Tropicality and Decoloniality: Sex Tourism vs Eco Tourism on a Philippine Beach
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.22.2.2023.3988Keywords:
Philippines, tropicality, decoloniality, postcolonialism, tropical natureculture, sex tourism, ecotourismAbstract
The small beachside town of Aplaya, Puerto Galera, on the island of Mindoro in the Philippines has a sex, beach, and diving tourist economy. Aplaya is considered a place of isolation, providing unspoiled tropical nature. Many foreign men discuss their desires for a Utopian paradise, a tropical beach that is imagined as uninhabited except for the necessary extras – the welcoming natives and compliant women. Foreign men depict the Philippines as a place where women are ordinarily sexually available, part of the natural excess of the tropics. This discourse of tropicality is here put into context with a discourse of decoloniality. The Philippines archipelago was colonised for over 400 years firstly by the Spanish, then by US colonisation, followed by Japanese occupation in WWII, and a return of the US until 1946 – after which post-colonial US influence continued. Despite this long and complex history, tourists who recount desires for a natural world and a nostalgia for a lost paradise in relation to the West help produce Aplaya as paradise found, rather than a particular version of paradise made. Amidst these ideas about natural women and traditional gender arrangements there are also ideas about the tropical natureculture, its natural state and cultural interventions. In Aplaya, a conflict is occurring between the development of sex tourism and environmental conservation through ecotourism. The domains of nature and culture, their articulation in the tropics, the environment, and development are produced and contested around this beach.
References
Anderson, W. (2006). Colonial Pathologies, American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822388081 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822388081
Arnold, D. (1995). The problem of nature: Environment, culture and European expansion. Basil Blackwell.
Ashcroft, R. (2000), The ethics of reusing archived tissue for research. Neuropathology and Applied Neurobiology. 26, 408-411. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2990.2000.00276.x DOI: https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2990.2000.00276.x
Betts, R.F. (1968) Europe Overseas: Phases of Imperialism Basic Books.
Blanc-Szanton, M. C. (1990). ‘Collision of Cultures: Historical Reformulations of Gender in the Lowland Visayas, Philippines’. In J. M. Atkinson & S. Errington (Eds.) Power and Difference: Gender in Island Southeast Asia. Stanford University Press.
Bowd, G. & Clayton, D. (2019). Impure and worldly geography: Pierre Gourou and tropicality. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315588087 DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315588087
Pablo, L.B. (1955). The Spanish Tradition In Nick Joaquin. Philippine Studies, 3(2), 187–207.
Chambers, D. & Buzinde, C. (2015). Tourism and decolonisation: Locating research and self. Annals of Tourism Research. 51, 1-16. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2014.12.002
Derrida, J. (1991). Cinders. University of Nebraska Press.
Ekoluoma, M.-E. 2017. Everyday Life in a Philippine Sex Tourism Town. Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology 57. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.
Fortes, M. (1997). Puerto Galera: A Lost Biosphere Reserve? South-South Co-operation Programme on Environmentally Sound Socio-Economic Development in the Humid Tropics, Working Papers No. 18, UNESCO https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000109206
Foucault, M. (1991). Discipline and Punish: the birth of a prison. Penguin.
Gibson, T. (1986). Sacrifice and Sharing in the Philippine Highlands - Religion and Society among the Buid of Mindoro. Athlone Press.
Gourou, P. (1947). The Tropical World, Les pays tropicaux - Principes d'une géographie humaine et économique, University of France.
Guha, R. (1983). Elementary aspects of peasant insurgency in colonial India. Oxford University Press.
Haraway, D. (1989). Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science. Routledge.
Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge.
Haraway, D. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan-Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. Routledge.
Haraway, D. (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press.
Ileto, R.C. (2001). Orientalism and the Study of Philippine Politics. Philippine Political Science Journal, 22 (45), 1-32, https://doi.org/10.1080/01154451.2001.9754223 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01154451.2001.9754223
Joaquin N., (1972). Tropical Gothic. University of Queensland Press
Law, L. (2000). Sex Work in Southeast Asia: The Place of Desire in the Time of Aids. Routledge.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1955). Tristes Tropiques. Librarie Plon.
