Navigating tourism: mobility, uncertainty and inequality in the Swiss Alps

Abstract

In this article, I examine the links between mobility and uncertainty in a village located in the German-speaking Swiss Alps, an attractive destination for international tourists as well as migrant hospitality workers and home to ‘native’ mountain dwellers. Based on the experiences of migrants, who represent the majority of the tourism workforce locally and nationally, I firstly discuss how for them cross-border mobility to wealthy Switzerland was a hopeful fix to address situations of existential immobility encountered in their home countries. After their arrival, however, I show how the highly stratified tourism economy, interlocking with restrictive regimes of mobility, exacerbated their sense of precarity. Following recent calls for a mobility perspective that includes both migrants and non-migrants, I secondly argue that such an experience of migrant uncertainty needs to be understood against a global background of instability, which is particularly visible in the context of international tourism and the environmental and social transformations this industry brings about. To do so, I compare and contrast the modes of navigation – such as externalizing or embodying – adopted by various locals (migrants or not) when faced with the upsetting paradoxes of tourism and the uneven consequences of such strategies for their lives.

Keywords: Uncertainty, mobility, tourism, inequality, Swiss Alps