Content uploaded by Ranjan Bandyopadhyay
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Ranjan Bandyopadhyay on Nov 07, 2019
Content may be subject to copyright.
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rtxg20
Download by: [Ranjan Bandyopadhyay] Date: 18 November 2017, At: 01:22
Tourism Geographies
An International Journal of Tourism Space, Place and Environment
ISSN: 1461-6688 (Print) 1470-1340 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtxg20
‘The white woman's burden’ – the racialized,
gendered politics of volunteer tourism
Ranjan Bandyopadhyay & Vrushali Patil
To cite this article: Ranjan Bandyopadhyay & Vrushali Patil (2017) ‘The white woman's burden’ –
the racialized, gendered politics of volunteer tourism, Tourism Geographies, 19:4, 644-657, DOI:
10.1080/14616688.2017.1298150
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2017.1298150
Published online: 15 Mar 2017.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 398
View related articles
View Crossmark data
‘The white woman's burden’–the racialized, gendered politics
of volunteer tourism
Ranjan Bandyopadhyay
a
and Vrushali Patil
b
a
Tourism and Hospitality Management Division, International College, Mahidol University, Thailand;
b
Department of Global & Sociocultural Studies, Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 26 January 2016
Accepted 3 February 2017
ABSTRACT
Talking about race in volunteer tourism is like breaking a taboo. By
critically exploring the racialized and gendered politics of volunteer
tourism from the perspective of the ‘white savior complex,’we seek
to open new avenues of discussion to break this silence. We employ
a postcolonial feminist theoretical framework to analyze volunteer
tourism. The meanings, practices, and policies of volunteer tourism
development are informed by the racialized, gendered logics of
colonial thought. If older colonial logics were predominantly
masculinist, it considers the largely (white) women participants in
contemporary volunteer tourism as a window onto current
transformations in historic racialized and gendered logics. Colonial
logics and discourses have shifted over time, from the erstwhile
‘civilizing mission’to the subsequent mandate for development to
contemporary depoliticized social causes such as ‘saving the
environment.’Volunteer tourism is an exemplar of this third
discourse, as global North volunteer tourists, through their
depoliticized logic of ‘saving’and ‘helping’the less fortunate others
in the global South, inherits such distinctions and reproduces them
further. Given the predominance of young white women in
contemporary volunteer tourism, beyond these continuities, we
also point to compelling shifts in this logic from the masculinism of
historic colonial processes. We also highlight the religious
dimension, how Christian ideologies which were so central to
formal colonial processes continue to play an important role in
volunteer tourism today. Future studies on volunteer tourism need
to examine its emergence, growth, and popularity (with young
white women in particular) from the perspective of historic and
ongoing power relations having to do with race and racialized
gender, which will enable a critical conversation on volunteer
tourism that adds significantly to our knowledge of contemporary
neo-colonial processes and their gendered dynamics.
摘要
谈论志愿旅游中的种族问题好比打破禁忌。我们通过从“白人救世
主情节”的视角批判地分析了志愿旅游中的种族化与性别化的政
治,寻求为打破这一沉寂的研究领域开辟新的讨论渠道。我们利
用了后殖民女性主义理论框架分析了志愿旅游现象。殖民思想的
种族化性别化逻辑有助于我们理解志愿旅游发展的意义、实践与
政策。如果说旧的殖民逻辑主要是男子气的,它把当前志愿旅游
KEYWORDS
Volunteer tourism; white
savior complex; race;
feminization; postcolonial
theory; postcolonial feminist
theory
关键词
志愿旅游;白人救世主情
节;种族;女性化;后殖民理
论;后殖民女性主义理论
CONTACT Ranjan Bandyopadhyay ranjanb_27@yahoo.com
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
TOURISM GEOGRAPHIES, 2017
VOL. 19, NO. 4, 644–657
https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2017.1298150
Downloaded by [Ranjan Bandyopadhyay] at 01:22 18 November 2017
中的绝大多数(白人)女性参与者视为一个窗口,洞察历史上的种
族化与性别化逻辑在当前的转型。米斯(Mies) 和希娃(Shiva) 在
1993年已经解释了殖民逻辑与话语如何随着时间转变,从以前
的“教化使命”到随后授权发展当前诸如“挽救环境”的、去政治化
的社会事业。志愿旅游是第三种话语的一个实例,因为北半球志
愿旅游者通过去政治化地“挽救”与“帮助”南半球较不幸运他者的
逻辑,延续了殖民逻辑的这些特征并且将之进一步繁殖。考虑到
白人年轻女性在当前志愿旅游中占有主导地位,与殖民理论的这
些连贯性有所不同,我们也从历史殖民过程的男性主义角度指出
了这种逻辑的印象深刻的转变。我们也突出了志愿旅游中的宗教
方面,即在殖民过程中居以核心地位的基督教意识形态在当今的
志愿旅游中是如何起到重要作用的。将来的志愿旅游研究需要从
历史的视角和与种族与种族化性别有关的权力关系视角继续考察
志愿旅游的出现、发展及普及化,特别是在白人年轻女性中的普
及化问题。这将推动志愿旅游的批判性讨论,将会显著增加我们
对当前新殖民过程及其性别动力学的了解。
Introduction
In the early phases of colonization, the white man's burden consisted of the need to ‘civilize’
the non-white peoples of the world —this meant above all depriving them of their resources
and rights. In the latter phase of colonization, the white man's burden consisted of the need
to ‘develop’the Third World, and this again involved depriving local communities of their
resources and rights. We are now on the threshold of the third phase of colonization, in which
the white man's burden is to protect the environment - and this too, involves taking control
of rights and resources. The salvation of the environment cannot be achieved through the old
colonial order based on the white man's burden. The two are ethically, economically and epis-
temologically incongruent. Mies and Shiva (1993, pp. 264–265)
The term ‘volunteer tourists’is generally applied to those tourists who partake in volun-
teer work during their vacation, through organizations that promote the economic, envi-
ronmental, or cultural welfare of some chosen groups in the host society (Wearing, 2001).
