When tourists go on vacation, the area around them becomes a liminal space. Their geographic location is no longer real, but a fantasy that they are living in. If tourists have the fantasy disrupted, they can get really mean. And that is why this raccoon biologist has to conduct her research wearing a bikini.
posted by clawsoon (30 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite

So she inadvertently has to conduct anthropological research on tourists in order to conduct research on pygmy raccoons.
posted by Peach at 6:38 AM on January 21 [13 favorites]

Oh I figured since she kept talking about researching raccoons and seemed surprised about how she had to manage herself as a participant observer that the idea was novel to her. Note: was ethnographer so don’t mind me.
posted by Peach at 7:08 AM on January 21 [2 favorites]

I must not be a very good tourist because if I were in Cozumel (not my sort of vacation spot most of the time, but still…) and someone came up to me and asked me to help them with a research project on endangered pygmy raccoons, I would be like “Hell yeah! What do you want me to do?” No matter how they were dressed. I might be a little disappointed if it only involved filling out a survey, though.
posted by TedW at 7:28 AM on January 21 [30 favorites]

Liminal space fantasies are why tourists try to pet the fluffy cows in Yellowstone, as if a petting zoo.
posted by Brian B. at 7:38 AM on January 21 [13 favorites]

See also: feeding bears, even putting food inside one's car to coax them into it. Humans may be sapient, but only on the average.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:40 AM on January 21 [9 favorites]

She says it's not a misogyny thing but I wonder how true that is; would be an interesting thing to study. Easy setup: have an assortment of gender and attractiveness researchers all dressed in skimpy beach wear approach people on the beach and see if they want to fill out a survey. Compare to if they were wearing shorts and tee shirt. I suspect willingness is correlated with attractiveness of the researcher and amount of skin showing.
posted by Mitheral at 8:30 AM on January 21 [11 favorites]

I think Mitheral has it. I had a summer job once going door to door to try to get people to letters to their senators against hydrofracking (and raise money for our org), and people were much more likely to talk & donate when I wore short shorts and a crop top on a hot day. And that had nothing to do with liminal space or whatever.
posted by subdee at 8:40 AM on January 21 [4 favorites]

When someone in street attire comes up to me at a resort, they're usually trying to get me to attend a timeshare presentation.
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:50 AM on January 21 [23 favorites]

btw we've all missed the most important part: there is such a thing as pygmy raccoons and they are even more adorable than the bigger kind.
posted by martin q blank at 9:05 AM on January 21 [15 favorites]

even though I am able to read and understand English, I was disappointed that this was not an AI thing with a pygmy raccoon in a bikini interviewing tourists. I'm sorry.
posted by mumimor at 10:19 AM on January 21 [4 favorites]

I guess I believe her, but I don't want to completely overlook to the possibility that she did, in fact, scam her advisor into funding "research" that involved lounging on a resort beach in a bikini and chatting with other guests, then she learned someone from her department saw her there and noticed how strenuous her research wasn't, so she frantically put up a Tik-Tok video about how it's all for science, borrowing a few words from a friend in the sociology department in a hope to muddy the waters a bit.
posted by mark k at 11:32 AM on January 21 [1 favorite]

Today I learned that even though I have told tumblr in my settings I would like to see (or rather, am not afraid of) "mature content" it will not let me search for "raccoon milf" so my scientific curiosity will remain unfulfilled.
posted by maxwelton at 12:59 PM on January 21 [1 favorite]

Liminal space yeah yeah yeah. My hypothesis: these people are also dumbfucks when not in Cozumel.
posted by polecat at 4:32 PM on January 21 [3 favorites]

Perhaps wearing minimal clothing provides guests with reassurance that she is not, in fact, three raccoons in a trenchcoat.
posted by nickzoic at 4:56 PM on January 21 [13 favorites]

Note: you may need to be signed into tumblr in order to view the official raccoonmilf tumblr. Well worth following to keep up with the latest pygmy raccoon research.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 7:08 PM on January 21 [2 favorites]

I love thinking about liminal spaces. Liminal spaces around events (and resorts perhaps) are really important. Suspending disbelief at a Renaissance fair is much easier if you walk down a twisty wooded path to get to the entrance instead walking through a turnstile directly off of a hot asphalt parking lot.
posted by olykate at 7:09 PM on January 21 [2 favorites]

Is there something wrong with me, that I find the idea of talking to a bikini-clad clipboard-wielding stranger by far the more uncomfortable option?
posted by breakfast burrito at 1:46 AM on January 27

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