates on the future and the history of tourism in the region of Grindelwald and the responses they elicited from villagers. Finally, I argue that to account for the complexity of modern capitalist time, one needs to bring the question of inequality back into the (temporal) equation. Taking the example of those who were excluded from vernacular and national collective acts of temporal reasoning – migrant workers – I show how experiences of capitalist time differ.

Anthropologies of time

Anthropology recently entered a ‘temporal turn’. Time had long been a focus of anthropological knowledge production but it is only with the works of Alfred Gell (1992) and Nancy Munn (1992) that it was explicitly addressed as an object of study. The current temporal turn is, however, the result of a fairly recent rapprochement between works affiliated to historical anthropology and ethnographies of capitalism at the turn of the twenty-first century (Bear 2015, 488). While the first unveiled the role of history in the construction of modernity as a temporal ideology (Fabian 1983; Wolf 1982), the latter focused on techniques of representation and management of time in different capitalist settings, such as banks, investment firms, often with an interest in speculation (e.g. Guyer 2007; Ho 2009). Anthropologists of time have importantly revealed the multiple and often conflicting rhythms between ‘abstract production time and […] social reproduction’ (Bear 2015, 488), in heterogeneous networks of actors, institutions and markets.

Yet, a tendency has emerged from this anthropological literature on time: it has focused either on particular financial actors and technocrats directly involved with the making and remaking of capitalist structures or the broader experience of social time in places where the linearity of time has been challenged or interrupted by crisis. On the one hand, we find studies on experts working in the fields of stock exchange, speculation or planning (Abram 2014; Guyer 2007; Zaloom 2009). On the other, a growing number of anthropologists have written on experiences of austerity or displacement in post-crisis, post-Soviet, post-colonial contexts (Bryant 2016; Jansen 2015). The latter convincingly describe how crises represent moments ‘of radical uncertainty’ (Narotzky and Besnier 2014, 5) that reveal the fragility of modern and capitalist time.

Like most comparable Western nation-states, Switzerland, a small country in the middle of Europe with one of the highest GDPs per capita globally,⁴ has been largely overlooked by literature on time and temporality (for notable exceptions, see Abram 2014; Hage 2003; Knight 2017a; Manley 2022). The country industrialized rapidly although unevenly during the nineteenth century, developing from a peasant-based to a second sector-dominated economy, from a country of outmigration into one of immigration (Zimmer 1998). In spite of its social conservatism, Switzerland has since been described as an example of political and economic stability and progress (Jung 2022) thanks to its political tradition of neutrality⁵ and the expansion of its international banking sector (Leins 2018), which have led some to label it the ‘most globalized country in the world’.⁶

The Swiss Alps industrialized too, yet at a different pace. Many valleys located outside of the centres became increasingly marginal while others quickly and intensively developed, thanks to tourism in particular (Bätzing 2015). From the end of the nineteenth century, railways connected valleys, commodified as pure and untouched, to European cities (Tissot 2006). Grindelwald, like many villages in the region, symbolizes a process of long and intense touristification from a peasant economy to a touristic one. In scholarly and popular discourses, the development of Switzerland and the touristic Alps’ thus often epitomizes an unilinear ‘teleology of modernity’ (Ferguson 1999), where a poverty-stricken past has smoothly and rapidly progressed into a present (and future) of wealth and stability.

One might assume that looking at the everyday experiences of people inhabiting a comparatively stable place like Switzerland would tell us little about the temporal heterogeneity, the ‘doubts’ or ‘conflicts’ (Bear 2014a) that mark the messy reality of life in the context of capitalist modernity, beyond the metanarrative of progress. In this article, I show precisely the opposite – namely that the lives of those in a seemingly successful Alpine tourist resort were shaped by temporal preoccupations and disorientations close to those which many have described in contexts of austerity. I argue that studying the privileged context of Switzerland and the Alps enables us to understand the complexity of modernity as a temporal narrative, as well as the pervasive sense of uncertainty and instability that capitalism brings about, even for those who seem to profit from it. To do so, I deploy an analytical approach to time and temporality that combines both a presentist, anti-deterministic lens as well as an existentially-informed perspective. In the next section, I discuss the analytical purchase of such an approach in connection with two events that made Grindelwald the site of important temporal concerns that problematized the village’s future and past as well as the role of tourism.

A contested future

One of the most emblematic debates of Grindelwald’s recent history took place on a summer evening in 2011 at the municipal hall. On that day, Mr Frei, the newly appointed CEO of the company Jungfrau Railway (JR), the main regional employer, introduced his company’s new project to the valley’s inhabitants.⁷ Based on a study conducted by a ski planning company that pointed to the inefficient ‘fill time’ (Füllzeit) of the resort – the time it takes to fill the resort with guests – and the limited transport capacity of the current infrastructure, Frei proposed to build a new cable car linking the valley floor to the higher slopes. This would allow the resort to save existing infrastructure such as ski lifts and ‘secure the valley’s future’ by bringing more tourists to the slopes and tops of the mountains in only a few hours, thereby keeping pace with the market.

The current situation was especially preoccupying because ski tourism had not been a growth market globally for years. The branch of Mr Frei’s company suffered various problems due to high maintenance costs (induced by global warming for example) and because fewer people were taking up the expensive activity of skiing. In this shrinking market, Grindelwald was one of the few contenders and speed was the only way to be in time. ‘Something needs to be offered to guests […] and time is running out’, Frei warned, hinting at the tourism market’s pressing requirements of speed and the local, already-existing infrastructure’s impeding obsolescence. Everyone, the CEO claimed, was to benefit from this project and not least the valley dwellers, who had been deeply involved with JR as one of the oldest and biggest touristic players and employers in the region. Ultimately, the project would enable the region to create ‘new job opportunities and synergies’ and to ‘enter the upper league’. These promises were projected to materialize in the year 2016 at a cost of 80 million Swiss francs.

