Cet article analyse les modes de vie mobiles d’individus privilégiés ayant adopté un mode de vie multirésidentiel dans une station renommée des Alpes suisses : Verbier. D’un côté, les nouvelles formes de mobilité dans le travail, l’habitat et les loisirs brouillent les frontières classiques entre vie privée et vie professionnelle, ici et ailleurs, hôte et visiteur. De l’autre, elles s’érigent en signe de prestige, reproduisant des distinctions de classe entre pratiques et représentations de l’espace montagnard. Les modes de vie mobiles observés — principalement la multirésidentialité — renvoient au capital social, symbolique, culturel et économique d’une classe moyenne supérieure dite créative. Ils se traduisent par la flexibilité de séquences du quotidien autrefois bien distinctes (activité/repos) et l’amalgame des qualités y étant relatives (sérieux/décontracté). À la fois inégalement accessible aux différents acteurs sociaux et réponse à une tendance normalisatrice plus générale, la mobilité multirésidentielle permet, en tant que notion anthropologiquement bonne à penser, d’étudier le processus d’embourgeoisement en cours dans la zone alpine.
In this contribution, we wish to shed light on narratives and imaginaries of new inhabitants in two Swiss mountain regions, concerning place and belonging, and how these are shaped by concerns of (im)mobilities, circulation and rootedness. Taking into consideration the diverse profiles of people living in the mountains, our aim is to analyse the processes of attachment to place, as enacted both by inhabitants who have migrated for labour reasons and by lifestyle migrants. How do different types of mobilities, and ways of belonging by new inhabitants of urbanised mountain resorts influence their strategies of making sense of place and (local) community? What expectations do both the newcomers and the residents established for several generations carry about each other and the place? How do social processes not only affect people “on the move”, but also the localities that are travelled, visited, inhabited, and invested by these people? We will see that the economic, financial and social backgrounds of the mountain inhabitants have a strong impact on their regimes of mobility, but also that place-attachment, rootedness and commitment to the local community have an influence, and that these vary in the intersection of gender, origin, and social class dimensions.
In this article, the city and the urban space shall be understood as a political platform, where identities and powers are bargained, and as a screen on which they are projected. In this context, I will reflect on the strategies of identity management ‘from below’ employed by Tatar young people in Kazan and on their attempt to build a ‘Tatar urban youth culture’. These identity strategies are mainly oriented against the ‘Russian other’, a decadent consumerist West and an ignorant rural Tatar culture and their main issue is the ‘repossessing’ of Kazan and the Tatarisation of the city. Such strategies namely include the use of the Tatar language in predominantly Russophone public spheres, the introduction of Tatar folkloristic elements in music and fashion as well as the appeal to a (lost) Tatar urban culture associated with an enlightened approach to Islam and to the pre-revolutionary Tatar intelligentsia. Tatar youth scenes thus use ethnicity as a resource in the linguistic, religious, historic and cultural (re)appropriation of the urban space, which in turn has to be understood as a symbolic political act in a specific historical as well as ‘glocal’ context. Thus, this article can be seen as a contribution to a critical approach towards cosmopolitanism introducing alternative concepts to reflect relationships, norms and values in urban life.
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