Domestic volunteer tourism in Thailand

Introduction

‘Volunteer tourism’, or ‘voluntourism’, typically refers to a type of tourism where people pay to participate in volunteer work, such as development or conservation projects, for parts or the whole duration of their trip (Brown, 2005; Wearing, 2001). Volunteer tourism has attracted attention in recent years both as a type of tourism and as a subject of academic interest (Wearing and McGehee, 2013). Much of this attention has focused on international volunteer tourism, which sees tourists from developed countries travelling to developing countries to do volunteering activities. There have been numerous positive and inspiring accounts of volunteers’ experiences presented through popular and social media, though there is also a growing body of research that looks at this phenomenon through a more critical lens. These studies examine the unequal power relations that are inherent in volunteer tourism, analysing it as a postcolonial encounter (Palacios, 2010) or in terms of the geopolitics of the global North and South (Mostafanezhad, 2014a). A number of researchers also root volunteer tourism firmly within a discourse of neoliberal transformations: how, despite the volunteers’ best intentions, volunteer tourism tends to perpetuate the logic of neoliberalism and ultimately does little to address the broader structural inequalities that underlie many of the problems the volunteers are trying to alleviate (e.g. Mostafanezhad, 2014b; Vrasti, 2013).

In this article, I focus on domestic volunteer tourism in Thailand and build upon the growing area of research that critically examines volunteer tourism. By domestic volunteer tourism, I refer to trips organised by Thai NGOs working in development, with the aim of taking mostly middle class Thais who reside in Bangkok and other urban centres to remote villages in Thailand to undertake volunteering activities.

Volunteer tourism in Thailand, as elsewhere, is embedded in unequal power relations and exemplifies a neoliberal approach to development and humanitarianism. Such an approach tends to promote individual and corporate giving as a morally and economically viable means through which to respond to societal needs in lieu of state intervention in mitigating the negative effects of capitalism (King, 2006: 27; Poppendieck, 1999). It would be too simplistic, however, to attribute the rise of volunteer tourism simply to a global neoliberal transformation and its associated shift in welfare provision from the state to the individual; ¹ neoliberalism is not a monolithic force, but is manifest within certain political, economic and social conditions (e.g. Ferguson, 2010; Springer, 2015). ² In Thailand, the dominant Thai volunteer discourse, as typified by the Volunteer Spirit campaign (introduced below), is inevitably linked to the political struggles and social transformations that the country has witnessed in recent times. In particular, it is part of the ongoing political struggle to preserve a status quo that promotes a form of governance concerned with moral rule by ‘good people’ (khon di). In this discourse, the middle classes are often reproduced as custodians of Thai politics and morality, acting on behalf of the masses who are not yet ‘ready’ to participate in democratic politics. Hence, voluntourist trips in Thailand are very much about the cultivation of a certain political subjectivity and power relations that are congruent with both neoliberal transformations and a specific type of moral politics.

In order to explore these processes of structural transformation, moral politics, subjectivity cultivation and power relations, the article begins by providing some historical context to demonstrate how changing political, social and economic circumstances have shaped volunteer discourses and practices in Thailand. Specifically, I look at the radical politics of the 1960s and 1970s and how this influenced volunteering activities that emerged during that period. Next, I explore how radical politics gave way to moral politics, with the emphasis shifting from political economy to the cultivation of morality, thus providing a context for understanding the current volunteer discourse and practices in Thailand, as typified by the Volunteer Spirit movement. I then illustrate how volunteer tourist trips fit particularly well with the logic and approach promoted by Volunteer Spirit, before providing an ethnographic account of a voluntourist trip in which I participated as part of anthropological field research conducted in Thailand from December 2007 to April 2009. ³ In describing the trip in detail, I aim to show how the different elements of a voluntourist trip contributed to the creation of a space for volunteers to experience and embody the ideals associated with Volunteer Spirit in intensified ways. In the final part of the article, I reflect on the subjectivity and social relations that voluntourist trips reproduce, particularly in light of the ongoing political crisis in Thailand.