Through connection and acceleration, Frei, in the name of JR, presented a vision in which success could be achieved by behaving in accordance with the market’s requirements and a capitalist abstract reckoning of time (Bear 2014b, 85) like that exposed in the above-mentioned study. His discourse was grounded in objectivized data designed to reveal how a better future could be planned. Such visions of a future which can be perfected through acceleration pervade the modern temporal discourse, where tomorrow appears as both open and as the bearer of infinite positive possibilities (Koselleck 2004; Virilio 2012). As such, Mr Frei’s discourse reveals much of the modern ‘addictions’ to futural dimensions or ‘futurisms’ in Pels’ words (2015).

Because such futurisms dominate contemporary temporal discourses, several authors have noted that anthropological scholarship often uses modernity both as an object of study and as a tool of analysis (Bear 2014a; Dawdy 2010; Pels 2015). Counterbalancing such modern reflexes, the presentist approach to time accounts for the fundamental inaccessibility of the future from the present – and, in a different way, for the inaccessibility of the past. The ‘past and future do not exist other than in their representations in the present’ (Ringel 2016, 403) since the past is always already ‘gone’ and the future ‘not yet’ there. One of the main benefits of this presentist temporal approach resides in its deeply constructivist focus: it shows how social actors ‘make’ time and how they evoke representations and knowledges of time in accordance with particular beliefs or agenda, beyond the simplified narratives of modernity.

In presentist terms, Mr Frei’s vision is thus a representation of the future, mobilizing specific knowledge about something – the future – inherently unknowable. But his summoning of the future was not just modern in shape, it was also vested with particular, capitalist, interest aiming at stabilizing his company’s position in the competitive global market of tourism to accumulate capital. Evoking the modern idea(l)s of speed and acceleration (Virilio 2012), he engaged in speculative practices that evoked the future with the aim of generating profits (Bear 2020, 2).

Yet, the promise of acceleration around the cable car did not just operate on an abstract, technical level. The cable car unleashed all types of reactions within and beyond the valley’s confines. Tourism lobbyists and politicians praised the idea and the pioneering spirits of the CEO and JR. As one of the many employees of the JR company explained to me, its innovative idea recalled and surpassed that of the first inventors who helped to connect the Alps to the rest of the Western world via rail at the end of the nineteenth century. Like him, many locals contended that building a new cable car was indeed the only way to be ‘in time’ in a market that they also experienced to be accelerating. After returning from an Austrian ski resort, a villager explained, ‘You feel like crying when you are there; it is all so fast, smooth and easy and much cheaper […] We are outdated (veraltet)!’ In 2014, when the project was presented at the municipal ballot box, a majority of the valley’s voters (71 per cent) supported JR’s plans.

However, before and after its acceptance, the new cable car project was vehemently opposed by some powerful local institutions, such as the so-called farmers’ corporation (Bergschaft) that had been regulating the use of and access to Alpine pastures since the fifteenth century. The farmers claimed that JR’s plans were endangering their work, which relied on the use of a historical train that they feared would be replaced in the company’s race into the future. Furthermore, the international company had grown exponentially in recent decades thanks to the increase in Asian mass tourism. This accelerated tourism was opposed to the values the farmers defended and from which they earned the most, embodied by hikers or skiers, who were seen as respectful of nature and interested in local heritage. For the farmers and many other villagers, the cable car represented a new, external threat which they saw as the symptom of a globalized⁸ force of destruction that contrasted with the local, steady history of touristification. They felt involved in an endless race for ‘money’, and ‘always more’ against their will, moved by the greediness of others, such as the Touristikers.

My fieldwork was profoundly marked by such debates. When I visited locals, who all identified as either opponents and supporters of the project, we often drew the imaginary lines of the cable car route onto the landscape from different sides of the valley, trying to gauge what the future would look and feel like. ‘You have to imagine, you’re sitting here and it’s going past every ten seconds, with noise and a shadow’, said an opponent whose house was located under the planned route.

The presentist lens outlined above proves useful from an analytical and epistemological point of view, in particular to counter modernist ways of evoking the future (Pels 2015). But the reactions that unfolded around the new cable car project reveal the messiness of the lived reality of time: the past often served to legitimize the future and the future, although ‘not yet’ there, shaped the present. If the presentist approach allows us to grasp human actions in the indetermined present, my material suggests that it needs to be complemented with a more existentially informed perspective on time (see Ringel 2016, for a similar point).

Existential accounts of the human consciousness of time question the break between the present and the past but also the future, dictated by Western historiography and conception of linear progress. Although discussions concerned a future yet to unfold, my informants and myself were engaged in an incessant back and forth between future(s), present and past(s) (Manley 2022). Their temporal thought ‘stimulated’ (Knight and Stewart 2016, 2) by the cable car, they engaged in practices that anthropologists of history have described as ‘historicity’ (Hirsch and Stewart 2005; Knight and Stewart 2016; Stewart 2016), which I understand as a synonym for ‘temporal reasoning’ (Jansen 2015; Kleist and Jansen 2016). Historicity or temporal reasoning derive from a phenomenological tradition of thought to address the ways in which the past and the future make themselves present in the lives of individuals in complex, non-linear and highly affective ways.

The non-linear, flowing quality of time is thus a human-shaped experience. Yet, Hirsch and Stewart insist that the ‘social and personal relationship’ tied between past, present and future need to be understood in context as they are shaped by ‘social ideologies’ with which people ‘make sense of the past, while anticipating the future’ in relation to ‘events, political needs, available cultural forms and emotional dispositions’ (Hirsch and Stewart 2005, 262). In 2016, a video uploaded on JR’s YouTube channel poignantly revealed the political and ‘social ideology’ at play in the valley. Since the official vote, more than a dozen legal appeals issued by locals as well as private and public institutions had stood in the way of the realization of what many called the ‘project of the century’. The video, entitled ‘Jungfrau Region 2026’, responded to this situation by revealing what the valley of Grindelwald (which lies in the Jungfrau region) would look like in the absence of the cable car.⁹

