ABSTRACT
There is a particular quality of light, sound, and touch as you approach the beach in Placencia, a rapidly growing seaside fishing village in southern Belize that has ‘gone crazy’ for tourism. It lends itself to a feel for the place, the impact of which, as Jim and Cindy said the first moment they laid eyes on it, ‘takes your breath away’. It’s some combination of sun, sea, sand and sky that intensifies an array of sensations as it dampens others. Much of this intensification and dampening is already encoded as advertising cliché, a carefully calculated indexing of pleasure in paradise ‘to die for’. In such cases these sensations stabilize momentarily into the commercial and cultural tropes of escape, paradise, and natural beauty that Belize has progressively activated commercially over the past ten years.
