A Middle Eastern Muslim Tourist Enclave in Bangkok

Abstract

Studies of tourist enclaves have noticed their boundedness, but paid little attention to the theoretical significance of the strictness of their boundaries for their internal dynamics. This issue constitutes the point of departure of our study of a Middle Eastern Muslim tourist enclave in an international tourist zone in Bangkok, which plays a double role as a source of religiously proscribed hedonistic opportunities and religiously prescribed services to a Muslim clientele. The enclave was founded by Gulf Arab sex tourists in the early 1980s and became a center of sexual services to Middle Eastern visitors, but its hedonistic role came to be increasingly confined to a hotel, and consequently stagnated, whereas the service role of the enclave flourished, particularly after the recent arrival of Middle Eastern medical tourists and their families, seeking treatment in a nearby hospital. The article analyses how the latter's arrival has changed the dynamics and structure of the enclave, led to unresolved tensions between vice and virtue in the area, and reconfigured the relationship of the enclave with the wider international tourist zone.