The video is set in 2026. It shows a fictionalized opponent expressing regrets to his grandson over his ‘stupid’ and ‘selfish’ decision to oppose the new cable car. The grandson, who has no knowledge of what tourism is, asks, ‘What is this weird bench?’, pointing at the dismantled chair lift seat they are sitting on. Talking over images of crowds, the grandfather explains how in his time tourism used to shape the valley’s economy: ‘Tourists came to us from all over the world, […] everyone had a job, we were doing good […] no wonder with these beautiful mountains!’ His tone changes as he asks, ‘We thought we had everything, we became lazy and dismissed every new idea, why change something like that?’ Images of an empty, shut-down tourism office and ski lift installations falling into ruin fill the screen. ‘We thought it was enough to continue as we had always done. Things went bad’. As the old man speaks, a map of the local resort fades away to leave a blank, empty space. Only the name of the region’s villages and a few roads remain on an almost untouched mountainous landscape. Grandfather and grandson contemplate the valley, where the entire public and private transport network has been dismantled. Grindelwald is now isolated, caught in time as a consequence of his and other opponents’ actions, the grandfather admits. He, like others, was ‘afraid of the new’ and his actions led to ‘everything going up the creak’ (alles ist bachabgange). ‘I could keep the chair lift seat and now it reminds me of how stupid I was’. Stroking the boy’s head, and contemplating what we now know is a valley in ruins, the grandfather concludes, ‘If only I had not hindered the new cable car ten years ago’.

The video draws clear boundaries between what is forward-thinking, progressive and good and what stands in the way of history, is backward, selfish and bad. It is typical of a modern temporal discourse that ‘valorises newness, rupture, and linear plot lines’ (Dawdy 2010, 762). Locals often mobilized such polarizing categories, reproaching one another for narrow-mindedness, which, as they often told me, was so typical of Alpine ‘backwardness’. Mountain dwellers, whose horizons were literally ‘blocked’ by the mountains, were described as incapable of grasping the future or of being ‘in time’ with the contemporary world.¹⁰ Younger villagers in particular often complained that they had to work against such ‘natural’ reflexes within their community, especially when speaking of the older, male farmers.

But what made this vision of the future so powerful was its closeness to what villagers had been taught about a past without tourism, when there was ‘nothing’, when huge numbers of farmers emigrated from Alpine villages to the Americas to make a living between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Holenstein, Kury, and Schulz 2018). Locals also saw such an apocalyptic vision as far from unrealistic: the abandoned hotels in the centre of the resort were powerful reminders of tourism’s harsh and uncertain reality. Living off tourism did not allow one to ‘rest on one’s laurels’, as a local woman told me. The risk here was to lose ‘everything’, to become ‘nothing’ again.

After years of delay, the last opponents succumbed to the strong pressure precisely thanks to communication strategies like the video. The construction and inauguration of the cable car finally started at the end of my fieldwork in 2018 and was inaugurated in 2020, at a final cost of almost 500 million Swiss francs.

From the context of the Swiss Alps, the example of the cable car reveals the contradictions of modernity itself, as a temporal ideology which reasserts breaks, newness and linearity and which aims for the better, progressive future as a continuation and renewal. It thereby claims the need for a future which is different from both past and present, but still takes these as reference points – a temporal basis to be built upon and developed but not lost. Losing past achievements, the video shows, means a return to dark times. The cable car controversy also shows the convoluted nature of human temporal awareness, even in contexts dominated by modern discourses. Moreover, JR’s endeavours to pursue modern ideals of unilinear progress and speed demonstrate that capitalist actors also use the uncertain, multi-layered experience of human time in order to convince people, in this case valley dwellers, to foster capitalist growth. Instead of simply ‘evacuating’ the past (Abram 2014), this Alpine case shows how the past and its evocations were used to make the modern, capitalist future.

Nostalgic scenes

Although the collective act of temporal reasoning around the new cable car project reveals one powerful winner – the JR company – other forms of temporal reasoning shape the landscape of capitalist modernity. In recent years, various social movements have revealed the devastating nature of endless capitalist expansion (Demaria et al. 2013). In the conservative German-speaking Alps, politically led by the right and far-right, such movements have remained marginal but the new cable car was heavily criticized by the local population who saw it as the manifestation of an accelerating race into the future. In this section, I will examine such critiques, which I describe as stemming from a preservationist position that is both critical of as well as coexisting with modern and capitalist imperatives of progress and growth.

Even locals in favour of the project admitted disliking the global tourism market’s most recent trends, and longed for times when guests from other regions of Switzerland or Europe used to stay for weeks or months in hotels that had now gone bankrupt. So much so that during the construction of the new cable car in summer 2019, a group of (mostly) local hoteliers¹¹ – all in favour of the new cable car – staged a theatre play on the history of tourism in the valley named ‘Alpine Glow’ (Alpenglühen).

The open-air play, ‘on the valley, for the valley and with the valley’, involved locals who volunteered to play their ancestors and the village’s historical guests during one summer. As the organizing committee explained, by evoking the touristic history of the place, the play aimed to ‘give back’ to villagers and ‘bring back Swiss and European guests’ in a context dominated by the fast-paced Asian mass tourists. The play targeted a wide audience of regular or returning guests who had ‘made’ the history of the village as opposed to what the director of the play described as new, faceless and ‘excessive masses’ (masslose Massen), who just passed through the village and did not benefit the local economy.

The opening scene of the play takes place sometime in the mid-nineteenth century on the arrival day of the valley’s first guests – a family of British aristocrats – later joined by the composer Felix Mendelssohn. The encounter between rich visitors and poor, local farmers is portrayed humorously as misunderstandings between both parties reveal radically different visions. Mendelssohn and the British aristocrats see Grindelwald as a place of purity, of sublime experiences and a source of inspiration, while local farmers in traditional clothes describe an everyday characterized by meagre resources. ‘We belong to the mountains and they belong to us’, explains a farmer-woman in local dialect.

