In the Name of the Father: Foreignness and Paedophilia, Kinship and Incest (Sabang, Puerto Galera, The Philippines)
Rosemary Wiss, Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University
This is an account which explores the complex and volatile interactions between Filipinos and foreigners in the context of the Philippines’ sex-tourism industry. Foreign men often claim that they are in search of a more ‘traditional’ life, nostalgically reciting an imagined sense of a ‘paradise lost’ in relation to the West. This paradise is imagined as an empty site where these foreign men hope to inscribe their own Utopia, entailing a sense of community and ‘harmonious’ gender relations. This intimacy industry is, however, orchestrated by organised crime. To show some of these volatilities I tell the story of Pierre, a long-term expat married to a woman from the bars who was also involved in the bar’s accompanying drug industry. They shared a child, and considerable business interests, and when Pierre tried to undertake formal separation, their precarious relationship imploded. Pierre was arrested on child sex charges, a death penalty crime in the Philippines. It was traumatic; I was out of my depth - and I knew I’d got my story. I explore the how and why of ethnography in this situation as well as investigating these accusations, the interests involved, the context for the production of accounts of paedophilia in local, national and international arenas. In sensational domains such as ‘sex tourism’, identities, experiences, and consequences are often assumed to be known in advance. I consider both the political use of these categories - and the effects of sensationalism.
