Mother sold food, daughter sells her body: the cultural continuity of prostitution
Muecke, M.A.
Social Science and Medicine 35(7): 891-901
1992
ISSN/ISBN: 0277-9536 PMID: 1411689 DOI: 10.1016/0277-9536(92)90103-wDocument Number: 323819
This article provides a cultural interpretation of female prostitution in contemporary lowland Buddhist Thai society. The heterosexual transmission of AIDS through prostitution has exposed the shallowness of understanding of prostitution as a socio-cultural phenomenon. The data were collected through case studies, participant-observation, and a review of Thai language media and texts. It is argued that in the past decade or so, the simultaneous rapid growth of prostitution as a lucrative sex industry and of the Thai economy as an emerging newly industrialized country have, paradoxically, enabled female prostitutes to conserve the basic Thai social institutions. This has occurred at a time when landlessness, rampant commercialism and poverty have threatened the survival of traditional lifestyles among the majority rural agricultural population. Prostitution, although illegal, has flourished at least in part because it enables women, through remittances, home and merit-making activities, to fulfil traditional cultural functions of daughters, conserving the institutions of family and village-level Buddhism, as well as of government.
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