Historical context: From radical to moral politics

Although a number of voluntary organisations had existed in Thailand since the late nineteenth century, ⁴ it was in the 1960s and 1970s that volunteering became institutionalised in universities and gained broader participation in Thai society. This was a period where voices critical of both the country’s oppressive military regime and its economic-focused development policies began to emerge. One such voice was that of Puey Ungpakorn, a former governor of the Bank of Thailand and rector of Thammasat University, who criticised the government’s emphasis on economic growth at the expense of other human development. ⁵ He was instrumental in establishing both development NGOs in Thailand and volunteering programmes in universities. He helped found Thammasat University’s Graduate Volunteer Programme in 1969, which still exists today. The programme aims to ‘cultivate students’ interest in rural development’ and takes one year to complete, with time split between academic training and fieldwork in rural areas (Sakuna et al., 2007). There are also shorter ‘volunteer development camps’ (khai asa pattana), in which university students go to rural villages for a short period of time to ‘do useful things for society’ (bamphen prayot), such as building roads, bridges, schools and irrigation dams for villagers (Samnao, 1998). Contemporary voluntourist trips were modelled upon these volunteer development camps. Indeed, they are sometimes referred to as ‘volunteer camps’ (khai asa).

Some academics believe that volunteer programmes and volunteer development camps provided fertile grounds for both students and villagers to become politicised. Giles Ji Ungpakorn (2007: 72), for example, suggests that participating in these camps helped to facilitate the future cooperation between students, small farmers and workers in the Triple Alliance, which was formed in 1975 to fight social injustice. Although not all those involved with volunteering in this period agreed with the emerging radical politics, including the ideology of the Communist Party of Thailand, volunteering in universities came to be seen as part of these radical forces calling for change. Government officials perceived volunteer camps as enough of a threat that they proceeded to ban them following the political crisis of 1976.

The growing tensions between the existing regime and those calling for change exploded in October 1976, when right-wing vigilante groups brutally attacked students who had gathered inside Thammasat University. This event, known simply as ‘6 October’, marked a turning point and began a process in which the military took control of the country and ‘obliterated’ left-wing forces that had emerged (Girling, 1981: 216–218). Political parties, student unions, farmers’ organisations and centre-left and left-wing newspapers were closed. The tough crackdown on left-wing forces had a lasting impact and significantly contributed to a shift in focus among those involved in NGOs and volunteering from broadly Marxist-oriented politics towards smaller-scale, issue-based politics. ⁶ Such an approach was seen to be less ‘threatening’ and therefore less likely to provoke state repression.

NGOs feel that developing people’s consciousness and carrying out small-scale peaceful, practical activities is a more appropriate and secure path to social change in Thai contexts. Thai NGOs view social development not as an overt struggle but as a long, peaceful process of change in consciousness. A great deal of this theoretical orientation is rooted in prevailing cultural values and an appreciation of current political realities, particularly local government officials’ distrust of NGOs. The unhappy experience of many Thai intellectuals with constitutional and rapid popular mobilisation efforts, right-wing violence and an ideologically backward Communist Party during the 1970s have also played a part in producing a reaction against much radical social theory and the confrontational political activism practiced in other Asian countries. (The Thai Volunteer Service’s Directory 1987, cited in Connors, 2007: 217–218, emphasis added)