Millions of young adults from the global North take a gap year and flock to the global
South in the name of helping the less fortunate by teaching in schools, building orpha-
nages, saving turtles or nurturing street children. The number of volunteer tourists is stag-
gering –every year, more than 1.6 million young volunteer tourists from the global North
spend about $2 billion in the global South (Kahn, 2014) and the majority of these young
volunteer tourists are white women (Jackson, Payne, & Stolley, 2015; Mostafanezhad,
2013) who travel with a desire to change the world.
Scholars have well documented how volunteer tourism can be mutually beneficial for
both tourists and host communities. However, recently some scholars have criticized the
role of volunteer tourism as a development tool as volunteer tourism is simply a new form
of colonialism which propagates unequal power relationships (Brown & Hall, 2008). The
continuities between the history of formal colonization and the current practice of volun-
teer tourism, and the resulting negative connotations arising from them, are far too signif-
icant to be ignored. While more has been written, this work on volunteer tourism has yet
to generate any sustained interdisciplinary critical inquiry in the tourism social sciences.
Wearing and McGehee (2013, pp. 122–127) aptly called for ‘more interdisciplinary, trans-
disciplinary, transnational approaches drawing from psychology, sociology, political
TOURISM GEOGRAPHIES 645
Downloaded by [Ranjan Bandyopadhyay] at 01:22 18 November 2017
science, anthropology, economics to examine volunteer tourism in a more systematic and
logical way.’Encouraged by Mostafanezhad's (2013, pp. 153–164) influential article in
which she laments that ‘there has been surprisingly little attention paid to the political
economy of volunteer tourism development’and in particular her call for volunteer tour-
ism to be ‘reframed as a historically situated and politically implicated cultural practice,’
this conceptual paper seeks to attend to this significant lacuna in volunteer tourism
research. Precisely, this study aims to confront the issue of race and in particular, the gen-
dered dynamics of racialized processes, as a significant blind spot in volunteer tourism
and development practice.
While the majority of volunteer tourism studies have acknowledged the significance of
volunteer tourism and challenged conventional understandings of socio-economic
change in the global South, the ways in which ideas about race and racialized gender
shape volunteer tourism and development discourses are rarely spoken about. It is
increasingly recognized now that development is about power –its operations, its geogra-
phies (McEwan, 2001) and indeed, development today is understood as a radical and
intrusive white endeavor (Biccum, 2011; Duffield, 2005). Feminist scholars in particular
have underscored the gendered and sexualized dimensions of this racialized endeavor
(see for example, Alexander, 1996; Wangari, 2002). However, the overall impact of anti-rac-
ist contributions by tourism scholars to expose and challenge the racism embedded in
‘whiteness’remains marginal in tourism studies. From a postcolonial feminist view, Frye
(1992) describes whiteness as an assumption on the part of many Northern white women
that they have the knowledge and the obligation to help women in the global South (no
need to know whether they want the help or not). Kothari (2006, p. 2) asks, ‘perhaps
within a discourse framed around humanitarianism, cooperation and aid, raising ‘race’is
too distracting, disruptive and demanding? Or does the silence of ‘race’conceal the com-
plicity of development with racialized projects?’This paper identifies the need for further
exploration of the subtle manifestations of gendered racism within volunteer tourism and
insists that gender and race deserve serious discussion in volunteer tourism research. In
particular, this study focuses on the history and legacies of the ‘white savior complex’as it
informs volunteer tourism. Contrasting the masculinism of racialized colonial processes
(their feminist variants notwithstanding) with the contemporary feminization of such raci-
alization within volunteer tourism, it also considers continuities and shifts within such
processes.
This paper employs a postcolonial feminist theoretical framework to analyze volunteer
tourism. Postcolonial theory emphasizes the legacy of colonial and imperial machineries
of oppression, of which the development project can be seen as one piece (Sahle, 2011).
Robert Young (2003) puts it succinctly, ‘postcolonial theory disturbs the order of the world.
It threatens privilege and power, [and it] refuses to acknowledge the superiority of the
Western cultures.’In theoretical terms, postcolonial perspectives have been greatly influ-
enced by Marxism and poststructuralism drawing on both the political economy
approaches of the former and the cultural and linguistic analyses of the latter. Postcolonial
critiques challenge the experiences of speaking and writing by which dominant dis-
courses come into being. For example, terms such as ‘underdeveloped,’‘developing,’and
‘the Third World’homogenize peoples and countries and other them in relation to the
‘developed’world. Gayatri Spivak (1990) named this process of ‘self’and ‘other’as
646 R. BANDYOPADHYAY AND V. PATIL
Downloaded by [Ranjan Bandyopadhyay] at 01:22 18 November 2017
‘worlding,’or setting apart certain areas of the world from others. As Sardar (1999) opined,
the real power of the West lies not in its massive economic development and technologi-
cal inventions but rather, in its power to define, represent, and theorize. The idea of devel-
opment has enabled the West to appropriate and control the past, present and future of
the Orient, a fact that postcolonialism seeks to disrupt. Hence, postcolonialism is a power-
ful critique of the legacies of formal colonialism and the development project and an
increasingly important challenge to dominant ways of apprehending North–South rela-
tions. Within this broader arena, postcolonial feminism in particular highlights the gender
and sexual dimensions of post/colonial processes and the racialized, neo-colonial dimen-
sions of Northern-based gender identities. In our analysis, we draw especially from this
postcolonial feminist critique, and bring it to bear on the identities which produce and
which are produced by volunteer tourism.
