ProMeRe an der Int. Tagung „Tourism and Seductions of Difference”

An der internationalen Tagung „Tourism and Seductions of Difference” vom 9.-12. September 2010 in Lissabon wird Silvi Scheuerer zum Thema “Ordering Place or the seductive View from the Hotel Bellevue“ referieren. Organisiert wird die Tagung von Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change (CTCC), the Network Centre for Anthropological Research (CRIA) and the Tourism-Contact-Culture Research Network (TOCOC).

Abstract:
Lying on the north-south route through Switzerland many people passed through Andermatt around the 1850s. However, a new kind of traveller soon joined business transients and migrant workers: a bourgeois solvent upper class started to travel to the mountains bringing new demands to the hospitality industry. Based on a perception of the Alps through literature and art tourists claimed for hosting places that would allow for gazing at the „Alpine theatre“. Just like in other Alpine regions local hosts picked up on the established urban hotel so that between 1850 and 1890 next to numerous small hotels also three Grand hotels opened their doors.

After the construction of a tunnel passing through underneath Andermatt since 1882 transients ceased to travel through the village. In order to attract visitors the whole area needed to be adapted to the ideal notions and requirements of tourists. These of course tended to be somewhat paradox, e.g. the longing for the pristine at the same time as for a modern luxurious lifestyle. Nevertheless, for the village tourism meant to abandon earlier economic strategies connected to transport business and agriculture and organize life in a whole new way around tourist aesthetic criteria. In this paper I will trace the process of reordering through looking at the example of street cleaning – one of the ways a tourist aesthetic was implemented in Andermatt.