The emphasis on morality has continued to gain traction. In the last decade or so, there have been ongoing attempts to explicitly link morality to political legitimacy. Conservative elements in Thailand have long promoted the idea that ‘Western’ democracy inevitably creates confrontation, disunity and disharmony. The country should therefore adopt a ‘Thai-style democracy’ (Connors, 2007; Hewison and Kengkij, 2010). Under such a system, it is a group of ‘good men’ who should be entrusted with managing national politics, rather than the electorate, the majority of whom are deemed unready to participate. Although there have been political struggles against this notion, particularly in the last tumultuous decade or so, since May 2014 democracy has been suspended in Thailand and the country is currently governed by a group of ‘good people’ (see e.g. Mairs, 2015). As the article will later explore, the most popular and visible volunteer movement today could be seen as part of this politics of ‘good people’. Encounters on voluntourist trips are thus shaped by a discourse which emphasises paternalist, moralistic relations between the privileged and the marginalised, with the latter seen as individuals in need of guidance and protection, rather than as equal citizens deserving of certain rights and entitlements.

Volunteering now: Volunteer Spirit

The founding of the influential Volunteer Spirit Network after the tsunami disaster of December 2004 arguably reflected and further consolidated the aforementioned trend towards ‘small-scale, peaceful and practical activities’ (cited in Connors, 2007: 217–218). The Network acts as an umbrella organisation, providing a platform for volunteer organisations to organise, network and promote volunteer work (more details below). While the Volunteer Spirit Network does not represent all forms of volunteering, the discourse and kinds of volunteering activities it promotes have become very visible and influential, particularly amongst the urban middle classes.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1

Positive power (phalang buak).

Talking about the inspiration behind the Volunteer Spirit Network, Dr Michita Champathes Rodsutti (2008), ⁸ one of its founders, said that she was moved by the outpouring of generosity and the way people came together to help victims following the tsunami disaster. She believed that this terrible tragedy had awakened the previously hidden power of the ‘volunteer spirit’ (phalang chit asa) of Thai people. The Volunteer Spirit Network was thus set up with the aim of trying to preserve this volunteer spirit long after the immediate post-tsunami rescue period was over.

The underlying assumption of the above illustration (see Figure 1) is that as an individual does volunteer work, positive power is lit within them. As more and more people do volunteer work, more and more positive power is cultivated, creating a sea of positive and moral force. Here, change occurs at the individual level and becomes significant as the number of people increases. In other words, a ‘better’ Thailand will be brought about through the cultivation of volunteer spirit and other moral values. As General Surayud Chulanont, a former prime minister, said: ‘Thailand will prosper if there are more good people and we have to increase the ratio of good people’ ( S! News, 2010). In this conceptualisation, change, in the form of re-moralisation, occurs within the volunteers and then spreads outwards to the societal level. As Mulder (1997: 153) notes, in this model, an individual is conceptualised as a moral agent whose actions drive and determine the condition of society, rather than the other way around. As other academics have noted (e.g. Mostafanezhad, 2014b; Vrasti, 2013), the way in which individuals are seen and promoted as primary agents of change involves a familiar neoliberal narrative.

To create this sea of change, the Volunteer Spirit Network aims to attract as many people to volunteering as possible. The assumption is that once people are given opportunities to volunteer, the volunteer spirit will be lit within them and grow. To increase public interest in volunteering, the Volunteer Spirit Network emphasises choice and variety so ‘people can choose activities that suit their personal skills and interests’ (Kanchita et al., n.d.: 1). As Dr Michita noted, in the past, volunteer opportunities were limited and volunteer programmes typically required long-term commitment, which many prospective volunteers found daunting. To this end, the Volunteer Spirit website has become a virtual platform, providing a regularly updated list of volunteering opportunities, as well as other educational resources. The choices are numerous and popular activities include visiting children in hospitals, organising activities for children living in orphanages, reading to students at schools for the blind and, of course, voluntourist trips.

In many ways, voluntourist trips fit perfectly with the founding logic of the Volunteer Spirit Network. There is a large variety of trips advertised on the Volunteer Spirit website and they typically last between two and five days, thus not requiring a huge amount of commitment. The trips typically involve taking participants, most of whom are Bangkok-based, to remote parts of Thailand. They often combine touristic elements, such as sightseeing and visits to famous landmarks, with opportunities to do volunteering activities. These include taking part in conservation projects; building roads, bridges, mud houses and irrigation dams; and teaching and doing activities with children. As we will see, although voluntourist trips are based on the volunteer development camps of the 1960s and 1970s, there is less emphasis on social justice and politicisation, and more emphasis on the ideal that volunteers should work together in unity with volunteer spirit. There is often not much space given to political discussions on voluntourist trips.

