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

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 occurred 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.