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Dahinden, Janine
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Dahinden, Janine
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Professeur.e ordinaire
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janine.dahinden@unine.ch
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- PublicationAccès libreExploring the social organization of difference at the interface of mobility and peripherality: Ethnographic study in a Swiss valley(2023-06-28)
; This thesis sheds ethnographic light on the small Swiss valley of Val-de-Travers, a region of 12,000 inhabitants located in the canton of Neuchâtel, on the border with France. Inspired by critical and reflexive studies on migration, it proposes an in-depth analysis of the discourses and daily practices that participate in the construction of a local order in constant negotiation, at the interface of different forms of mobility and lived and situated experiences of peripherality. Based on a qualitative field study conducted between 2019 and 2021, this thesis apprehends the Val-de- Travers through two of its main and interwoven characteristics. On the one hand, the diversity of past and present mobilities that intersect. Indeed, for decades, countless foreign workers, cross-border workers, tourists, refugees, and residents of other Swiss regions have been crossing the region to work or live there. At the same time, young people, job seekers, families and retirees have left the valley in search of professional, educational, or economic opportunities. On the other hand, the Valley is characterized by its peripherality: a complex set of experiences and imaginaries that refer both to its asymmetrical political and economic relationship with a neighboring city (Neuchâtel); to a romantic celebration of the valley’s authenticity as a rural periphery sheltered from globalization and modernization; a supposedly superior value of seemingly unconditional solidarity; a region characterized by scattered settlement and low population density in public spaces; a region adjacent to a national border; or a tourist region with natural sites and industrial heritage. By adopting a posture at the interface, this thesis explores how the different forms of mobility that traverse and shape the valley articulate, resonate, or come into tension with the lived and imagined experiences of peripherality; and vice versa. Indeed, the position and evolution of the valley in the global, national, and cantonal political economy contribute significantly to the daily dynamics of selfidentification and social categorization. This thesis thus seeks to understand how people who visit, live, or work in this place make sense of their daily environment and negotiate the social organization of difference, namely the way in which differences between individuals and collectives, and the social categories associated with them, are produced, represented, appropriated, and organized. It shows how the lived and situated experiences of these different dynamics generate discourses and practices that participate in the emergence of an (imagined) community characterized by the coherent assemblage of its heterogeneity. By focusing on the everyday experiences of ordinary people, it also highlights how the categories, boundaries and regulations of the nation-state permeate everyday life and articulate with other social and symbolic differentiations beyond ethno-national categories and governmental logics. In the form of a collection of scientific articles, the analysis is composed of three parts, each illuminating not only specific dynamics of the articulation between mobilities and peripherality, but also proposing specific and original conceptualizations to approach this articulation. The first paper explores the emergence of what I call an imagined community of fate, which can be understood as the result of dynamic and nested forms of boundary-work in which the most important categories and markers are socioeconomic rather than nation and ethnicity based. The second article documents the discourses and everyday practices that participate in the emergence of a regime of (im)moral mobilities. Exploring in particular border mobilities (whether to work or to buy goods and services), I demonstrate how ordinary inhabitants categorize these mobilities in terms of good or bad and put in place informal strategies of regulation. The third article explores how the presence of people assigned to stigmatized categories of difference – in this case, refugees, cross-border workers and “cas sociaux” – generates varied and interrelated representations of experiences of peripherality. Depending on the situation, these categories of difference are presented as familiar strangers, as space invaders, or as peripheral figures.