It could be argued that, in this context, the emphasis is not so much on whether volunteering activities can make a significant difference to the lives of those the volunteers aim to help. Rather, attention should be paid particularly to the change that is supposedly occurring within the individual volunteer. Given the short-term and temporary nature of most volunteer spirit activities, it is perhaps likely to be the case that volunteering will not make a significant impact on the ‘receiving’ communities. At a conference on volunteering in July 2008, a professor said that, ‘it does not matter if our volunteering activities do not lead to social change. As long as we can develop the chit [pattana chit or moral self] of our university students, I’d say we’ve already gained something worthwhile’. ⁹ This is not to say, however, that the volunteers are deliberately ‘using’ those in need to gain moral and other forms of capital. Indeed, the aim of this article is not to ‘reveal’ whether the motives of volunteers are purely ‘altruistic’ or not. Rather, it aims to show how volunteer discourse and practice are situated within broader power relations, which govern both the volunteers themselves and those they aim to help. In this case, cultivating moral value within the volunteers is seen as the ‘natural’ and appropriate way forward for the Thai nation.

During fieldwork, I took part in three voluntourist trips, which were organised by two Thai development NGOs. Both organisations work to promote the rights of Thailand’s highland ethnic minority groups. The NGOs charged participants a relatively small fee (in comparison to commercial tour operators) to cover basic running costs. Through their works, the NGOs came to know these ‘hill tribe’ communities well and some of these villages acted as host communities during the trips. On the first trip, I went with 12 other volunteers to a small village located along the Thai-Burmese border. We spent time teaching children in the village how to make hand puppets and the trip culminated in a hand puppet show, performed by both the volunteers and the children. For the second trip, I journeyed with 70 volunteers to the NGO’s base in the north of Thailand to help organise Children’s Day festivities for 1,500 ‘hill-tribe’ children (dek chao khao). This involved erecting a large stage, setting up a funfair and preparing 1500 gift bags containing donated toys, clothes and stationery for the children. On the third trip, I travelled to a small Lisu ¹⁰ village to become a volunteer teacher (khru asa). I describe this trip in detail below.

Ethnography: Volunteer teacher trip

On a cool and misty February morning, I walked towards the central bus station in Chiang Rai, as instructed by an email sent out by the NGO prior to the trip. As I approached the station, I could see groups of people standing together, making polite conversation. As I joined them and introduced myself, I learned that most had just taken overnight buses from Bangkok. Although there were a few who came from other parts of Thailand, the overwhelming majority came from the capital. As we waited and chatted, more people drifted in to join the groups. The majority of participants were young professionals in their twenties and thirties, though there were also several older volunteers. By 9.30 am, most of the 63 participants, who had registered and paid a fee of 2000 baht (approximately £37), had arrived at the station.

Khru Somchai, ¹¹ an experienced and long-term staff member of the NGO, then appeared and gathered everyone together. He made a quick introduction and drew our attention to some huge cardboard boxes, containing books, stationery and sports equipment, which had been donated to the NGO. Everyone was quick to help move the boxes into the waiting song thaeo or buses with two rows of seats facing towards one another. The buses then made their way towards the NGO’s base, just outside the city centre. En route, we stopped at the monument of King Meng Rai, the founder of Chiang Rai, to pay respects and ask for his blessings during our stay. During our journey in the song thaeo, my fellow passengers exchanged stories about their previous trips to the north. One recounted a story of the ‘hill-tribe’ people (chao khao) she had met in the touristy parts of nearby Chiang Mai and how they were very ‘modern’ (than samai), walking around with mobile phones and MP3 players.

