ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the contradictory relationships between the desire for violence and the assumed exemption from violence. The desire for heterogeneous spaces, for spontaneity, and for volatility points to travellers' expectations of non-violence, while that very physicality of violence enacted upon the bodies of locals, serves to define local people and geographies as appropriate sites of alternative tourism. While violence may be more prevalent in the global south, violence is pervasive throughout the world. The presence of tourist police, then, emphasizes the possibility of violence that provides meaning to ethnological travel at the same time that this presence indicates a lack of manifest physical violence. While violence is understood to inhere in the locals, the tourism industry itself produces the idea of potential violence that creates ethnological desire and at the same time that the industry mitigates against the possibility of physical violence.