The following scenes portray a valley shaped by the advent of mountaineering (between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1930s) and skiing (in the 1970s) before a final scene looking towards a grim future set in 2030. In the village, hit by global warming, the closing scene shows a trio of ruthless tourism lobbyists (Touristikers) who claim: ‘We want expansion, explosion […] and we need to react, reorganize, re-optimize … and make profit!’ Grindelwald’s mayor of the future urges lobbyists to stop because global warming forces even the local mountain spirit, Challigroosi, to outmigrate. Other ghostly historical figures come to express their distress and implore the Touristikers to respect the original roots of what was once called the ‘glacier village’, inhabited by farmers. Local youngsters, no longer playing roles, then enter the stage and give their opinions: ‘Have you heard this? We don’t want that! We want to inherit something, something meaningful!’

All the play’s scenes, except the last, were historically accurate, as the director explicitly wished. The very positive reception of the play among guests and locals was due to the familiarity of these events in the valley as well as the evocative power of the show, reinforced by the actual presence of the mountain as a natural backdrop. Locals explained that although they knew about these historical milestones thanks to local history books, they were deeply touched by the play as it creatively displayed their valley, their history and heritage, threatened by ‘too much’. The music, witty dialogue and stage direction were particularly praised.

While inaccessible from an epistemological point of view, the valley’s touristic past and the threatening future in the play shaped the experiences of the locals, who no longer felt the gap separating the present from the past or future. They felt pride in seeing their traditions displayed and hearing their local dialect recited on stage, had shivers because of the beauty of the songs, or held back tears when confronted with the vision of the valley’s children, as they told me after the show. The temporal folding of past, present and future provoked powerful affective responses that were hard to describe for locals. Yet, the play’s temporal reasoning did not operate in a vacuum but relied on particular ‘templates’ (Kleist and Jansen 2016, 381).

The play was described as innovative for its treatment of the future and of climate change, but the temporal narrative it proposed was in fact well established. It stemmed from a preservationist attitude that can be traced back to the Swiss origins of nostalgia, also called the ‘Swiss disease’ (Schweizerkranhkeit). Whereas the modern teleology associates newness with progress, nostalgia results from a resolutely anti-modern temporal reasoning: it associates the nature of the modern, linear passage of time with the ‘irreversible’ loss of what once was (Berliner 2012). With an opening scene that displayed a pure, Alpine life leading to a final scene of destruction, the play stressed time’s irreversible nature and the affective experience linked to heritage loss.

From its origins, the phenomenon of nostalgia was rooted in the Swiss Alps. In the seventeenth century, Swiss mercenaries – often poor, Alpine dwellers in service of foreign powers – suffered from a mysterious illness upon hearing a song reminding them of their lives in the mountains (Lems 2016). A century later, the Alsacian doctor Johannes Hofer called this disease ‘nostalgia’, before the Romantics celebrated nostalgia as a metaphorical and sane response to a world in perdition during the industrialization (Starobinski 1966). For the latter, the Alps and their ‘delay’ (Niederer, Bätzing, and Anderegg 1993) in development in comparison with the urbanized lowlands were symbols of a pure life preserved from the evils of modernization. They were visited precisely for their capacity to reunite travellers with what was being lost. Such imaginaries, which still shape the temporal narratives of escapism and authenticity in tourism today (Salazar and Graburn 2014), brought urban artists and elites like Mendelssohn and the British family to Grindelwald.

While the preservationist discourses featuring the Alps often issue from the inhabitants, policy makers and elites of lowlands, the play reveals how Grindelwalders themselves deployed Romantic, nostalgic visions of the world through historical references. Like in many regions dominated by right-wing populism (Mazzarella 2019), this nostalgic reading was often seen as part of a healthy, conservative, rural sensibility. Most locals were critical of modern ideals of progress and cosmopolitanism, drawing lines between a time of harmony (the past of farming) and a present of ‘uprooting’ acceleration and multiculturalism that could not lead ‘anywhere’, as villager Moritz for instance explained.

The play’s preservationist discourse – even if not explicitly termed ‘nostalgic’ – involved such critical aspects towards a present of increasing technology and speed that were epitomized by the new cable car project. Yet, the organizers of the play, made up of hoteliers who worked closely with JR as the biggest tourism player, were reluctant to critique and target the cable car project. The hoteliers disliked the accelerating trends of the tourism market because of the lower prices and the higher turnover in personnel that day-trippers implied, but they further claimed that the new cable car was a necessity in an objectively difficult context for the tourism industry. The play, although anti-modernist, thus did not aim to be ‘moralizing’, the theatre director explained.

How, then, could such modernist and anti-modernist temporal reasonings coexist in Grindelwald? While they show strong friction, visible in the cable car controversy, I would like to point to their greater entanglement in the touristic Swiss Alps, as in many touristic resorts. The history of nostalgia and tourism themselves point to the capacity of the modern temporal discourse to integrate anti-modern narratives. Nostalgic imaginaries of a world in perdition and the commodification of the Alps for yearning guests have fostered the modernization and capitalist development of tourism in the Alps since the nineteenth century.

Further entanglements between modern and capitalist, progress-oriented time and anti-modern forms of nostalgia appear in the video and the play. JR’s vision of the future without the cable car and the theatrical representation of a future of lost heritage present similar, dystopian visions of a human life made meaningless in a context of socio-economic and ecological ruination. Both share similarities in their form and content by using children as messengers and choosing to locate their worrying in the near future of 2026 and 2030. They jointly assert the idea of a linear passage of time and the irreversibility of one’s actions, which results in strong affective responses such as guilt, shame or sadness. But while JR’s video proposes a clear plan aiming at avoiding the devastating consequences portrayed in the video, the dystopian narrative of the play becomes all the more worrying since alternative scenarios are foreclosed. This speaks of the power for modernity and capitalism to colonize even the imagination (Jameson 2003, 76).

While nostalgia – in this case at least – proves incapable of providing alternatives for a problematic future, more can be said from it from a presentist perspective. The nostalgic temporal reasoning of the play revealed a particular way of doing business in the village. Evoking the better past and the doomed future in the present performed a form of moral, economic and social hierarchy of guests in the village: between tourists who stayed longer in the village, who belonged to it, its history and culture and those who were new, disruptive and ‘different’.¹² This hierarchy predated the play but the hoteliers mobilized it creatively, to give ‘back’ to the local community, as well as to make the destination more attractive to historical guests.