Local Government Code 1991 Republic Act 7160 Government of the Philippine
Lonely Planet (2003). Philippines: A Travel Survival Guide [C. Rowthorn et al. 8th edition). Lonely Planet Publications
Lundberg, A, Regis H. & Agbonifo, J. (2022). Tropical Landscapes and Nature-Culture Entanglements: Reading Tropicality via Avatar. eTropic, electronic journal of studies in the tropics, 21 (1), 1-27 https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.21.1.2022.3877 DOI: https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.21.1.2022.3877
Lundberg, A, Vital, A. & Das, S. (2021). Tropical imaginaries and climate crisis: embracing relational climate discourses. eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics, 20 (2), 1-31https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.20.2.2021.3803 DOI: https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.20.2.2021.3803
Peplow, E. (1997). The Philippines. Odyssey/Passport Books.
Phelan, J. (1959). The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses 1565-1700. University of Wisconsin Press.
Puerto Galera Fortnightly (1995-1997) N. Lineses (Ed.) ELL Printing Press. http://www.puertodegalera.com/
Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from the South. 1(3), 533–580. https://doi.org/10.1177/0268580900015002005 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0268580900015002005
Quijano, A. (2007) Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality. Cultural Studies 21 (2–3), 168–178. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601164353 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601164353
Rafael, V. L. (Ed.) (1995). Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays on Filipino Cultures. Temple University Press.
Rafael, V. L. (2000). White Love and Other Events in Filipino History. Duke University Press.
Said, E. (1978). Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Routledge.
Schult, V. (1991). Mindoro – A Social History of a Philippine Island in the 20th Century: A Case Study of a Delayed Developmental Process Manila, Divine Word Publications.
Spivak, G. C. & Harasym, S. (1990). The Postcolonial Critic. Routledge.
Stanley, P. W. (1974). A Nation in the Making: The Philippines and the United States 1899-1921. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674436053 DOI: https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674436053
Stepan, N. L. (2001). Picturing Tropical Nature. University of Chicago Press
Thiers, R. (2023). Tales of the Post-Plantation: Unlikely Protagonists of Modern Philippine Banana History. The Ateneo University Press.
Tsing, A.L. (2005). Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400830596 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400830596
Tsing, A.L. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400873548 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400873548
Veric, C.S. (2019). The rise of Filipino postcolonial knowledge: Philippine studies, the institute of Philippine culture, and the Ateneo de Manila University press. Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints, 67 (3/4), 521-556. https://doi.org/10.1353/phs.2019.0025 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/phs.2019.0025
Walsh, C. & Mignolo, W. (2018). On Decoloniality. Duke University Press https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822371779 DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11g9616
Wiss, R. (2011). 'No Minors Allowed': Outsider Bar-¬girls and Trafficking in a Philippines Sex Tourism Industry. Online Proceedings Young Lives, Changing Times, University of Sydney, 8-9 June.
Wiss, R. (2013). And justice for all? International anti-trafficking agendas and local consequences in a Philippines sex tourism town, Australian Journal of Human Rights, 19(1), 55-82. https://doi.org/10.1080/1323-238X.2013.11882117 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/1323-238X.2013.11882117
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 CC-BY
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who submit articles to this journal agree to the following terms:
1. Authors are responsible for ensuring that any material that has influenced the research or writing has been properly cited and credited both in the text and in the Reference List (Bibliography). Contributors are responsible for gaining copyright clearance on figures, photographs or lengthy quotes used in their manuscript that have been published elsewhere.
2. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) License that allows others to share and adapt the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
3. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository, or publish it in a book), with proper acknowledgement of the work's initial publication in this journal.
4. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (see The Effect of Open Access or The Open Access Citation Advantage). Where authors include such a work in an institutional repository or on their website (i.e., a copy of a work which has been published in eTropic, or a pre-print or post-print version of that work), we request that they include a statement that acknowledges the eTropic publication including the name of the journal, the volume number and a web-link to the journal item.
5. Authors should be aware that the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) License permits readers to share (copy and redistribute the work in any medium or format) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the work) for any purpose, even commercially, provided they also give appropriate credit to the work, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. They may do these things in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests you or your publisher endorses their use.