A postcolonial feminist approach
In Orientalism (1979), Edward Said argues that the construction of the ‘Orient’in terms of
inferiority, irrationality, excess, strangeness, sensuousness, and so on secures the superior-
ity, rationality, and normativity of the ‘Occident’or ‘West.’As feminist scholars point out,
such understandings were highly gendered. For example, the West's othering of the Ori-
ent was similar if not identical to its othering of (Western) women –a commonality which
points to the elaboration of both from the point of view of one group, elite Western men
(de Groot, 2000). Said himself does not focus on the role of gender and sexuality in the
construction of the Orient, nor the significance of these processes for Western masculin-
ities or femininities. Nevertheless, a number of scholars across a range of (inter)disciplines,
from Said's own English and Comparative Literature to History, Anthropology, Sociology,
and International Relations have since further elaborated the multiple ways in which gen-
der and sexuality inform colonial and imperial processes and legacies. In Imperial Leather:
Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (McClintock, 1995, pp. 6–14) for example,
Anne McClintock argues that Orientalism is a ‘male power fantasy which sexualizes a femi-
nized Orient for Western power and possession…sexuality itself is a trope for imperial
power relations…indeed imperialism cannot be understood without a theory of gender.’
Hence, it is from the point of view of elite Western men that beyond the Orient, in the
‘global’eighteenth century, the entirety of the globe was imagined as four distinct quad-
rants, represented iconographically as female figures:
America was represented as bare breasted, with a feathered headdress, carrying arrows and a
bow; Asia bore incense and was veiled against a backdrop of desert and camel, or the harem;
Africa, naked except for an elephant headdress, sat on a lion, and was flanked by a cornucopia
signifying its natural riches; and Europe was represented as a muse surrounded by arts and
letters as well as the signs of military victory. (Nussbaum, 2003,p.2)
Thus, the racialization of multiple distinct spaces in imperial and colonial processes was
dependent on racialized constructions of gender and sexuality.
Historians and historically oriented anthropologists have also shown how gender and
sexuality informed colonial policy. For example, Ann Stoler (1997) has written on how Brit-
ish, French, and Dutch colonial states, concerned with the mixing of their own populations
TOURISM GEOGRAPHIES 647
Downloaded by [Ranjan Bandyopadhyay] at 01:22 18 November 2017
with ‘natives’in colonies where miscegenation was common, sought to educate the for-
mer in proper gendered and sexual behavior in order to secure their racial and civiliza-
tional superiority. Indeed, a slew of historical work argues that notions of modern and
civilized gender and sexuality emerged in precisely these sorts of spaces of intense con-
tact with the other, in opposition to ideas of the other's ‘savage’and ‘barbaric’gender and
sexuality (Bleys, 1995; Sebastiani, 2013; Wilson, 2004; Woollacott, 2006).
With the Enlightenment emphasis on progress and development over time, the racial-
ized and gendered others of European colonialism were increasingly imagined as children
who could be and should be educated and developed –in all sorts of arenas including
the realm of gender and sexuality (de Groot, 2000; Patil, 2008). One cause that galvanized
much activity in the Indian context on the part of British missionaries, the colonial state,
humanitarians, and feminists was the practice of sati. Careful historical work has shown
that this ‘traditional Indian practice’was very much a political and social reification that
extrapolated from the practices of a few groups to characterize an entire religion, culture,
and eventually country (Mani, 1987; Narayan, 1997). Moreover, such concern for ‘native’
women was ultimately hollow and hypocritical, for at the same time that British officials
passed legislation to prohibit these ‘barbaric practices,’they enacted laws which imposed
prison sentences on wives who refused to fulfill sexual obligations to their husbands and
imposed a system of prostitution that provided Indian women to sexually service British
soldiers stationed in India (Enloe, 1989, p. 49). Nevertheless, these discourses of civiliza-
tional and moral uplift served a variety of purposes such as the colonial project itself.
Overall then, postcolonial and other anti-racist feminists across a variety of disciplines
have elaborated the functions of particular constructions of ‘oriental’and other traditions,
problems, and causes for Western subjectivities, including masculinities and femininities,
in colonial and postcolonial contexts (Grewal & Kaplan, 1994; Mohanty, 1988; Spivak,
1988).
However, well-intentioned and progressive particular efforts towards the ‘less fortunate
in other parts of the world’may be, without a critical theory of global power relations and
imperial histories, such efforts may end up reproducing problematic processes instead.
Voluntourism, or ‘travelling with a purpose’is interesting because it similarly seeks to help
such ‘others,’and again typically without a critical theory of global power relations and
imperial histories. Furthermore, as the purview generally of mostly white, Northern
women, it also begs for an analysis from the perspective of postcolonial feminisms. And
yet, this work clearly still remains to be done.
Volunteer tourism, romanticism, and the feminization of the global South
The historic connections forged between colony and metropole in imperial relations can
be seen from the perspective of ‘contact zones, social spaces where disparate cultures
meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domi-
nation and subordination…[and which include] the strategies of representation whereby
European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they
assert European hegemony’(Pratt, 1992, pp. 4–7). One key dimension of this contact zone
within colonial histories was travel writing, a compelling and seductive form of story-tell-
ing. European travellers wrote about faraway lands of interest, and ‘travel accounts were
648 R. BANDYOPADHYAY AND V. PATIL
Downloaded by [Ranjan Bandyopadhyay] at 01:22 18 November 2017
frequently translated into several European languages and gathered into collections of
voyages’(Teltscher, 1995, p. 3). Indeed, from Marco Polo to Bruce Chatwin, travellers’tales
about distant places and exotic cultures have proven to be remarkably popular reading
(Blanton, 2002). Travel writers of the nineteenth century contributed to a certain exoticisa-
tion of India in the name of a cultural need to know more about ‘their’Indian empire.
Tourism representations have traditionally been implicated in such socio-political dis-
courses (Bhabha, 1983). While commenting on British (and European) travel writing about
India in the nineteenth century, Lalvani (1995, p. 263) argued,
The discourse of ‘la femme orientale’which informed the Romantic critique of capitalism, was
recuperated in a hegemonic manner to promote a commodity fetish and an expanding con-
sumer culture, the success of this transference was guaranteed by Romanticism, which not
only underwrote the discourse of Orientalism but ironically advanced a psychology commen-
surate with the emergence of a consumer society.
