Mother sold food, daughter sells her body: The cultural continuity of prostitution

• Published in: Social science & medicine (1982) Vol. 35; no. 7; pp. 891 - 901
• Main Author: Muecke, Margorie A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Elsevier Ltd 01.10.1992; Elsevier; Pergamon Press Inc
• Series: Social Science & Medicine
• Subjects: AIDS; AIDS/HIV; Biological and medical sciences; Buddhism; Cross-Cultural Comparison; cultural analysis; Cultural aspects; Cultural Change; Cultural Identity; Culture; Daughters; Developing Countries; Economic conditions; Female; female prostitution; female prostitution Thailand cultural analysis AIDS; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Gender Identity; HIV Infections - prevention & control; HIV Infections - transmission; Humans; Personality. Affectivity; Prostitutes; Prostitution; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Rationalization; Religion and Sex; Risk Factors; Sex Work - psychology; Sexuality. Sexual behavior; Social conditions & trends; Social Support; Social Values; Socioeconomic Factors; Thailand; Traditional Societies; Tropical medicine; Women; Thailand; Asia; cultural analysis; AIDS; Thailand; female prostitution; Human; Infection; Prostitution; Government; Viral disease; Cultural environment; Religion; Mass media; Woman; Public opinion
• ISSN: 0277-9536; 1873-5347
• DOI: 10.1016/0277-9536(92)90103-W

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 our understanding of prostitution as a sociocultural phenomenon. The data were collected through case studies, participant-observation, and 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 (NIC) have, paradoxically, enabled female prostitutes to conserve the basic institutions of society. This has occured at a time when landlessness, rampant commercialism and poverty have threatened the survival of traditional lifeways 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.