Tourist beach as the uncommons: storying tourism commodification of the beach

This article tells stories about what happens when a beach becomes tourism commodity. Drawing from multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Indonesia, the stories elucidate the myriad ways tourism commodification of the beach plays out in everyday local life. Using the local discourses on sunset daily prayer in Lhoknga (Aceh), open defecation free campaign in Watukarung (East Java), and seaweed farming waste and ‘ugly’ coastal plants in Nemberala (Rote Island), the article exposes how the common capitalist project of tourism commodification generates uncommon meanings, trajectories, and consequences in each local beach. The stories thus directly challenge the homogenising tendency of capitalist commodification, doing so by approaching the commodified tourist beaches through the lenses of ‘uncommons’ and ‘commodity stories’. Put together, these lenses shed light on the more-than-economic lives of a tourist beach and, in the process, localise and pluralise the discourse related to tourism commodification of the beach. As such, this article contributes to efforts to pluralise and re-situate tourism sustainability within the social, cultural, and political textures of place, as well as to debates in the tourism and sustainability literature on the growing need for localising and socialising tourism.