The exploration of nineteenth-century travel writings on India made it apparent
how important the Romantic gaze was at that period (Bandyopadhyay, 2009), which
on one hand, provided the travellers' self-discovery and idyllic pleasures, and on the
other hand, was an integral part of the colonial scientific enterprise by which India
was appropriated to the European imagination and facilitated the implementation of
a colonial ideology of improvement (Nayar, 2005). Volunteer tourism is the most
recent addition to a long pedigree of romanticism about global South people and
cultures. However, romanticism is a subject that has been neglected in tourism social
science research. From the perspective of gender, descriptions abound about how in
the nineteenth-century British social reformers, especially women, became popular in
Britain for their frequent self-promoting articles in British newspapers describing their
moral duty and valiant efforts to save Indian children from savagery and raise and
educate them instead in a civilized environment.
Also significant was the related yet distinct discourse of saving women. As mentioned
in the discussion of postcolonial feminism above, one major point of focus in the Indian
case became the so-called traditional practice of sati, which was understood as an exam-
ple of how Indian culture and Indian men oppress Indian women. Such causes became
important sites of, as Spivak (1988, p. 24) has aptly described it, ‘White men saving brown
women from brown men.’Part of the problem, according to this narrative, was the devi-
ance of Indian men from norms of (imperial white) masculinity, as argued by T.B. Macaulay
(1843 = 1967) and Hopkins (1998). Sinha (1995, pp. 18–19) argued that such representa-
tions of effeminacy helped represent Indian men as simultaneously sexually insatiable
and inferior to the imperial male. Moreover, British women were also deeply implicated.
While for British men, such a discourse consolidated a colonial masculinity which justified
and legitimated colonial policies, for British women, it was a bid for space in the political
and civil realms of nation and empire, from which they were excluded. For example, in a
suffrage periodical of the early twentieth century, Common Cause, the author argued that
imperial responsibilities to oppressed Indian women and their uplift compelled British suf-
fragists to demand the vote, ‘not only for themselves but for the sake of their colonial sis-
ters’(Burton, 1994, p. 187). Thus, as numerous critical writers have observed, such
constructions of the other are actually sites for the consolidation of particular definitions
of the self (Hall, 1992, p. 297; Mohanty, 1988), for it is in the process of civilizing, uplifting,
TOURISM GEOGRAPHIES 649
Downloaded by [Ranjan Bandyopadhyay] at 01:22 18 November 2017
saving, and aiding this helpless and oppressed other that the self becomes secured as the
source of these gifts.
Today, such gendered othering of historically colonized countries continues, whether
in the Northern masculinist constructions of states in the global South as inappropriately
or insufficiently masculine (Patil, 2009) or in Northern feminist constructions of women in
the global South as needing rescue (Abu-Lughod, 2002). Patil (2008) argues that the lan-
guage of development itself is a legacy of a colonialist ‘kinship politics’in which global
North actors are envisioned as the parents that will help underdeveloped, immature ‘third
world’countries reach civilization, maturity and development. Within contemporary vol-
unteer tourism, despite a different set of actors (i.e. the host, the volunteer (or other) tou-
rists, the organizations bringing together the alternative forms of tourism, and the local
partners), dominant discourses continue to perpetuate this kinship politics. For example,
some terms that have been used by an earlier generation of tourism scholars (transmitted
to the next generation of scholars) regarding volunteer tourism include ‘mini-mission’
(Brown & Morrison, 2003), ‘petting the critters’(McGehee, 2007), ‘charity’(Wearing, 2001),
‘community-service,’and ‘servant-leadership’(Butin, 2003). These terms perpetuate the
imagery of a feminized, childlike global South awaiting (white, Western) assistance. As the
postcolonial feminist critique points out, such a construction of self and other, with no rec-
ognition of the power differentials which have historically produced such distinctions,
merely ends up reproducing essentialist, racialized constructions. Cecil et al. argue that for
male volunteer tourists, the ability to endure hardships in a ‘savage’land while helping
the deprived is a current site for the securing of Western masculinity (Cecil, Pranav, &
Takacs, 1994).
More work is clearly needed on contemporary women volunteer tourists, in order to
understand how they construct their identities within these processes. If for British women
in the colonial period, saving Indian children and women from their savage men and cul-
ture was a bid for inclusion in nation and empire (Burton, 1994), what are the particular
concerns of the predominantly young, white women who participate in volunteer tourism
today? How does this participation matter for their sense of self? How is it related to their
identities as young American women?
The new civilizing mission
The literature on volunteer tourism has limited evidence of long-term benefits of volun-
teer work in the global South, whereas there is a sustained emphasis on the transforma-
tive experiences of the volunteers (Gray & Campbell, 2007). Hence, volunteer travel
narratives today abound with the images of the primitiveness of the toured, the enrich-
ment of self of the tourist, and the renewed appreciation of the tourist's own life. The web-
site of a British company (studential.com, 2011) illustrates this imagery while justifying the
need for volunteer tourism:
More and more people are becoming motivated to go out and do something as the news
media daily report on poverty in the developing world. You may find yourself working with
people who live in poverty, surrounded by disease, and frequently hungry. You will hopefully
return with a great sense of achievement and pride in what you have done for a local
community.
650 R. BANDYOPADHYAY AND V. PATIL
Downloaded by [Ranjan Bandyopadhyay] at 01:22 18 November 2017
The notion that as a prospective volunteer tourist, you will work with the poor, diseased
and hungry and return with a ‘great sense of achievement’raises the question: is the pur-
pose of volunteering in the ‘Third World’in this way to do good, or to feel good? Commen-
tators have argued that if designer clothes and fancy cars signal material status in the
North, then volunteer tourists’stories of embracing of poverty and its discomforts signals
(almost a spiritual?) superiority of their characters (Zakaria, 2014). Taking selfies with those
one is ‘helping’seems to be a recurrent practice volunteer tourists engage in. The taking
of these pictures and their inevitable subsequent distribution via social media like Face-
book points to their significance in a certain construction of self on the part of the tourist.
