Anthropology in Action

This special issue examines the popular TV series The White Lotus as a site for anthropological provocation to examine contemporary systems of privilege. The introduction analyses how power, desire and inequalities are orchestrated. It points to the show's attempt to criticise commodity capitalism while reproducing the commercialised relations it criticises. This parallels the storylines of the show: every attempt to escape or critique the current system, whether through moral posturing or romantic, social or spiritual seekings, becomes reabsorbed into it, often resulting in reproducing privilege itself. The issue's contributions reflect the multifaceted infrastructures – material, affective and economic – through which privilege in luxury tourism and wellness industries operates.

This ethnographic account explores the labour sustaining luxury tourism behind the scenes. Inspired by the opening scene of The White Lotus, in which the resort manager instructs a service staff trainee that the effort behind luxury must remain hidden, this research focuses on the unseen bodily cost of housekeepers. Drawing on auto-ethnographic fieldwork as a housekeeper in two different hotels in Spain, this research examines how subcontracting has intensified workloads, stress and unpaid overwork. Low wages compel housekeepers, many of whom are migrant women, to juggle multiple jobs to survive. This intimate exploration exposes how neoliberal restructuring drives cost-cutting policies that inscribe themselves on workers’ bodies, resulting in workplace accidents and disabling injuries. By foregrounding housekeepers’ experiences, the article offers a visceral critique of neoliberal tourism economies.

In luxury tourist economies, wellness operates simultaneously as a consumer fantasy, as labour discipline and as proximity to privilege. It reifies structural inequalities by framing health, beauty, youth, resilience and ‘improvement’ as personal achievements, while masking not only the violence, precarity, exploitation and moral decay that sustain these leisure economies, but also the deep personal and moral dysfunction among those who participate in it. Reading The White Lotus, Season 3 as an ethnographic text, this article puts HBO's show in conversation with fieldwork in two small luxury hotels in Tulum, Mexico, investigating the aspirational dynamics and contradictions of wellness economies. This article highlights how both guests and workers become complicit in reproducing colonial and capitalist hierarchies through the language and performance of self-improvement.

The White Lotus is distinctive not only in its critique of wealthy tourists in luxury resorts, but in centring the emotional labour and aspirations of resort workers – spa labourers, ‘wellness mentors’ and security personnel. Echoing this focus on the interactions between workers, consumers and local communities, this article puts forward a research agenda on the contested encounters and inequalities of Southeast Asia's multi-billion-dollar wellness industry. The region's long-standing healing traditions are being repackaged and commodified as ‘self-care’ practices, often with significant state investment, to meet a growing demand for healing experiences from within and beyond the region. This article traces the contemporary development of Southeast Asia's wellness industry and its uneven transformations of transnational mobilities (of tourists, entrepreneurs and migrant labourers), local economies and environments.

This article examines how the popular TV show The White Lotus represents labour within luxury tourism through hierarchies of the tourist gaze. It first reflects on how the imagination of luxury depends on the invisibilisation of the ‘dirty labour’ that sustains it. It then explores those hotel workers who achieve what I term ‘selective visibility’, such as management, spa workers and entertainers, who work on the front line of comfort. Finally, the article demonstrates how The White Lotus employs visual regimes that make inequality affectively palpable yet structurally intact, showing how fleeting visibility and aestheticised glimpses of labour ultimately reinforce the very hierarchies the show appears to critique.

Using themes and narratives from The White Lotus, this article ethnographically examines the positioning of migrants from Northeast India within the labour hierarchies of Bengaluru's wellness industry. It explores two trajectories: middle-class counsellors whose therapeutic expertise constitutes emotional labour, and working-class service providers – hairdressers and masseuses – whose labour combines touch and scripted care. Northeastern migrants are sought after for their perceived docility, English fluency and ‘Asian’ appearance, yet racialised biases limit their access to higher-status wellness professions requiring academic credentials. While pathways for self-making exist, the industry's promises of self-work and professional advancement remain unequally distributed. This analysis highlights how race, region and class shape the ‘capacity to aspire’ in urban contexts, positioning the wellness industry as a significant site for aspirational self-making.

The second season of The White Lotus presents a representation of the Sicilian landscape linked to luxury and privilege. Thus, while the series offers an ironic critique of tourism, it also reinforces a glamorous image of Sicily. This article explores how social media, in particular TikTok, contributes to the projection of this image. Through digital ethnography and semiotic analysis, it examines how user-generated content related to The White Lotus reproduces, subverts or reinterprets the projected representations of the series. The results show how TikTok posts emphasise locations, stereotypes and narrative motifs specific to the series. Thus, an audiovisual production and social media can influence a destination's tourism dynamics, making it necessary to monitor user-generated content to identify emerging tourism trends.

Each season of HBO's The White Lotus portrays parents with their teenage or young adult children vacationing in beautiful locales. Although the parents are crumbling under the weight of social expectations to succeed, they set their children up to live their futures the same way. This article focuses only on the families on holiday to perform a narrative analysis of the dialogues between characters in the show's first three seasons. The article questions how privilege is maintained as it is transmitted from parents to children through values and behaviours, and how vacation provides opportunities to reinforce power structures and social privilege before the children become fully independent. Finally, the article assesses the extent to which the children successfully exercise some agency over their own enculturation.