Dancing Pines: A Wild Journey Through Swiss Customs & Traditions - Hardcover

Rosenmund, Dominique; Britsch, Karin; Gerber, Sibylle; Hess, Stephanie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3716518476 ISBN 13: 9783716518472

Publisher: Benteli Verlag, 2019

Synopsis

The Swiss, whether living in cities or in the countryside, have always practiced and cultivated their very own local customs. This provides the country with an enormous wealth of communal religious and secular occasions and lively traditions. In many villages, districts and regions, these are essential parts of the cultural heritage that are integrated into everyday life and passed on, whether similar to 100 years ago or adapted to the present. The photos and texts in this book do more than to convey a perfect, often well-established image of the tourism brochures, as they rather reflect the particular specific atmosphere that the authors and photographer have experienced at each location. Through conversations with the participants, light is shed on what they do is really about and what it means for the individual person.

About this title

About the Author

Dominique Rosenmund is a Swiss photograper. She is the head of the pic-ture editing department of the “Luzerner Zeitung” newspaper.

Since fall 2018 Karin Britsch, social scientist, has been chief editor and presenter of the Swiss national broad-cast SRF.

Folklorist Sibylle Gerber is curator at the Lucerne museum of history.

Stephanie Hess, journalist, works for the travel section of a Swiss women’s magazine as well as a freelance writer.

From the Back Cover

In a quiet valley of the Swiss mountains, anarchic creatures, half giants, half animals, roam about. A cozy village transforms into a busy Alpine Wall Street in the summertime. And wildly blazing torches on people's shoulders plunge a historic old town into a sea of flames every year.

Quaint, fervent and close to nature - the Swiss cultivate their very own local customs and traditions with a great deal of passion. There are rituals that wistfully bid farewell to summer or exuberantly drive away the long winter, that celebrate religious occasions or cultivate secular events; sometimes similar to those of a hundred years ago, sometimes adapted to the present.

Together, the photographer and authors traveled through Switzerland tracing some of its most beautiful and wildest traditions, exploring what they are really about and what they mean to people. In this volume, the editors present their personal highlights of the customs of Swiss urban and rural life.

Edition details

• Publisher: Benteli Verlag
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3716518476
• ISBN 13: 9783716518472
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160