Paper long abstract:

Beginning with the 1980s, female tourists from Europe, and to a lesser extent from North America, Australia and Japan, started visiting Kenya driven by an erotic nostalgia for the now famous prototype of the Maasai or Samburu "warrior". The image of tall, slim bodies, dressed in red, wearing spears and carrying clubs led to a stereotypical 'aesthetization' of the Samburu men. As my on-going research in Kenya reveals, the relationships between female tourists and Samburu ilmurran (warriors) engage a plurality of often incompatible sexualities and notions of pleasure. Herein, various forms of recursive communication through sensorial interaction become an important way of negotiating new paths of pleasure between partners. In this paper, I suggest that an emphasis on higher order learning (Bateson, 1987) can allow for a conceptual acknowledgement of the intersection between various embodiments and sexualities in the context of tourism. I propose that studies of sex tourism need to move beyond mechanistic analyses, and engage with some of these deeper channels of contextual aesthetic communication.