The Importance Of Volunteer Tourism

1. Introduction

Already since the time of the Grand Tour, tourism has been combined with volunteer work and is gaining popularity ever since including ever more actors (Wearing & McGehee, 2013). In recent decades, the phenomenon has received more attention in academic research and is critically examined from all kinds of perspectives. In fact, volunteering and travelling as a combination have even grown exponentially over the past two decades and created an alternative form of travel called ‘volunteer tourism’ (Wearing & McGehee, 2013). Time to take a closer look at volunteering from the perspectives of the volunteers themselves.

Volunteer experiences are an interesting source of information that can help in providing insights on what is important

Gray and Campbell (2009) show that in their study both volunteers and the locals gave similar reasons for viewing a volunteer as a tourist. A tourist was associated with key words such as ‘foreign’, ‘pay’, ‘travel’, ‘special kind of tourist’. Contrary, the notion of volunteer complied with words such as ‘work’, ‘altruism’, and ‘local involvement’. The altruistic nature of volunteers in this case is recognized in the discourse as an element that distinguishes them from other tourists. Altruism can also be an element in the discourse that categorizes volunteers as ‘special tourists’ or that removes volunteers from the tourist category altogether (Gray and Campbell,

Helping others can be seen as being rooted in the desire to give back and therefore has an altruistic nature. This element can be understood by the concept of the humanitarian gaze that can help in describing how volunteer tourists think about their ‘helping’ relationship to the beneficiaries of the project they attended (Mostafanezhad, 2013). The research by Mostafanezhad (2013) is on celebrity humanitarianism, but can nevertheless also be applied to ‘regular’ volunteer tourists. “The humanitarian gaze specifically highlights how the tourism-development encounter is mediated by discourses that create a binary and implicit hierarchy between givers and receives, as well as circumscribing who is a legitimate benefactor of aid” (p. 489). The humanitarian gaze therefore contributes to the ‘us’ and ‘them’ power dynamic because it suggests that some people are meant to be saved and others for being saviors. ‘The right thing to do’ is often a phrase that is used to express this relationship between the volunteers and the beneficiaries, whether they realize this or not. When the interviews with the volunteers of Mantay show aspects of ‘helping’ it is important to situate this in the larger context which will be done by using the perspective of the humanitarian