In a recent article in The Onion (2014),the author describes sarcastically how a six-day visit
to a rural African village can ‘completely change a woman's Facebook profile picture.’The
article quotes ‘22-year-old Angela Fisher’who says: ‘I don't think my profile photo will
ever be the same, not after the experience of taking such incredible pictures with my
arms around those small African children's shoulders.’
Two voluntourism organizations based in the USA (Globe Aware and Global Volunteers)
draw young students in this way, capitalizing on a Northern will to uplift and save. The fol-
lowing quotes demonstrate how these organizations rely on a spectacle of poverty in the
global South in order to do so.
Participate in Globe Aware's India program and combat poverty by working with slum dwelling
and other disadvantaged children in the community of Jaipur. Volunteers will work with rescued
child laborers, assist at day care centers and provide support for local teachers, in addition to
completing beautification activities for public facilities. Come and fight poverty in India and
enhance the lives of poverty-stricken children in ways that you can only begin to imagine.
You're needed now to volunteer in India. Teach and care for orphaned children. Help once
homeless youth in Chennai reach their full potential as a volunteer in India. Your volunteer
assistance for one or two weeks directly elevates the futures of Indian children who have
been abandoned, orphaned or are from families too poor to care for them. What's more,
Global Volunteers offers the most affordable India volunteer program fees.
Such imageries of misery, disorder, mass death, and poverty reinforce notions of ‘Third
World’dependency, powerlessness, and need, while perpetuating ‘First World’benefi-
cence, and capacity to act, assist, and save. As such, these images reproduce historic colo-
nialist and kinship politics. As French sociologist Luc Boltanski (1999) has argued,
‘suffering, though at a distance’is a master subject of our mediatized times and is rou-
tinely appropriated in American popular culture (which is synonymous to global popular
culture). Indeed, this globalization of distant suffering is one of the more problematic
impacts of the discourses and practices of volunteer tourism.
From yet another angle, one can also ask: and what about social problems and strug-
gles in the global North –in volunteer tourists’own backyards, so to speak? For example,
according to a report by UNICEF (2014), 27% of children in the UK (i.e. one in four) and
32% of children in the USA (i.e. one in three) live in poverty. Kenyan activist Boniface
Mwangi aptly asks why young American volunteers would choose to come to Africa to
help dig wells, for example, when they have so many social ills in their own communities
(Goffe, 2015). In other words, it should not be forgotten, that there are ‘first worlds’within
‘third worlds’and vice versa. Perhaps other people's problems seem simpler, less compli-
cated, and easier to solve than those of one's own society. In this context, Zakaria (2014,
p. 2) suggests that the decontextualized hunger and homelessness in Haiti, Cambodia or
TOURISM GEOGRAPHIES 651
Downloaded by [Ranjan Bandyopadhyay] at 01:22 18 November 2017
Vietnam is an easy moral choice –unlike the problems of other societies, for example,
severe poverty in Manchester or London or the failing inner city schools in Chicago or the
hopelessness of those living on the fringes in Detroit.
The historic roots of racial inferiority/superiority are further perpetuated by contempo-
rary neo-colonial aid relationships in volunteer tourism (Lough & Carter-Black, 2015). The
colonial narratives are retold through modern discourses of volunteer tourism and devel-
opment, where those in the global South come to believe that they have lower capacity
for development augmented by inferior science, technology, and resources (Kothari,
2006). Despite decades of independence, this narrative results in a ‘colonization of the
mind’(Ng~
ug
~
ı,1986), wherein whiteness is associated with progress, power, and higher sta-
tus. But we argue that it is not just this kind of ignorance of the other which enables the
quick shift to Africa or Asia. Rather, it is the impact that this selective attention and com-
plementary deflection has for the constitution of the self. That is, a recognition of prob-
lems of poverty, inequality, and oppression within the USA or Britain would require a
fundamental disruption of binaries between ‘West’and the ‘rest’that have been operative
for centuries. Furthermore, a deep engagement with these problems would inevitably
involve an interrogation of relations of power having to do with gender, sexuality, race,
and class within global North countries that volunteer tourists (typically as middle class,
white students) benefit from.
While The Onion's fictional character, Angela Fisher, seemingly engages in volunteer tour-
ism for the benefits to her Facebook page, we again return to the predominantly young white
women who participate today and ask: how are their subjectivities formed within these rela-
tions of power? Why do they choose this sort of activity as opposed to other opportunities
within the USA? In what ways are these understandings continuous with colonial-era racializa-
tions and in what ways do they differ? Are we seeing a particular kind of Northern, white femi-
nist identity in the making? And, what are the larger structural and institutional contexts
within which their participation in this activity has emerged and grown?
Volunteer tourism and religion
Scholars have highlighted another significant issue within contemporary volunteer tour-
ism: the fact that most volunteer trips often have the explicit goal of imparting certain reli-
gious beliefs on the host community (Ver Beek, 2006). As McGehee and Andereck (2008,p.
20) put it, ‘The role of organized religion in volunteer tourism often seems to be the ‘ele-
phant in the living room’that no one wishes to discuss.’Hence, similar to the role of Chris-
tian ideologies in formal colonial processes, such ideologies continue to be important in
volunteer tourism today. ‘Missionary movements in nineteenth-century Britain, for exam-
ple, created a public awareness of the fact that there was a larger world beyond Britain
and that British Christians had an imperial duty towards the rest of the world’(Van der
Veer, 2001, p. 12). Such ideologies have changed little as the following quote from a US-
based volunteer organization (Catholic Relief Services) reveals:
Catholic Relief Services carries out the commitment of the Bishops of the United States to
assist the poor and vulnerable overseas. We are motivated by the Gospel of Jesus Christ to
protect, defend and advance human life around the world by directly meeting basic needs
and advocating solutions to injustice.
