The baba and the patrao: negotiating localness in the tourist village

Abstract

This article focuses on the concept of ‘localness’ within the subculture of electronic music tourism in Goa, India. Localness as observed through the affective lenses of familiarity, affinity and belonging, emerges as a performative expression of group cohesion, suggesting that the ‘local’, like the ‘nomad’, occupies a transient and shifting relationship with physical and ideological space. Ethnographic observations and thick descriptions articulate a composite of ‘localness’ in the tourist landscape, showing the various ways in which localness emerges as a cultivated affect, tradable commodity and, most significantly, as an ethnographic methodology. The article concludes by arguing that ‘localness’, while being employed by tourists and locals within the political economy of a subculture, also enables a nomadic subjectivity for the ethnographer, whose work is to traverse familiar and unfamiliar research environments.