At Home, Here and There. Multi-Dwelling Mobilities in the Mountains: The Case of Verbier in Switzerland
This article analyses the mobile lifestyles of privileged multi-resident individuals in a well-known ski resort in the Swiss Alps: Verbier. On the one hand, the new forms of work, dwelling and leisure mobilities blur the traditional boundaries between private and professional life, here and elsewhere, host and guest. On the other hand, they are a sign of prestige, reproducing class distinctions between practices and representations of mountain space. The observed lifestyle mobility—mainly multi-residential—reflects the social, symbolic, cultural and economic capital of a higher middle class, known as “creative.” They are expressed by the porosity of sequences of daily life formerly hermetic (activity/rest) and its related set of values (busy/relax). Both unequally accessible to various social actors, and in response to a more general normalising trend, multi-residential mobility allows, as an anthropologically sound concept, to study the gentrification process under way in the Alpine region.