Both the cable car project and the nostalgic play thus reveal the dominance of modernity as a progress-oriented discourse put to work in capitalist endeavours to plan the future in order to accumulate capital. At the same time, these temporal events and their associated discourses reveal the messiness behind smooth and unilinear modern teleological narratives, the intertwining of modernity with anti-modern sensibilities as well as the doubts, conflicts and contradictions they provoke for those who live in the Swiss Alps. In the next session, I turn to what I describe as the disorientating nature of these tensions for inhabitants of the Alps and their relationship with capitalism before addressing the issue of inequality.

In and out of time: disorientating experiences of capitalist time

In his work on Greek austerity, anthropologist Daniel Knight wrote about ‘vertigos’ as part of the ‘affective structure of the Time of Crisis’ (Knight 2021, 8; see also 2016, 2017a). Although vertigo entails more than the sole concern of temporality, Knight argues that ‘Time of Crisis fractures timelines of anticipated historical succession’ (2021, 9), and generates feelings of ‘temporal disorientation’ or ‘temporal vertigos’. Temporal vertigos may manifest in feelings of ‘nausea’, ‘dizziness’ or ‘confusion and anxiety about where and when they belong in overarching timelines of pasts and futures’ (Knight 2016, 32; 2021, 5). Under the conditions of crisis austerity with ‘decreased household income, policy attacks on healthcare, energy and property rights’ (2021, 8), temporal vertigos point to the experiences of interruption of normalized linear connection between timeframes. This generates an ‘anguish of dehistoricization or removal from normalized temporal and historical succession’ (10) and makes people draw unexpected connections between events they previously saw as distant (2017b).

Knight compellingly shows how unexpected events such as crises exacerbate the vertiginous quality of life. Yet, scholars have repeatedly highlighted the close entanglement of capitalism and instability or crises might contradict the progressive, modern ideals of linear development but they are integral parts of capitalism. They even participate in its expansion, a feature acknowledged by critical scholarship of capitalism (Harvey 2007) and neoliberal economists (Hayek 1945). Behind such abstract definitions, Harvey and Kohn-Hansen have insisted on the ‘senses of disruption or disorientation, such as the sentiment of feeling out of place, or of losing your bearings or sense of self as things move and change around you’ (2018, 10) marking human life under capitalism.

Vertigos are undoubtedly particularly prominent in the Time of Crisis and the ‘heightened awareness’ (Vigh 2008, 19) such situations create, especially in contexts of austerity, where those who ‘formerly enjoyed a higher standard of consumption must now make do with less’ (Knight and Stewart 2016, 2). Yet, (spatio-)temporal disorientation also appears as a feature of modernity and capitalism’s mundane experiences. As I mentioned, few ethnographic examples deal with the ordinary, lived experiences of disorientating modern capitalism in ‘stable’ contexts like Switzerland. The material presented above reveals the different acts of temporal reasoning in a successful touristic valley but also their uneven, frictional relationships.

Around the new cable car project, innovation and acceleration were presented as the only ways for this Alpine village to be ‘in time’, and to belong to the world and history. ‘Without innovation, we are out’ or ‘we are outdated’ were statements uttered by locals concerned about becoming ‘nothing’ again because of the importance and fragility of the tourism economy. In a place located at the margins of the world – ‘Grindelwald’ means ‘locked forest’ in Old German – holding on to the rest of the world by a (touristic) thread, locals felt on the edge of ‘dehistoricization’, of being ‘removed’ (Knight 2021, 10) from the history of touristification that had led to the present.

The video ‘Jungfrau Region 2026’ revealed the proximity of negative scenarios, as well as the guilt and shame attached to potentially bad decisions taken in the present. Standing in the way of JR’s future-making meant opposing the valley’s history of capitalist exploitation of the beauty of the region. Opponents like the grandfather were betraying the spirit and tradition of innovation that characterized Grindelwald. Their guilt was also intimate, directed towards the transgenerational future symbolized by the grandson in the video, who lost the knowledge of tourism and success. Many locals, who often imagined the disappearance of tourism when talking to me, believed that youngsters would then have to outmigrate to the urban lowlands, like many inhabitants of surrounding Alpine valleys already experienced. Describing themselves as mountain dwellers attached to rural sensibilities, they particularly disliked this prospect. At the same time, the possible future of emigration and displacement echoed locals’ memories of ancestors who had to leave for the Americas. Many villagers thus admitted supporting the infrastructural acceleration ‘for the youth’ or ‘their children’s future’ and not for themselves. ‘I personally don’t need it [the cable car], but that would be selfish’, said one villager, referring to her children, who she predicted would leave the valley if the project did not come about.

But disorientation and anxiety also accompanied the race to be ‘in time’, in the twenty-first century and before. As we have seen, from the beginning of the industrialization of the Western world, Romantics criticized the alienating nature of these processes and longed for bygone days of greater harmony. Centuries later, villagers still yearned for the better past and critically questioned where the ‘endless’ and accelerating touristic development of the region was going to lead them. Was Grindelwald going to resemble the suffocating cities and the multiculturalism that shaped these leftist, red parts of Switzerland? Most locals I met explicitly avoided parts of the village, such as the centre, which had ‘lost’ their authenticity, and were inhabited by migrants or populated with mass tourists. This made them feel sick, worried or induced headaches. Feelings of ‘vertigo’ or ‘homesickness’ (Knight 2021) in this context were associated with anti-modern discourses critiquing the acceleration of life and/or cosmopolitanization of places that were based on (often idealized) farming values of rootedness and organic solidarity.

The theatre play organizers relied on such affective experiences to evoke a glorious history and roots, threatened by the future as dictated by imaginary Touristikers. In the play, youngsters poignantly described their fears for the environmental future of the valley but also the lack of economic means and above all their wish to stay there. Their desire for continuity – ‘we want to inherit something meaningful’, they said in the last scene – was particularly powerful when contrasted with the constant touristic expansion that subjected the valley to landslides and to a loss of identity as village spirits left.

