Malleable words

The beach as liminal space, where unforeseeable encounters take place and transformation seems to dominate, is not only found to be a historical setting like that of first encounters in colonial contexts or as a place where one may be lost, but is also – invested with more banality and silliness – a mass tourism site, where it provides consumable liminalities. At El Arenal on the island of Mallorca, the beach combines, in curious ways, various such commodified forms of liminality, which, probably most saliently, are constructed as various forms of southernness.