Finally, we arrived at the NGO’s base, which had the look and feel of a small village, with a number of houses and offices dotted around the area. Khru Somchai gathered everyone in what was usually a storage room to watch a video presentation about the NGO, the Lisu village that we were to stay in and the village’s school. We learned a few Lisu words and phrases such as ‘hello’, ‘thank you’ and ‘the food is delicious!’. Khru Somchai then went over the schedule, which had been posted on the website. He reiterated the rules: we were not to give money to the children, we were not to give out our mobile phone numbers, we were not to give an empty promise that we would come back again soon and we were not to drink or smoke in front of the children. ‘You are here as a teacher [khru]. The children will address you as a teacher, so please act like one. Set a good example’, stressed Khru Somchai.

All the participants on the trip, now addressed as khru, then sat in a large circle on the floor and introduced themselves to the rest of the group. Most could be described as middle class based on their education and/or profession. Only a handful of people had a background in teaching. Most people had found out about the trip through the internet, particularly the Volunteer Spirit Network’s website, and through word-of-mouth from friends and acquaintances. When asked to say why they had decided to come on the trip, the most common replies were: ‘to do something useful for society’, ‘to give back’, ‘to meet new people’ and ‘to see different parts of Thailand’. After the session, a quick lunch followed and we were then instructed to move the boxes and the bags from the song thaeo that had taken us to the NGO’s base into even bigger song thaeo, fitted with six tires. We hopped on these massive vehicles and journeyed towards the Lisu village, approximately 100 km away.

The village is situated on a mountain top (doi) and it took approximately two hours to reach our destination. When we arrived at the village’s school, we could see that teaching had just finished for the day and students were wandering around the school ground, presumably waiting for their visitors to arrive. I later learned that, as the village was quite remote, it rarely received a big group of visitors like this. Once we got off the song thaeo, Khru Somchai told us to stand in line so the students could come forward to pick who they would like to have as their house guests for the next four days. Then he handed us bags filled with food supplies, including eggs, rice, dried sausage, cooking oil, fish sauce and vegetables. Ratree, ¹² a girl in Year 4, picked two other volunteer teachers and me to stay in her family home, located just a short distance away from the school.

Ratree lived with her grandparents, her mother and her aunt-in-law. A few other relatives lived in a house next door. Ratree’s father and uncle were away working in other parts of Thailand. It was indeed common for them to be away for long periods of time. Ratree’s mother herself had only recently returned to live in the village, having spent the previous three years working in another city. The family showed us our sleeping area and then invited us to join in the family dinner. Afterwards, we chatted with our host grandfather and practiced the Lisu phrases we had learned earlier.

After dinner, we walked back to the school with Ratree. While waiting for the evening activities to commence, the volunteer teachers compared notes about their accommodation and dinner. One group was staying with a relatively well-off host family. Although they felt comfortable, they felt that the house was rather ‘posh’ (ru) and feared missing out on having the same ‘authentic’ experience as everyone else. Although we were invited to share the family meal, many people cooked dinner themselves and spoke excitedly about preparing a meal from scratch, without using any processed ingredients or a microwave.

After everyone had arrived at the school, we started the campfire activities (kitkam santhanakan). To our delight, the students seemed to enjoy the games we had planned. Afterwards, we were directed to the school canteen to prepare for the next day. During the planning session, the village’s head (pho luang) and the school’s headmaster came to greet us and gave brief speeches, thanking the volunteer teachers for coming to visit the village and the school.

The next day, Saturday, we came back to the school at 8.00 am. The day began with a familiar school routine: standing in line to sing the national anthem and chanting a Buddhist prayer. Then the lessons started and continued through the rest of the day, with a lunch break in between. The volunteer teachers wanted to make the lessons as fun and interactive as possible and many brought along colourful visual aids, props, games and prizes from Bangkok. Our group, made up of 11 volunteer teachers, was responsible for teaching Year 4, which had 10 students. We taught lessons in maths, Thai, English and art. By the end of the day, each student had accumulated an armful of art works, sweets and other prizes that they had won throughout the day. After dinner with our host families, we came straight back to the school for another round of campfire activities. Before the day came to a close, we were called to meet in the school canteen to assess how the day’s lessons had gone. Then we planned for the next day’s activities and headed home to sleep.

On Sunday, we were told to rise at 4.00 am so we could squeeze in a trip to the local coffee factory before school started. We gathered at the school in relative darkness before dawn and then piled ourselves into pick-up vans. We spent the next several hours being tourists, admiring the scenery and tasting freshly brewed coffee. We arrived back at 9.00 am and could see that the students were already waiting for us. Today, the teaching and learning took place outside the classrooms, with groups of students rotating around the different ‘learning bases’ that the volunteer teachers had set up. Some bases focused on physical activities such as games and sports, others on arts and crafts and reading. The day went on until around 5.00 pm. Everyone then helped to tidy up the school ground, making sure that it was free of litter. Afterwards, with a little bit of free time before dinner, some volunteer teachers took a walk around the village, with the students proudly acting as tour guides.

As this was our last evening in the village, Khru Somchai told us to borrow traditional Lisu costumes from our host families, to which we happily obliged. When we came back to the school ground, we stood and joined hands with the children and villagers, forming a big circle. An elderly gentleman at the centre of the circle started playing a musical instrument and led the dance. The atmosphere felt truly magical, full of smiles and laughter. The evening was not quite picture perfect, however. A group of teenage boys came to stand just outside the circle. These were the same boys we had seen riding motorcycles in and out of the village during our stay. They were wearing casual clothing, instead of the traditional costumes, and were decidedly not joining in with the festivity. They would occasionally make cat calls and tease some of the girls. We learned that the boys were from the village but went to high school outside. Some volunteer teachers looked at the boys with a certain amount of disdain and wondered whether it was wise for children to further their education by attending a school outside the village ‘if they were going to come back like that’.

After the dance, we made our way to the school canteen once more to review how the day’s activities had gone. After the session was done, Khru Somchai asked each group of volunteer teachers, together with their students, to organise themselves into ‘human sculptures’. The sculptures were to represent what this trip had taught us. Most of the resulting ‘sculptures’ placed children at the centre, with adults forming circles around them, or with children on top of a pyramid, with adults kneeling as a base. When asked to elaborate, the volunteer teachers spoke of the responsibility adults had towards children and how children’s interests should be central and a priority. They also spoke about the importance of unity or samakkhi: ¹³ how we can overcome any hardship and obstacle if everyone works together in unity to achieve a common goal.

After we had dismantled the ‘sculptures’, the atmosphere became more sombre and serious. Khru Somchai switched off the light and the room became dark, apart from the soft glow of a single lit candle. He said that for the next hour or so, the platform would be open for people to come forward and say whatever was on their mind. He asked the audience to please listen in silence without answering back. The first person moved towards the centre of the circle and Khru Somchai passed the lit candle to him. Holding the candle in his hand, he started speaking about his busy life in Bangkok and how coming to the countryside, ‘where life was simpler’, had recharged his batteries. Once he finished, he passed the candle onto the next speaker. Several people who followed commented on the villagers’ way of life, or at least their perception of it. ‘The children have shown me how to live Sufficiently ¹⁴ …the family grows their own vegetables, keeps chickens and pigs and they have fresh food to eat every day’. ‘Being here has really made me ask myself—could I live on 30 baht [50 pence] a day? My host family here lives on 30 baht a day and they are happy’. One young man in his twenties spoke movingly about overcoming a life-threatening illness and how this had changed his whole outlook on life. Now he wanted to ‘give to society’. As he spoke, several volunteers were moved to tears and the atmosphere became even more emotionally charged. Finally, the evening drew to a close at around 10.00 pm and we walked quietly back to our host families.

On the last day, we gathered at the school for the final time. After singing the national anthem with the students, we formally presented the gifts that had been donated to the NGO to the school’s headmaster and the village’s head. Afterwards, volunteer teachers and students joined hands to form a large circle. Khru Somchai then asked each volunteer teacher to go around the circle and say ‘goodbye’ to each student. As we bade farewell, I could hear the volunteer teachers wishing students luck and telling them to study hard and be good (pen dek di). By this point, many students were in floods of tears, which also made the volunteer teachers cry. Once everyone had gone around the circle, the volunteer teachers and the students hugged again and again. Both sides made promises to write letters and keep in touch. After the long final goodbyes, we loaded our bags back into the song thaeo and departed from the village.

After the initial sadness had subsided, people started exchanging contact details, singing and making the most of these last moments of the trip. The buses made a one-hour detour to a famous temple, our last tourist stop, before heading back to the central bus station, where the journey had all started just a few days ago. The volunteer teachers made promises to stay in touch and to organise a reunion meeting back in Bangkok. ¹⁵

Analysis: Volunteer Spirit ideals

From the above description, we can see that even though the trip lasted only a few days, each day was packed full of activities. The trip was also organised in such a way that there were many opportunities for participants to bond and for emotionally charged moments to occur. In other words, the trip created a context in which the participants could experience volunteerism in an intensified and emotionally heightened way that they would not experience in their daily lives. As Richard and Rudnyckyj (2009) note, these elements help to create an ‘economy of affect’, through which a certain subjectivity is produced.

In his study of pilgrimage, Morinis (1992: 4) argues that pilgrimage can be defined as any ‘journey undertaken by a person in quest of a place or a state that he or she believes to embody a valued ideal’. The destinations at the end of such journeys need not be ostensibly religious settings, but instead ‘share being an intensified version of some ideals that the pilgrim values but cannot achieve at home’ (Morinis, 1992: 4). For Morinis, such ideals can be understood as ‘sacred’ in that they ‘are the image of perfection that a human being sets out to encounter or become on a pilgrimage’ (Morinis, 1992: 2). I discuss in detail how voluntourist trips could be analysed as pilgrimages elsewhere, ¹⁶ but here I focus on the way in which they provide an opportunity for the volunteers to experience and embody the valued ideals associated with the notion of volunteer spirit in ways that they would not in their everyday lives.

The notion of volunteer spirit, as presented in popular discourse, is meant to convey something more than simply doing one’s prescribed tasks as a volunteer. As one volunteer explained to me:

if someone comes to volunteer at the orphanage, but leaves immediately once the agreed time is up, without staying behind to tidy up, they don’t have true volunteer spirit. Having volunteer spirit is a willingness to help anyone, anywhere, anyhow, without expecting anything in return.

The notion of volunteer spirit is popularly associated with a kind of utopianism. A consistent narrative that one hears is: we can make the world a better place if we learn to give more and work with volunteer spirit. The emphasis is very much on individuals giving both on an individual basis and by coming together and working in unity (samakkhi). On voluntourist trips, the volunteers witnessed not only people behaving with individual volunteer spirit, but also what their collective efforts, their collective volunteer spirit, could result in. Tasks that might have seemed formidable could be accomplished without delay. In other words, the volunteers saw instant ‘physical proofs’ of what could happen when everyone worked together, embodying the ideals associated with volunteer spirit. As one volunteer wrote in a poem afterwards: ‘one heart, one goal and we saw how a dream could come true with our hands’. As the volunteer quoted above said, this was not something one necessarily witnessed in everyday life or on other trips.

