Swiss Guestbook Project: Spatial Practices and the Performance of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Swiss Guestbooks (2018-2022)
Jérémie Magnin (Université de Neuchâtel), Patrick Vincent (Université de Neuchâtel), and Kevin James (University of Guelph)
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Guestbooks offer an unexplored window onto the social, cultural and spatial practices of Swiss tourism. Our primary aim in the four appointed years is to produce an in-depth study of nineteenth-century guestbook culture both to shed insight into the practice of guestbook reading and writing, and to better understand the historical development of the Swiss hospitality industry and of tourism more generally.
The current research plan follows up a six-month start-up project in which seventy-one archival sources were located, providing the foundation for a Swiss-wide bibliographic database on extant guestbooks. We wish to continue locating sources and building a corpus of texts so as to obtain a large representative sample from different decades, regions, and types of accommodation and tourist activity. This will allow us to establish a descriptive taxonomy of the guestbook’s bibliographic features, including its legally-shaped visitor records, but also elements that draw on sentimental culture, including marginalia, sketches and doodles, epigrams, bons mots, and verse.
Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, we then wish to examine how visitors used these guestbook inscriptions to engage in distinct spatial practices and to self-fashion themselves according to various gendered, class, national, and regional identities. Taking advantage of similar projects being carried out on guestbooks from other nations, we will place our findings within a comparative framework in order to understand what might be the distinctive characteristics of Swiss guestbook culture. This research will in turn help to us to answer a number of important questions concerning the development of Swiss hotels, touristic practices, and mountain sports.
