ABSTRACT
The idea of the sex tourist and sex tourism occupying liminal space has been central to the development of this book. The notion of Turner (1974) that liminal entities are neither here or there, that they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremony has been utilised to help partly explain the cultural space that sex tourism fills. As has been discussed, the tourist is therefore a marginal person, with the extent to which tourism is sanctioned varying from society to society and the nature of such marginality changes over time. For example, Lea (1993: 709) noted that in the early 1960s ‘the advent of young westerners and their casual attitudes to sex and drugs had a severe impact on the predominantly Roman Catholic Christian Goan community’. Writing several years later Wilson (1997: 70) noted that there is ‘little evidence of hostility and resentment among local people against the majority of such tourists’, and argued that this is because, in part, such low-budget, low-income tourism in Goa has spread the economic benefits of tourism more widely through the local community than five-star hotel development. Wilson quotes an interview by Anderson with one villager in north Goa who stated:
The villagers … were devout Catholics and they had been offended by hippies bathing naked in front of their homes. But that had now stopped. [They were] not bothered by the hippies’ lifestyle. The village as a whole were happy to augment their incomes by renting out rooms in their houses to budget travellers and running little cafés and bars which fell well short of overwhelming village life.
