Nothing Without Tourism

For centuries, locals in many Swiss Alpine villages have depended on visitors' wanderlust to sustain their livelihoods. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a German-speaking village and tourist resort between 2017 and 2023, this book explores people's everyday experience of tourism as a volatile yet vital industry, where successes and failures in the past, present and future intersect in puzzling ways. Following 'native' locals, migrant hospitality workers from (mostly) Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as tourism lobbyists in this globalized mountain village, it examines how power imbalance among those dependent on tourism elicit different responses to the dilemmas of tourism.

Danaé Leitenberg is a social anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Basel. Prior to this, she was Research Fellow in the research group 'Alpine Histories of Global Change' at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle and Lecturer at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg.