(Wearing & Wearing, 1996). A focus on the tourist experience more effectively illustrates the conceptual, theoretical and practical differences and similarities between mass tourism and alternative forms of tourism, thus moving towards an understanding and elaboration of the potential benefits of alternative tourism experiences such as volunteer tourism (Wearing et al., 2005).
MacCannell (1976: 23–29) accords to the tourism experience a considerable degree of complexity in his analysis of it as a subclass of cultural experience, thus opening it to the intellectual and ideological debates of sociology. It is, therefore, essential in the examination of tourism experiences to analyse their social construction in order to understand their complexities and relationship to culture. MacCannell (1976: 23) suggests that tourism experiences are culturally constructed, having two basic components, which must be combined in order for the experience itself to occur. The first he terms a ‘model’ (an embodied ideal); the second an ‘influence’ (the changed, created, intensified belief or feeling that is based on the model). In this way the volunteer tourism experience needs a ‘model’ to explain the experiences it provides the participants, and where the tourist and community are the ‘influence’. The ‘medium’ (MacCannell, 1976: 24) corresponds to the agency that connects a model and its influence, in this case the face-to-face interaction that occurs at the destination site. The outside interest groups that exist in the community and tourism industry he calls a ‘production’. Thus, the tourist experience is a cultural production that is shaped by significant power groups who have a stake in the experience.
The tourist as an entity is seen by MacCannell (1976) as enjoying a privileged Western middle-class leisure activity. This is very obvious amongst volunteer tourists; they generally come from the middle or upper middle class (Simpson, 2004; Devereux, 2008). This is not a criticism but rather an acknowledgement of the need for income levels well above the poverty line in order to be able to consider volunteering in this manner. Therefore, to explore fully some of the structural differences between mass tourism and volunteer tourism, there is a need for models that enable the inclusion of commonalities as well as differences that influence and contribute to the understanding of tourist experiences.
Modernisation simultaneously separates these things from people and places that made them, breaks up the solidarity of the groups in which they originally figured as cultural elements, and brings the poor liberated from traditional attachments into the modern world where, as tourists, they may attempt to discover or reconstruct a cultural heritage or a social identity.
(MacCannell, 1976: 13)
Initially, it would seem that the investigation of the alternative tourism experience needs to move into a sphere of theory that allows the face-to-face interaction of everyday life to be followed (Goffman, 1974; MacCannell, 1976; Atkinson & Housley, 2003). This book does not attempt to diminish the relevance of macro-social influences on the tourist experience, but seeks to expand the relevance of the micro-social elements that contribute to make up the tourist experience. As MacCannell (1976: 10) suggests: ‘[A]ll tourists desire this deeper involvement with society and culture to some degree; it is a basic component of their motivation to travel’.
MacCannell (1992: 3) suggests that critical theory has prepared us for the absence of the subject, for an empty meeting ground including an empty signifier. He suggests deconstruction gives us access to the realm of absolute possibility in theory, in the imagination and where it exists, in life. However, he maintains that an allied sociology of interaction or dialogue is still necessary to gain access to the realm of contingency and determinism, and especially resistance to, and struggles against, determinism.
An understanding of this involvement can only come through a better explanation of the relational elements that the tourist experiences within and with the destination site. Goffman (1974) for example, structurally analysed social establishments in what he termed ‘front’ and ‘back’ regions. The front is the designated meeting place of hosts, guests, customers and service persons, and the ‘back’ is the place where members of the community retire between performances to relax and to prepare. MacCannell (1976: 94) suggests that being one of the ‘locals’ is being able to experience this ‘back’ region. But if tourists enter this back region, is the experience similar for all involved? This region may offer the ability to work beyond the images the tourist has of the site, which have been presented by the media or advertising in the attempt to sell a destination rather than the reality of what is there: ‘once a person, or an observer, moves offstage, or into the ‘setting,’ the real truth begins to reveal itself more or less automatically’ (MacCannell, 1976: 95).
I have claimed that the structure of this social space is intimately linked to touristic attitudes and I want to pursue this. The touristic way of getting in with the natives is to enter into a quest for authentic experiences, perceptions and insights.
(MacCannell, 1976: 105)
Rojek (1993: 133), in this respect, raises significant questions about the relation between ‘authenticity’ and experience. In relation to tourism, he states that the modernist quest for authenticity and self-realization has come to an end and is now equivalent to a mere consumption activity. However, in placing contemporary touristic practices within postmodernism, Rojek (1993: 126) states that postmodernism emphasizes the discontinuity of change and the irregularity of association and practice, leading to ‘the rejection of modernist universal categories of ontology and epistemology’. Rojek’s suggestion that tourism can become generalized and de-differentiated places emphasis on the different meanings and elements that arise. It questions the current order, but significantly, allows for tourism as a form of spectating and consumption.
Situating Volunteer Tourism in the Context of the Alternative Tourism Experience
Tourist development has not progressed without controversy. Disillusionment with ‘mass’ tourism (Mowforth & Munt, 1998; Sofield, 2003; Brammer et al., 2004; Holden, 2008) and the numerous problems it has engendered has led many observers and researchers to criticize the past methods and directions of tourism development and to offer instead the hope of ‘alternative tourism’. Pearce (1990) notes the term ‘alternative tourism’ has been adopted to denote options or strategies considered preferable to mass tourism. As R.W. Butler (1990: 40) states: ‘Alternative to what? Obviously not to other forms of tourism, but rather, an alternative to the least desired or most undesired type of tourism, or essentially what is known as mass tourism, such as the “golden hordes” of Turner and Ashe (1975), or the “mass institutionalized tourist” of Cohen (1972)’.
However, the term ‘alternative tourism’ is interpreted by various authors in widely differing and sometimes openly contradictory ways. R.W. Butler (1990), for example, places alternative tourism as up-market package tours of rich people to exotic destinations, mostly wilderness areas, whereas others define it as rucksack wandering by young people with limited financial means (e.g. Cohen, 1972), or anti-tourists seeking to avoid highly commodified mass tourist spaces (Welk, 2004).
The term ‘alternative’ logically implies an antithesis. It arises as the contrary to that which is seen as negative or detrimental about conventional tourism. In the domain of logic, an alternative is based on a dialectical paradigm that offers only two possibilities: a conclusion that is either one or the other. Therefore, the terminology of alternative and mass tourism are mutually interdependent, each relying on a series of value-laden judgements that themselves structure the definitional content of the terms.
Thus, the common feature of ‘alternative tourism’ is the suggestion of an attitude diametrically opposed to what is characteristically viewed as the ‘hard’ and therefore, ‘undesirable’ dominant forms of tourism. Like ‘alternative tourism’ this form itself has been designated by varying terms including conventional mass tourism (CMT; Mieczkowski, 1995) and mass tourism (MT;