652 R. BANDYOPADHYAY AND V. PATIL
Downloaded by [Ranjan Bandyopadhyay] at 01:22 18 November 2017
Wilson and Janoski (1995) found out in their study that among Catholics, the connection
between church involvement and volunteering is formed early and remains strong. A promi-
nent and gendered example of this is Mother Teresa, whose work spurred the growth of vol-
untourism. Mother Teresa, then a young woman, was sent on a mission by a Roman catholic
religious order in her homeland Macedonia to serve the poor people in Kolkata (erstwhile Cal-
cutta), India. Calcutta was founded by Job Charnock, a British East India Company administra-
tor in 1690, and was the premier city of Britain's overseas empire for nearly 250 years –serving
as the capital of the British Raj till 1911. In 2001, the Government officially changed the name
of the city from Calcutta to Kolkata. Apart from Malcolm Muggeridge's (1971)Something Beau-
tiful for God that elevated Mother Teresa to sainthood, Dominique Lapierre's (1985) bestseller
and Roland Joffe's (1992) epic direction, City of Joy transformed Calcutta in the Euro-American
thought as the very exemplar of poverty and squalor. In Kolkata, Mother Teresa later founded
an organization known as Missionaries of Charity to offer palliative care to the poorest of the
poor in the city. She is an international icon and won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work. Her
canonisation took place in September 2016.
Mother Teresa opened her work to thousands of annual volunteers often coming and
going unannounced –a model that now inspires waves of evangelical trips to India (as
well as other places in the global South). Today, thousands still feel drawn to Mother Ter-
esa and to Catholicism. Similar to her program, individuals are still enticed by voluntour-
ism organizations to volunteer for a day or two and then go sightseeing elsewhere in
Calcutta. Two voluntourism organizations based in the USA (Volunteering with India and
IFRE Volunteers) echoes the following sentiments:
VWI offers a unique combination of volunteering projects and action packed adventure travel
in a fun, safe, educational and well-organized environment.
We are honored that you are considering a volunteer abroad experience with us. As a human-
itarian with desire to complete works of mercy and charity we applaud you! We recognize
your courage to venture so far from home.
In these examples, we see the construction of a volunteer tourist identity that explicitly
combines the charity orientation of volunteer tourism with the Christian mission to do
good works.
Mother Teresa's own legacy has always been called into question as she was criticized
for converting the people she served into Christianity (Taylor, 2015). The late British writer
Christopher Hitchens (1995) vehemently criticized Mother Teresa who was ‘less interested
in helping the poor than in using them as an indefatigable source of wretchedness on
which to fuel the expansion of her fundamentalist Roman Catholic beliefs.’From a postco-
lonial perspective, Vijay Prashad (2012) has also written: Mother Teresa is the quintessen-
tial image of the white woman in the colonies, working to save the dark bodies from their
own temptations and failures. This sort of religiously oriented volunteer tourism, then, is
the contemporary manifestation of colonial-era imperial, missionary travel. Although Marx
opined long ago that religion will fade away with modernity, it is important to note that
for most people in the world today, religion still remains the ultimate source of morality.
Ironically, in an era of sustainable development, global South spaces still continue to be
constructed as the white man's and perhaps even more, the white woman's burden. It
should be noted, however, that for those who live in the ‘postcolonial’world, the concept
of religious identity is intricately bound up with imperialism, colonial history, and now the
hegemony of world capitalism. As the Orient ‘develops,’the interpenetrations between
TOURISM GEOGRAPHIES 653
Downloaded by [Ranjan Bandyopadhyay] at 01:22 18 November 2017
the producer and consumer of religious representations –between an Orient hungry for
foreign capital and a West craving cultural and spiritual authenticity –will continue.
Conclusion
This paper argues that the meanings, practices, and policies of volunteer tourism develop-
ment must be understood within broader histories of colonial thought. Following Mies
and Shiva (1993) who we began with, colonial logics and discourses have shifted over
time, from the erstwhile ‘civilizing mission’to the subsequent mandate for development
to contemporary depoliticized social causes such as ‘saving the environment.’We argue
that voluntourism is an exemplar of this third discourse, as global North volunteer tourists
seek to ‘save’and ‘help’others, typically in the global South. Postcolonial theory and post-
colonial feminist theory, in particular, has highlighted the colonial era racialized, gendered
distinctions between an independent, masculine, active, rational, West, and a childlike,
feminine, passive, and irrational non-West –as well as their ongoing significance. We
argue that global North volunteer tourism, through its depoliticized logic of ‘saving’and
‘helping’others in the global South, inherits such distinctions and reproduces them fur-
ther. Given the predominance of young white women in contemporary volunteer tourism,
beyond these continuities, we also point to compelling shifts in this logic from the mascu-
linism of historic colonial processes. Finally, we also highlight the religious dimension of
this volunteer tourism: that is, Christian ideologies which were so central to formal colonial
processes continue to play an important role in volunteer tourism today.
This paper thus contributes to tourism social science research by highlighting the
racialized, gendered logics of volunteer tourism and their continuities with and distinc-
tions from the colonial era from which they emerged. Thus, if colonial era discourses pro-
duced narratives of orientalist savagery requiring civilization and uplift, we ask: to what
extent do such logics continue within contemporary discourses and practices of volunteer
tourism? If such logics secured the civilized masculinity of colonialist men (and to a lesser
extent the civilized femininity of colonialist women), we ask: what are the consequences
for identity for the predominantly young white women who participate in volunteer tour-
ism today? If the ‘imperial feminists’of the Raj participated in gendered colonial projects
as a bid for inclusion in nation and empire, we ask: what are the power structures within
which young white women volunteer in a ‘third world’country today? In short, work on
volunteer tourism needs to examine its emergence, growth, and popularity (with young
white women in particular) from the perspective of historic and ongoing power relations
having to do with race and racialized gender. It needs to examine what sorts of concerns,
tensions, and identities produce the participation in this practice, as well as the conse-
quences for identities of such participation. We submit that such a path will enable a criti-
cal conversation on volunteer tourism that adds significantly to our knowledge of
contemporary neo-colonial processes and their gendered dynamics.