As contradictory as they might first seem, I suggest that these experiences of being ‘in and out of time’ – of belonging to capitalist modernity but losing one’s heritage, of slipping out of modern and capitalist time and going back to ‘nothingness’ – are not mere opposites. Rather, they can be understood as manifestations of the paradoxical nature of time in capitalism, based on ‘mixed utopic and dystopic representations of time’ (Bear 2014b, 78). On the one side, time in capitalism is ‘a disciplinary unit for human labour’ (ibid.) that allows for capitalist production and accumulation, symbolized by Mr Frei’s promising vision to conquer the future. On the other, time passing by is ‘destructive of value’ (ibid.), as featured in the dystopian tales of both JR’s video and the play. Passivity, like resistance to change, in an accelerating market can thus lead one to go back in time, as the video and Mr Frei made clear on multiple occasions.

The dialectics of ‘in and out of time’ shape the paradoxical, yet mundane experience of living under capitalist tourism in a region shaped by no alternative to it. As Franziska, a local woman explained to me, she would have liked to live before tourism, when farming values ‘still’ shaped the valley, when people were less ‘anonymous’ and had ‘time for each other’. In the same breath, she nonetheless argued the absolute ‘need’ to build the new cable car ‘for her sons’, who were employed at JR. Like her, many villagers’ lives were shaped by the paradoxes and ambiguities of needing to be in time but longing for something else.

Such fears of dehistoricization, erasure and displacement, if they are part of the abstract structures of capitalism, are essential features of Alpine touristic capitalism (see Nöbauer 2022). In a rural region either dominated by touristic expansion or abandoned by capital investment and often characterized by the monopoly of one powerful actor (Bätzing 2015, 197–198), I argue that time feels particularly slippery or vertiginous. Moreover, as an industry based on speed and transnational mobility, tourism relies on what my interlocutors described as the ‘unmanageable wanderlust’ of tourists. In local discourses, the movements of tourist crowds, their presence or absence or even success were omnipresent but volatile concepts, exemplified by the hotel ruins that were once the village’s ‘jewels’ and now issues of concern. This shaped a particularly slippery state of dependency on fragile but essential global connections.

For many of the local inhabitants, living in Grindelwald gave rise to a bothering, puzzling and disorientating reality where they felt ‘stuck’ in timeless touristic imaginaries of the Alps while fully involved in the making of the future via tourism. The ambiguous temporal debates taking place in the valley in turn gave a particular, ‘uncanny’ quality to the present (Bryant 2016), in which links to the past and the future were questioned. The heated debates around Grindelwald’s future contrasted with a present of ‘standstill’ created by the legal opposition against the ‘project of the century’, as well as the delay in construction permits and the slowness of administration procedures. The absolute need to accelerate clashed with a feeling of stuckedness in the present that Mr Frei described as already regressing. For many opponents, the deep-seated fears associated with the new project exacerbated the perception of an immobile, uncertain present, clashing with a negative future about to unfold, like calm before the storm. This did not mean that locals had no ‘temporal agency’ (Moroşanu and Ringel 2016) as they celebrated and performed nostalgic narratives to reveal the dangers of overtourism and attract the (Western) guests they wanted.

Unequal yearnings

The discourse of a fractured present and of a valley ‘split’ between two sides following JR’s project was reiterated by my informants, as well as local and national media reports. Yet, during my research, I was also confronted with the lack of awareness or even disinterest of some village inhabitants regarding a project that would ‘benefit everyone’, as Mr Frei emphatically promised.

When I met Ines, a former chambermaid originally from Portugal who had spent more than three decades in Grindelwald, I was expecting to draw the imaginary route of the cable car, like I had with many others. After decades spent in the village as a ‘seasonal worker’ (Saisonnier) under Switzerland’s temporary guest-worker regime, she had recently acquired citizenship and was now proud to call Grindelwald ‘her village too’. But when I addressed the issue of the future, Ines shrugged: ‘JR do what they want anyways’. She had no opinion about the future. Sometimes, talking with hospitality workers from Portugal Italy or Germany, I was put in the position of informing them about the project, its importance or its possible impact on the valley and their jobs.

The historical play likewise aroused no more reactions. Ines, like many workers, had somehow heard about the play but did not attend it. It was too expensive and she had no time as she was working late. When I told her about the absence of migrant workers in the play, in spite of their historical contribution to the local and national tourism economy (Kuhn 2019), Ines said: ‘We are not part of history, we are in the shadows. […] I know that when I leave [for Portugal for retirement], I will not be part of the history’. Although a member of the largest migrant community in the village (more than 370 Portuguese out of the 1129 foreign residents living in the village as of January 2020), Ines did not feel concerned by the history of the place as it was presented, nor was she involved in debates around its future.

The experiences of hospitality workers like Ines fundamentally question the forms of temporal reasoning I analyzed above and who they involved. This reveals the need for an anthropology of modern and capitalist time to be attuned to inequality, as Laura Bear has observed (2015). In a context where differences such as gender, race, age, nationality and ethnicity are the ‘lifeblood of capitalism’ (Kasmir and Carbonella 2008, 7; see also Bear et al. 2015), Bear demonstrates how the contradictions of capitalist time are unequally ‘mediated’ by people via labour (Bear 2014b).

In the globalized yet conservative Alpine and Swiss context, a country shaped by both a long history of migration and one of the most restrictive European migration regimes, one’s provenance and migratory status represents one of the main markers of inequality. In what follows, I build on Bear’s insights to consider the practice of ‘temporal reasoning’ as another, unevenly shaped practice. Temporal reasoning, while a general human trait, also implies highly political practices of in – and exclusion, which in turn shape people’s capacity to project themselves into certain pasts and futures.

