around the world to find a good and worthy cause to dedicate their efforts to. Volunteering should be something we do as a regular part of our lives, not just when we can take a month or two off, or when we have extra money to spend on travel. Your actions are your voice in the world, saying loudly and clearly what you think is important, what you believe to be right, what you support.
(EIT, 2008: X)
Furthermore, the position of the BTCV also emphasizes this point in an environmental conservation context:
Voluntary and community action can support site and species surveys, practical conservation projects, and longer term care and management. In the course of giving their time, energy, and experience to improving biodiversity, people can gain social and economic benefits including understanding, knowledge and skills. All of this can then further enhance their voluntary commitment.
(BTCV, 2000: 1)
Volunteer tourism can take place in locations varying from densely populated urban settings to rainforests and conservation areas. Popular locations include countries in Africa, Asia, Central and South America. Activities can vary across many areas, such as scientific research (wildlife, land and water), conservation projects, medical assistance, economic and social development (including agriculture, construction and education), and cultural restoration. Indeed, volunteers can find themselves anywhere, working on a multitude of projects, including assisting with mass eye surgery operations, tree planting, conducting a health campaign, teaching English, improving village sanitation, constructing a rainforest reserve, or assisting physicians and nurses with a mobile clinic. There is generally the opportunity for volunteers to take part in local activities and interact further with the community. Hence the volunteer tourist contribution is bilateral, in that the most important development that may occur in the volunteer tourist experience is that of a personal nature, that of a greater awareness of self:
When volunteers come back they feel empowered, knowing they have been able to make a difference … You come home feeling you don’t have limits. You feel a lot more confident in your ideas and beliefs and that you can contribute to society.
(Hill, 2001: 28)
While multidisciplinary in approach, and drawing heavily on broader tourism literature, a largely sociological perspective has been taken in this book. The Symbolic Internationist turn in sociology is of particular value when considering how individuals construct the meaning of their experience as volunteer tourists. As part of the volunteer tourism experience, interactions occur and the self is enlarged or expanded, challenged, renewed or reinforced (Wearing & Deane, 2003). As such, the experience becomes an ongoing process, which extends far beyond the actual tourist visit. Rojek (1993: 114) claims ‘travel, it was thought, led to the accumulation of experience and wisdom. One began with nothing, but through guidance, diligence and commonsense one gained knowledge and achieved self-realisation.’ Furthering this, volunteer tourism provides an opportunity for some individuals to engage in an altruistic attempt to explore ‘self’. It has been built around the belief that by living in and learning about other people and cultures, in an environment of mutual benefit and cooperation, one is able to engage in a transformation and the development of self.
Still, the broader tourism literature suggests that holidays do not usually have a tremendous impact on the way in which an individual sees him- or herself (Kottler, 1997: 103). It has been contended that holidays serve as an escape from the constraints and stresses of everyday life (Burkart & Medlik, 1974: 56; Cohen & Taylor, 1976; MacCannell, 1976; Rojek, 1995; Urry, 2002), or perhaps as a reward for hard work, but do not ultimately alter a person’s everyday life in terms of the way they think, feel or act. The traditional tourism literature suggests that while individuals may have enjoyed themselves, it is not long before that holiday is a memory in the day-to-day life to which they inevitably return. This book seeks to explore a different approach: taking volunteer tourism and investigating the more significant impacts it can have on the individual and on their lifestyle while also examining the same for the host community.
While much has been written in relation to the motivations of tourists when engaging in tourism,1 little research has been presented concerning the impact that leisure experiences such as volunteer tourism may have on the development of self through travel, and how one changes as a result (McGehee, 2002). The focus of the research on experience is contextualized within a framework stemming from the literature on tourism and leisure experiences. The experiential focus allows for the analysis of the volunteer tourism experience as a participative process involving direct interaction with the natural environment/local community within a specific social situation, contextualized by the differential elements of ecotourism, volunteering and serious leisure. This provides the initial basis for the exploration of alternative tourist experiences.
Selves in the Tourism Experience
To date, sociologies of tourism have developed two major themes concerning the self of the traveller. On the one hand, there has been an emphasis on tourism as a means of escape from the everyday, even if such escape is temporary. On the other, travel has been constructed as a means of self-development, a way to broaden the mind, experience new and different cultures, environments and to come away in some way enriched. Both involve the self of the tourist. One adopts a pessimistic view, suggesting that there is no escape (Cohen & Taylor, 1992; Rojek, 1993) and the other moves to an optimistic outlook in which everyone will benefit from the tourist experience (Pearce & Caltabiano, 1983; Brown, 1992; Wearing et al., 2008); others, such as MacCannell (1992), attempt to balance the two views.
MacCannell, for example, sees the touristic movement of peoples both to and from the Western world as an opportunity to form hybrid cultures, a precondition for inventing and creating subjectivities that resist cultural constraints. He claims that the neo-nomads of tourism in the postmodern era cross cultural boundaries not as invaders, but as imaginative travellers who benefit from displaced self-understanding and the freedom to go beyond the limits that frontiers present. The ‘true heroes’ of tourism, he claims, are those who know that ‘their future will be made of dialogue with their fellow travellers and those they meet along the way’ (1992: 4). On the other hand, he debunks the traveller who seeks escape through tourism while demanding the comforts of home, at an exaggerated and luxurious level. ‘This’, he says, ‘is an overturned nomadic consciousness in which the ultimate goal of travel is to set up sedentary housekeeping in the entire world, to displace the local peoples, or at least to subordinate them in the enterprise, to make them the “household” staff of global capitalists’ (MacCannell, 1992: 5). This form of ingesting the ‘other’ into the self — and subsequently eliminating it — is termed contemporary cannibalism: where the tourist consumes and destroys the culture of the host peoples in developing countries. Far from enlarging the self, he sees this form of tourism as supplying the energy for ‘autoeroticism, narcissism, economic conservatism, egoism, and absolute group unity or fascism’ (1992: 66). The tourist self, in this view, remains rigid or static and turned in on her/himself — shrinking, rather than expanding, or, in Craib’s terms (1998), closing down psychic space where the self of the host person is devalued and diminished.
This book seeks to pursue another direction. Building on Kelly’s (1996: 45) work on leisure, where he proclaims that ‘this relative freedom makes possible the investment of self that leads to the fullest development of ourselves, the richest expression of who we want to become, and the deepest experience of fulfilment’, the volunteer tourist seeks to discover the type of life experiences that best suits their needs. In undertaking this, they launch themselves into a journey of personal discovery. The volunteer tourist experience offers an opportunity to examine the potential of travel to change self, in the belief that these experiences would be of a more permanent nature than the average guided, packaged holiday that lasts 2 or 3 weeks (Kottler, 1997: 103). Craik and Cohen have given mention to the phrase ‘modern day pilgrims’, which propounds the idea that during the process of searching for something else, one may be better able to identify with self. The reasons for this could relate to the fact that as a result of travelling for a longer period