all things as being of an equally dull and grey hue. However, there is a thirst for increasing amusement and greater excitement, which has not been satisfied by the fleeting, intense stimulations of the city (Simmel, 1978).
Against this background, Simmel (1978) is critical of those ‘fillings-in of time and consciousness’, which lie outside the sphere of work and which constitute leisure. Individuals in the city still wish to assert their individuality and differentiation through leisure pursuits, while seeking to belong to their own social group and its lifestyle (Frisby, 1989). New fashions for old distractions and stimulations constitute an essential part of leisure consumption and this rapidity of turnover in fashions is ever increasing. Sites of entertainment in all modes are increasingly devoted to the titillation of the senses and intoxication of the nerves by colour, glamour, light, music and above all, sexual excitement. Simmel (1978: 376) suggests that a range of sites, such as world exhibitions, trade exhibitions and large shopping malls, are where this predominantly occurs. The effect of the concentration of a world of commodities in a confined space is to overpower, disorientate and hypnotize the individual, whilst the ostentatious presentation is appropriate to the stimulation of overexcited and exhausted nerves.
The ultimate commodified leisure escape today can be seen in specific forms of tourism, where travel to far distant and different places is held out as ‘paradise gained’ (the return is never presented as ‘paradise lost’!). Perhaps the ultimate example of this commodification is the photographing of such experiences in an attempt to possess them and make them desirable. The image becomes all important, the personal experience of secondary consequence. As Jamieson (1962, cited in Bennett, 1998: 17) points out:
The American tourist no longer lets the landscape ‘be in its being’ as Heidegger would have said, but takes a snapshot of it, thereby transforming space into its own material image. The concrete activity of looking at a landscape — including, no doubt, the disquieting bewilderment with the activity itself, the anxiety that must arise when human beings, confronting the non-human wonder what they are doing there and what the point or purpose of such a confrontation might be in the first place — is thus comfortably replaced by the act of taking possession of it and converting it into a form of personal property.
It is within the context of contemporary touristic practices that questions arise as to the possibility of alternative forms of tourism arising as leisure in modern society; it is not only conceived as ‘free time’ but also as ‘freely chosen activity’ (Roberts, 1978) and as ‘self-enhancing experience’ (Kelly, 1982; Rojek, 2006). However, its commodification has the potential to constrain rather than enhance freedom (Cook, 2006). ‘Broader questions of freedom and control’, they say, ‘have been narrowed around the right to consumer choice’ (Clarke & Critcher, 1985: 232).
Glasser (1976) applies a similar argument to the notion of identity itself. He claims that the overriding compulsion governing actions and attitudes of individuals is the pursuit of a desired identity. In earlier societies, an ideal culturally constructed identity was promulgated and facilitated by religious observances or shamanistic practices. Today the pursuit of a desired identity, he says, has been channelled into consumerism through the circulation of an ideal consumer whose main ‘freely chosen’ leisure activity is consumption. Moreover, the construction of identity has come to be characterized by the objectifi-cation and commodification of one’s body and personality, where the market prompts the individual to promote and sell themselves (Baudrillard, 1998: 135; Bauman, 2007: 6). Under these conditions, identity becomes a kind of cultural resource, asset or possession (Lury, 1996: 8).
In this view, the tourist can therefore never achieve what they seek. The experience becomes a tranquillizer, a form of therapeutic leisure, rather than raising awareness in attempting to cancel out the stress of life. The individual is left with an unsatisfactory and unending search for some form of identity. Glasser (1976: 43) notes:
While the high priests of old aimed at an unchanging model of an ideal identity, the new priesthood aims to mould an ideal consumer, one who willingly makes the changes in his (sic) lifestyle demanded by competing marketing policies, accepting too, the idea that his (sic) immediate anxieties can be assuaged by buying new and more products, imagining that each piece of emotional comfort so obtained will be long lasting.
Thus, under the guise of a legitimate conservation activity leading to awareness and appreciation of nature and the exploration of the relationship between nature and the self, alternative forms of tourism — such as ecotourism — may themselves be underpinned by the consumption of nature in modern society.
Campbell (1983), following Weber, argues that the ‘spirit’ of modern consumerism rests upon an attitude of restless desire and discontent that produces consumption as an end in itself. Romanticism, he claims, conceived of as a ‘cultural movement which introduced the modern doctrines of self-expression and fulfilment’, is the most likely source of an ethic that legitimates such a spirit. Thus the ‘romantic ethic’ of the enlightenment provides a contradictory and compensatory ethic to the self-disciplinary future orientation of the Protestant work ethic, but one that is necessary for perpetual consumption. Campbell (1983) suggests that the two contradictory ethics have been accommodated in contemporary society by separating out the sphere of leisure, with its emphasis on self-expression and fulfilment, from the sphere of work with its self-denying disciplinary ethic. In this respect, alternative tourism experiences, such as those provided by ecotourism, may not in themselves legitimate nature as an entity but may simply provide another avenue for overtly consumptive leisure practices.
These ideas provide a key tension for this book. They are unlikely to be answered conclusively but they will be necessarily explored with a view to providing a better understanding of the difficulties that exist in moving toward an understanding of volunteer tourism experiences. The following section examines several of the underlying tenets and structural principles of the tourism industry in order to provide a specific context for tourist experience at the industry level. This analysis will provide an inclusive context for the idea of volunteer tourism.
Volunteer Tourism and the Tourism Industry
A range of institutions and organizations, such as Earthwatch, Community Aid Abroad, Global Volunteers Network, Conservation Volunteers Australia, British Trust for Conservation Volunteers, Voluntary Services Overseas, Rotary Youth Projects and Youth Challenge International play a role in providing tourism experiences that fall outside the boundaries of what is generally considered mass tourism. The type of organizations that fall generally in the volunteer category of experiences often provide international support and sponsorship for the implementation of research projects and community development. These organizations have operating philosophies and processes that use resources that may not otherwise be available to mass tourism — such as fundraising — as their infrastructure requires and uses different resource bases. Such a focus allows for the provision of experiences that are not generally encompassed in the analysis of mass tourism experiences — such as volun-teerism, community development and personal development. Whelan (1991), for example, was one of the first to identify organizations that recruit participants with free time and money to spend on sustainable development efforts. It is such organizations that provide the boundaries for examining alternative tourism experiences.
Against this background, long before volunteer tourism was labelled as such, a United Nations (1975) study stated: ‘international realities today and in the foreseeable future, therefore, point to the importance of paying increased attention to programs fostering the participation of youth in development’ (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 1975: 34). Therefore, the tourism industry (and in particular volunteer tourism) will certainly gain from having an understanding of the history of these types of organizations that have contributed to the provision of the tourism experience being sought by the youth who become involved.
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