“…Palimpsest of collective identities in the lower Valais It was while I was undertaking a study on another issue, which I have conducted for several years in the Val d'Anniviers (Amrein, 2013), a valley in the canton of the Valais whose characteristics are similar to those of the valleys in which this present study was conducted, that I came to observe that even if the influence of migrants on the local societies was obviously significant, it was not given much study, nor has it received much attention in discourses, be they scientific, secular, or covered by the media. It seemed, in fact, that the ever-increasing number of "strangers" that have arrived in the valley over three or four decades -whether they were "non-locals" in the sense commonly used in the Valais, that is to say anyone not originally from there, or migrants from a country other than Switzerland -had played an important part both in the economic sphere and in everything concerning the evolution of the representations.…”