Never like them

Migrant workers from Portugal, Italy or Slovakia living in Grindelwald worked as waiting, bar staff, or in hotel housekeeping. As they regularly told me, they had ‘no other choice’ but to work as whatever was ‘given to them’ in order to enter the labour market from below and make a living in wealthy Switzerland. For centuries, hospitality work in the region and in the country had been the domain of the ‘deskilled’ migrants, who had been stripped of the value of previous experience abroad (Barber and Lem 2018). Long and scattered working hours with restricted free time, low wages and few prospects of upward mobility as well as the demeaning nature of ‘servile’ tasks, as Swiss inhabitants said, made for typical, unattractive ‘foreigner’ or ‘guest-worker’ jobs.

If touristification had pulled the village ‘out of poverty’, as the modernist narrative had it, Swiss locals showed a strong reluctance to work in the hospitality sector, which they could relatively easily avoid, thanks to their language skills, education and networks. In spite of the essential and historically contribution migrants had made for Switzerland and the village from its touristification at the end of the nineteenth century, clear boundaries were drawn between the inhabitants of Grindelwald. A ‘foreigner’ (Ausländer) could ‘never’ be truly Swiss: an accent, a culture, a history, a passport or a job would always be in the way of their ‘complete’ integration, Swiss locals said. Ines confirmed: ‘We will never become like them’. The past of those who came from elsewhere was an obstacle to their assimilation in the time and future of the ‘here’.

Such narratives point to the deeply political implications of temporal reasoning as an act of ‘boundary-making’ (Lamont and Molnár 2002), capable of activating and naturalizing boundaries between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. The importance of evoking commonly shared past, present or future events has long been observed by studies of ethnicity and nationalism (Anderson 2006; Brubaker 2004). Anthropological scholarship itself has participated in exclusionary forms of temporal reasoning, as famously criticized by Johannes Fabian. Fabian claimed that anthropologists’ ways of writing about their traditional object of study – the exotic, non-Western, Other – removed these interlocutors from a commonly shared temporality by denying them ‘coevalness’ (Fabian 1983).

In light of these considerations, I wish to highlight that the temporal debates I have described above, which animated and ‘split’ the village, themselves followed and performed particular understandings of the community. Opponents and supporters of the ‘project of the century’ were united by an affective belief that was grounding their belonging in the village and Switzerland: if the ‘wrong’ decisions were taken regarding the touristic development of the region, this could have tragic consequences for their business, their heritage, their children, their world. Out of the almost 4000 people living in the municipality, only approximately 2600 were granted the right to vote and exercise their right to democracy and self-determination (the conditions being: Swiss nationals, 18 years old, main residency in the village for at least three months¹³). Only inhabitants granted citizenship under the principle of blood ties and progeny (the jus sanguinis rule¹⁴) were able to voice their opinions on the future of Grindelwald (and more generally Switzerland), which automatically excluded foreigners who often had spent decades in the village.

The temporal reasoning operating in the open-air play ‘on the valley, for the valley, with the valley’ also revealed a normative understanding of the community of potentially impacted inhabitants. It portrayed the Swiss locals as eternal hosts who genuinely and naturally belonged to and owned the place, as well the guests who enjoyed the beauty of the Alpine heritage. The local hosts and the European guests were presented as a ‘community of loss’ (Berliner 2012), both in the story told by the play and the audience it was targeting. This time, the boundary between in- and outsiders did not rely on a legally grounded form temporal reasoning (like in the voting) but was based on the erasure from and non-recognition of foreign hospitality workers in history. As I noted earlier, there was no mention of the migrants who lived and worked in the resort: as Ines put it, they were ‘erased’ from history. I asked the theatre director, who was concerned with the ‘veracity of history’, why these ‘outsiders’, who had also made Grindelwald, were not included in the play. Surprised and after a long silence, he responded that the play was no ‘social survey’, that after all he ‘only had 100 min’ to tell a compelling story in the show. This artistic choice was in fact the result of a long national history of rendering exploited migrants invisible, of not acknowledging their contributions in a country praised for its wealth and rapid development (Jain 2020).

The temporal events presented in this article, like the temporal reasoning associated with them, reproduced a ‘denial of coevalness’, a ‘temporal othering’ of migrants like Ines, in Fabian’s terms (1983). This temporal boundary was accompanied by a strong segmentation of the labour market, as well as a form of spatial segregation between migrants and Swiss locals, who often lived on the outskirts of the village, in inherited houses, which allowed them to circumvent the bothering crowds. In addition, many Swiss villagers referred to migrant dwellers as ‘guest-like’ inhabitants, who did not share the same history, had no ‘genuine’ or deep interest in the village, its traditions and ‘native’ community. Migrants were expected to leave again, to live a future in their original homelands thanks to money earned in Switzerland, once their professional lives were over.

As Ines’ statements show, this was often a reality, not so much because of what Swiss locals described as migrants’ natural attachment to their home countries but rather as a consequence of a lifetime of precarious jobs in Switzerland. Ines’ legal assimilation in the Swiss society via citizenship had not erased a life made up of years without social benefits under the guest-worker permit and then bad salaries, seasonal contracts, interrupted by months of unemployment in between and a costly divorce that had all made her ‘poor’. So poor that her future retirement would have to be spent in her native Portugal.

Ines’ story points to the entanglements between local and national forms of temporal othering and capitalism. In Switzerland, the allochronism of migrants forms the basis of what Ayse Çağlar has called an ‘integrationist’ framework that entraps migrants in a ‘state of perpetual becoming’ where the ‘ideal future’ of ‘complete’ integration, assimilation or settlement appears as normative horizon for migrants (Çağlar 2018, 27). Migrants’ presence and right to stay, work and live in the ‘host’ society are constantly evaluated in terms of deficits and essentially framed as temporary, revocable and conditioned by their capacity to ‘integrate’ into the eternal space and time of the ‘host’ society. In Switzerland, the temporariness of migrants also results from a particular agenda implemented under the so-called ‘guest-worker’ regime, which formally lasted until 2002, and was aimed at securing national interests while maintaining high levels of productivity (Piguet 2013). In this system, migrants represented a cheap, disposable and flexible workforce that, in the case of a bad conjuncture, could be exported to their countries of origin in order to avoid social security costs and the cultural ‘alienation’ of Switzerland (Niederberger 2004). While this system was abolished, Ines’ story, as well as the temporal reasonings of the play and the on-going Swiss integrationist framework all point to the continuous relevance of the temporal otherness of migrants.