Websites
<www.studential.com>(accessed on 20 September, 2015).
<http://www.theonion.com/article/6-day-visit-to-rural-african-village-completely-ch-
35083>6-Day Visit to Rural African Village Completely Changes Woman's Facebook Pro-
file Picture. The Onion 28 January 2014. (Accessed on 26 September 2015).
654 R. BANDYOPADHYAY AND V. PATIL
Downloaded by [Ranjan Bandyopadhyay] at 01:22 18 November 2017
<http://www.volunteeringwithindia.org/about/>(Accessed on 18 June 2016).
<http://www.ifrevolunteers.org/aboutus.php>(Accessed on 18 June 2016).
<http://globeaware.org/>(Accessed on 20 December 2016).
<https://globalvolunteers.org/>(Accessed on 20 December 2016).
<http://www.crs.org/>(Accessed on 20 December 2016).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributor
Ranjan Bandyopadhyay is an associate professor at Mahidol University, Thailand. Previously, he was
an associate professor at The California State University, USA and also taught at The University of
Nottingham, UK. He obtained his Ph.D. in Tourism and Socio-cultural Anthropology from The Penn-
sylvania State University, USA. His research interests include sociology of tourism, politics of repre-
sentation, nationalism, heritage, nostalgia, identity and social justice. He has published in Annals of
Tourism Research, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice and is an
Associate Editor of the postdisciplinary journal - Visual Methodologies.
Vrushali Patil is an associate professor of Sociology at Florida International University in the US. She
obtained her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Maryland, Collge Park. Her research interests
include postcolonial and decolonial feminism, transnational feminist theory, and global historical
sociology. Her work has appeared in Theory and Society,Annals of Tourism Research,Signs,Sex Roles,
and Sociology Compass.
References
Abu-Lughod, L. (2002). Do Muslim women really need saving? Anthropological reflections on cultural
relativism and its others. American Anthropologist,104(3), 783–790.
Alexander, M. J. (1996). Erotic autonomy as a politics of decolonization: An anatomy of feminist and
state practice in the Bahamas tourist industry. In M. Jacqui Alexander C. T. Mohanty (Eds.), Femi-
nist genealogies, colonial legacies, democratic futures (pp. 63–100). New York, NY: Routledge.
Bandyopadhyay, R. (2009). The perennial Western tourism representations of India that refuse to die.
Tourism: An International Interdisciplinary Journal,57(1), 23–35.
Bhabha, H. K. (1983). The other question –the stereotype and colonial discourse. Screen, 24(6), 18–36.
Biccum, A. (2011). Marketing development: Celebrity politics and the 'new' development advocacy.
Third World Quarterly, 32(7), 1331–1346.
Blanton, C. (2002). Travel Writing: The Self and the World. London: Routledge.
Bleys, R. C. (1995). The geography of perversion. New York: New York University Press.
Boltanski, L. (1999). Distant suffering: Morality, media and politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Brown, F., & Hall, D. (2008). Tourism and development in the Global South: The issues. Third World
Quarterly,29(5), 839–849.
Brown, S., & Morrison, A. M. (2003). Expanding volunteer vacation participation: An exploratory study
of the mini-mission concept. Tourism Recreation Research,28,73–82.
Burton, A. (1994). British feminists, Indian women, and. imperial culture, 1865–1915. Chapel Hill: Univer-
sity of North Carolina Press.
Butin, D. W. (2003). Of what use is it? Multiple conceptualizations of service-learning in education.
Teachers College Record,105, 1674–1692.
TOURISM GEOGRAPHIES 655
Downloaded by [Ranjan Bandyopadhyay] at 01:22 18 November 2017
Cecil, W., Pranav, J. & Takacs, S. (1994). India is(n't): Misrepresentations of India in the US media. South
Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection, (Summer), 4–9.
de Groot, J. (2000). “‘Sex’and ‘Race’: The construction of language and image in the nineteenth cen-
tury.”In C. Hall (Ed.), Cultures of Empire (pp. 37–60). Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Duffield, M. (2005). Getting savages to fight barbarians: Development, security and the colonial pres-
ent. Conflict, Security & Development,5(2), 141–159.
Enloe, C. (1989). Bananas, beaches and bases: Making feminist sense of international politics. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Frye, M. (1992). White woman feminist. In Willful virgin: Essays in feminism 1976-1992 (pp. 147–169).
Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press.
Goffe, L. G. (2015, March 19). Taking on America's “Voluntourism”.NewAfrican, 1–3.
Gray, N. J., & Campbell, L. M. (2007). A decommodified experience? Exploring aesthetic, economic,
and ethical values for volunteer ecotourism in costa rica. Journal of Sustainable Tourism,15(5),
463–482.
Grewal, I. Kaplan, C. (Eds.). (1994). Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist
Practice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hall, S. (1992). The question of cultural identity. In S. Hall D, Held A, McGrew (Eds.), Modernity and its
futures (pp. 274–316). Cambridge: Polity Press in association with the Open University.
Hitchens, C. (1995). The missionary position: Mother Teresa in theory and practice. London: Verso.
Hopkins, J. (1998). Commodifying the Countryside: Marketing Myths of Rurality. In R. Butler, C. M.
Hall, & J. Jenkins (Eds.), Tourism and Recreation in Rural Areas. (pp. 139–156). West Sussex: Wiley.
Jackson, K. M., Payne, L. L., & Stolley, K. S. (2015). The intersection of star culture in America and interna-
tional medical tourism: Celebrity treatment. Maryland, MD: Lexington Books.
Joffe, R. (1992). City of Joy. Hollywood Movie.
