This master's thesis is an anthropological study of the Alpine community in the municipality of St. Leonhard im Pitztal in Tyrol, Austria. In the past, the population of this village was plagued by great poverty, so that a large part of the population migrated seasonally to other places every year. The development of ski tourism has allowed the locals to work in their municipality and radically increase their quality of life. The author of the master's thesis focuses on the area of ski development, where many changes have taken place in the last decades. On the one hand, it deals with the important spatial changes in 1983 brought by the construction of the glacier express that transports visitors to the glacier. Since then, the glacier area has been of central economic importance for the valley's inhabitants. Secondly, the changes in ownership are significant in this discourse, as the larger ski areas in the community are no longer locally owned, but are owned by entrepreneurs from Innsbruck. Taking these changes into account, the author attempts to interpret the economic and ecological interests of different actors in the context of planning development projects in the glacier area. Political ecology and the political configurations that play out in the relationship between people and the environment are the focus of attention. At the same time, the author raises the question of the strength and significance of the alpine community.
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