What drives the phenomenon of mobile labour is a particular enterprise of difference-making, shaped by the xenophobic, nativist parameters of the nation in a context globalized, capitalist, open market. Here again, the capitalist utopian and dystopian narratives of time play an important role in reasserting migrants’ spatio-temporal otherness: migrants participate in the linear development of Switzerland through their (cheap) labour but the erosive, fragile nature of the global market regulates their presence. This is supplemented by nationalist concerns of the potential cultural, migrant ‘interference’ with the teleology of the nation.

Behind such broader logics, reproducing and exploiting migrant difference, Ines’ experience speaks to the precarity of hospitality workers and how this in turn shaped her way of temporally reasoning. Like many migrant hospitality workers I met, she described her life as shaped by a rupture between a past in rural Portugal and a present in Switzerland, where she was treated as an other, only worthy to work in the lowest positions the society offered. Working as a chamber maid, her life shrank to a minimum: she had to work fast, for long and scattered hours and bad salaries, taking care of her family while feeling diminished mentally and physically, on the verge of a mental breakdown. She became ‘someone else’. Even after extracting herself from this grinding, entrapping present and acquiring citizenship, Ines was still grappling with the ongoing difficulties of having once migrated. Long after moving, after having settled down, built a family, worked for years, learned the local dialect and passed the citizenship test, Ines explained that her past indeed shaped her future. The movement she undertook between Portugal and Switzerland decades earlier would soon lead her to do the opposite. In this context, both the temporal events that shaped the valley I described in this article were unlikely to affect her life.

Conclusion

In this article, I have addressed how two temporal events – the cable car project and a theatre play – revealed the frictions between competing and coexisting ways of performing temporal reasoning in a capitalist, Swiss touristic valley often described as successful or stable. These temporal discourses are, I argued, indicative of the messiness of life in modernity but are also manifestations of capitalism’s contradictory temporal representations. Based on this, I have called for an anthropology of time attuned to the mundane experiences of capitalist time and its disorientating feelings, especially in the context of the touristic Alps. Building on the experience of a migrant worker, Ines, I have called for more focused attention on the political nature of such acts of temporal reasoning, capable of including and excluding actors. By way of conclusion, I now wish to come back to the unequally disorientating qualities of capitalism.

The forms of temporal reasoning operated by Swiss villagers along the cable car project and the play span over more than two centuries (from the mid-nineteenth century to 2030). Swiss villagers who could avoid the most exploitative aspects of tourism labour thus spent significant energy evoking and reflecting on their deep-seated, long-lasting, transgenerational sense of rootedness in the village. This belonging and feeling of entitlement clashed violently with the possibility of the irremediable and dramatically abnormal loss of such moorings. This oscillation between what should and could be, present in both temporal projects I have discussed here, made for a particularly vertiginous experience of time that was also collectively shared. Migrant workers, to the contrary, were often preoccupied with a grinding, shrinking present and short-term future, made of very concrete ‘foreigner problems’ (Ausländerprobleme) that had to be faced alone, such as how to combine family life with scattered schedules, low income, conflicts between work colleagues, administrative matters or chronic pain.

Attending to people’s temporal reasoning in an uneven world thus illuminates important variations in the forms of disorientation that capitalism brings about. The vertigos experienced by Swiss locals can be compared to those of a group of passengers anticipating their ride on a roller coaster, while the precarity lived by migrant workers is more akin to the experience of a lone tightrope walker moving without safety net.

Acknowledgements

I wish to warmly thank Annika Lems and Sabrina Stallone for their thorough reading and commenting of earlier versions of this article. Thanks to Julene Knox and Anthony Ellis for their careful editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The research this article is based on was supported by the Max Planck Society, via the JR independent research group ‘Alpine Histories of Global Change’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle, Germany), as well as the project ‘Trapped in Paradise: Entangled Mobilities and Imaginaries of Freedom’ at the Institute for Social Anthropology of the University of Bern, funded by the Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung: [Grant Number 169715].

Notes

1 Grindelwald is the name of a village, a valley and a resort.

2 All names have been anonymized in this article, and some identity markers have also been changed to guarantee my interlocutors’ anonymity.

3 https://www.unwto.org/impact-assessment-of-the-covid-19-outbreak-on-international-tourism [Accessed 17 June 2022]

4 https://countryeconomy.com/countries/groups/united-nations [Accessed 17 June 2022].

5 The neutrality of Switzerland has been criticized by historians who revealed the participation of the Swiss state in the colonial enterprise (Purtschert, Lüthi, and Falk 2012) and its role during the Second World War.

6 https://kof.ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/kof-bulletin/kof-bulletin/2020/12/Switzerland-remains-the-most-globalised-country%20in-the-world.html [Accessed 16 June 2022].

7 This section is based on local newspaper articles and reports between 2010 and 2018 and participant observation in various assemblies between 2017 and 2018.

8 This force is eminently capitalist, but in this traditionally economically liberal area, the term ‘capitalism’ itself was not used to utter critique: ‘speed’, ‘technology’, ‘digitalization’ or the image of urbanization were the most negatively tainted terms.

9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBk0-Q4ZU30 [Accessed 23 April 2023]

10 This recalls Fabian’s notion of temporal othering or allochronism (1983), as I will discuss later on.

11 Gathered under the name ‘Jungfrau Theatre’.

12 I have explained elsewhere how economic relations were also tainted with racial and cultural stereotypes regarding the new ‘Asian’ mass tourists (Leitenberg 2021).

13 In some Swiss municipalities, foreigners are allowed to vote on communal matters like the cable car project.

14 This drastically limits possibilities to access national belonging.