Kahn, C. (2014, July 31). As ‘Voluntourism’explodes in popularity, who's it helping most? National
Public Radio.
Kothari, U. (2006). Critiquing “race”and racism in development discourse and practice. Progress in
Development Studies,6(1), 1–9.
Lalvani, S. (1995). Consuming the Exotic Other. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 12,263–286.
Lapierre, D. (1985). City of joy. New York, NY: Time Warner Books.
Lough, B. J., & Carter-Black, J. (2015). Confronting the white elephant: International volunteering and
racial (dis)advantage. Progress in Development Studies,15(3), 207–220.
Macaulay, T. B. (1967). Macaulay: Prose and poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Original
work published 1843).
Mani, L. (1987). Contentious traditions: The debate on SATI in colonial India. Cultural Critique,7, 119–
156.
McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial conquest. New York,
NY: Routledge.
McEwan, C. (2001). Postcolonialism, feminism and development: Intersections and dilemmas. Prog-
ress in Development Studies,1(1), 93–111.
McGehee, N., & Andereck, K. (2008). ‘Pettin’the critters’: Exploring the complex relationship between
volunteers and the voluntoured in McDowell County, WV, USA and Tijuana, Mexico. In S. Wearing
K. Lyons (Eds.), Journeys of discovery in volunteer tourism: International case study perspectives) (pp.
12–24). Oxfordshire: CABI.
McGehee, N. G. (2007). An agri-tourism systems model: A Weberian perspective. Journal of Sustain-
able Tourism,15(2), 111–124.
Mies, M., & Shiva, V. (1993). Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books.
Mohanty, C. T. (1988). Under western eyes: Feminist scholarhship and colonial discourses. Feminist
Review,30,61–88.
Mostafanezhad, M. (2013). The politics of aesthetics in volunteer tourism. Annals of Tourism Research,
43, 150–169.
Muggeridge, M. (1971). Something beautiful for God: Mother Teresa of Calcutta. London: Collins.
Narayan, U. (1997). Dislocating cultures: Identities, traditions and third-world feminism. New York, NY:
Routledge.
656 R. BANDYOPADHYAY AND V. PATIL
Downloaded by [Ranjan Bandyopadhyay] at 01:22 18 November 2017
Nayar, P. K. (2005). Marvelous excesses: English travel writing and India, 1608–1727. Journal of British
Studies,44(2), 213–238.
Ng~
ug
~
ı,waT.(1986). Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. Portsmouth,
NH: Heinemann.
Nussbaum, F. A. (Ed.). (2003). The global eighteenth century. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Patil, V. (2008). Negotiating decolonization in the United Nations: Politics of space, identity and interna-
tional community. New York, NY: Routledge.
Patil, V. (2009). Contending masculinities: The gendered (Re) negotiation of Colonial Hierarchy in the
united nations debates on decolonization. Theory and Society,38(2), 195–215.
Prashad, V. (2012). Mother Teresa as the mirror of Bourgeois Guilt. In N. Samina S. Rajini (Eds.), White
women in racialized spaces: Imaginative transformation and ethical action in literature (illustrated
ed.) (pp. 67–68). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Pratt, M. L. (1992). Imperial eyes: Travel writing and transculturation. London: Routledge.
Sahle, N. (2011). Post-development. In P. Haslam J. Schafer P. Beaudet (Eds.), An introduction to inter-
national development: Approaches, actors and issues (pp. 66–82). (2nd ed. Don Mills: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Said, E. (1979). Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Sardar, Z. (1999). Orientalism: Concepts in the Social Sciences . Buckingham: Open University Press.
Sebastiani, S. (2013). The Scottish enlightenment: Race, gender and the limits of progress. New York, NY:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Sinha, M. (1995). Colonial masculinity: The ‘manly Englishman’and the ‘effeminate Bengali’in the late
19th century. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Spivak, C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpre-
tation of culture (pp. 24–33). London: Macmillan.
Spivak, C. (1990). The post-colonial critic: interviews, strategies, dialogues. London: Routledge.
Stoler, A. (1997). Making empire respectable: the politics of race and sexual morality in twentieth-
century colonial cultures. In A. McClintock A. Mufti E. Shohat (Eds.), Dangerous liaisons: Gender,
nation and postcolonial perspectives (pp. 344–373). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press.
Taylor, A. (2015, March 15). Why Mother Teresa is still no saint to many of her critics. The Washington
Post.
Teltcher, K. (1995). India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600–1800. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
UNICEF. (2014). Children of the Recession: The impact of the economic crisis on child well-being in rich
countries. Innocenti Report Card 12. UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre: Florence.
Van der Veer, P. (2001). Transnational Religion. Paper presented at Conference on Transnational
Migration: Comparative Perspectives, Princeton, NJ.
Ver Beek, K. (2006). The impact of short-term missions: A case study of house construction in Hondu-
ras after Hurricane Mitch. Missiology: An International Review,34(4), 477–496.
Wangari, E. (2002). Reproductive technologies: A third world feminist perspective. In K. Saunders
(Ed.), Feminist post-development thought: Rethinking modernity, post-colonialism & representation
(pp. 298-312).London: Zed Books.
Wearing, S. (2001). Volunteer tourism: Experiences that make a difference. New York, NY: CABI.
Wearing, S., & McGehee, N. (2013). Volunteer tourism: A review. Tourism Management,38, 120–130.
Wilson, J., & Janoski, T. (1995). The contribution of religion to volunteer work. Sociology of Religion,56
(2), 137–152.
Wilson, K. (2004). Empire, gender and modernity in the eighteenth century. In P. Levine (Ed.), Gender
and Empire (pp. 14–45). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Woollacott, A. (2006). Gender and empire. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Young, R. (2003). Postcolonialism: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zakaria, R. (2014, April 21). The white tourist’s burden. Aljazeera America.
TOURISM GEOGRAPHIES 657
Downloaded by [Ranjan Bandyopadhyay] at 01:22 18 November 2017