But perhaps equally important as what they could witness with their eyes – if not more important – was what the volunteers said they could feel in their hearts. They described moments when they felt that they had made a connection and a difference, however small, in someone’s life. The volunteer teachers talked about these ‘precious and invaluable’ (mi kha mak) moments when the children appeared completely engrossed in what they were saying, or when the children shared genuine laughs and smiles. ¹⁷ During these moments, there was a total immersion in the immediacy of the situation, the here and now. Questions such as why these children had to rely on donations and acts of kindness from volunteers in the first place, or what other long-term solutions for them there could be, felt far away. Indeed, in the volunteer spirit discourse, discussions on the structural causes of poverty, social and economic inequalities, the role that ‘we’ – the middle classes – may play in these problems and the issues of rights and entitlements are often absent. Perhaps the lack of engagement with potentially ugly and messy issues on these trips enhances the belief that we can make a difference and helps to maintain a positive atmosphere. ¹⁸

There is thus a performative aspect to voluntourist trips, in that volunteers are compelled to act, gesture and behave in ways that embody the norms associated with the volunteer spirit discourse. Following Butler (1990), performative here does not imply voluntarism. It is not a performance in a theatrical sense, where an actor can choose a script and act. Rather the subject is constrained by possibilities, i.e. ones that help maintain the dominant discourse and categories. The repetitions and reiterations of these ideals mean that certain possibilities for action, such as helping in small, intimate and empathetic ways, come to feel real and natural. The repetitions and re-enactments of such norms contribute to the constitution of a certain subjectivity. If we take subjection to mean the process through which individuals come to understand themselves, their position and possibilities for action in the world (Vrasti, 2013: 128), voluntourist trips then contribute to the reproduction of a type of subjectivity that is congruent with the dominant discourse that emphasises individual action, morality and depoliticisation. In this case, a ‘good’ Thai subject is someone who cultivates morality, helps others with volunteer spirit and works together in unity. Subjectivity is of course not only how subjects come to see themselves and their positions in the world, but also how they relate to others in society, which I now examine.

Subjectivity and relations with the other

Scholars of the anthropology of tourism have long written about tourists who feel alienated by contemporary life and who travel to search for a world that is more ‘whole’ and ‘authentic’ or as yet undiminished by modernity (e.g. MacCannell, 1976). Selwyn (1996: 21) suggests that in the tourists’ encounter with the Other, the Other often comes from an imagined world which is ‘variously pre-modern, pre-commoditised’. Academics researching on Thailand have also written about the way rural Thailand, particularly the north, is portrayed as a place to go to experience something unspoiled and to encounter the Other (Evrard and Prasit, 2009). Ethnic minority groups in particular tend to be seen as ‘simple’ and ‘governable subjects’ (Latt, 2008). ¹⁹ A desire to have this kind of experience and encounter was evident on the voluntourist trips. As mentioned, many volunteers spoke about their ‘need to escape an urban life’ and their admiration for the villagers’ ‘simple’ way of life.

At the beginning of 2009, many highland villages, including the Lisu village we were due to visit, were featured in the evening news. In a brief segment titled ‘a typical day at school’, we saw children sitting in their classrooms dressed in full tribal costumes and then engaged in traditional games and activities such as weaving. As the volunteers spent time in the village, however, they came to realise that what was portrayed on television was not necessarily the everyday reality in the village. The children did not dress in their tribal costumes on a daily basis. Many villagers mixed traditional items such as the Lisu velvet trousers with contemporary items such as t-shirts, both of which were bought rather than hand-sewn. Although many volunteers were aware of ‘staged authenticity’ (Selwyn, 1996: 6–7) elsewhere, some volunteers expressed disappointment that what they actually encountered in the village did not match the images they had in mind when they first signed up to the trip. I asked one volunteer why she said she felt disappointed, to which she replied:

the village is too developed (cha roen)…I don’t know what I was expecting…something a bit more rough-going and unspoiled perhaps. In a way, I felt that maybe we were already too late, the children had already been watching television for some time.

The way in which the middle classes feel that they should ‘protect’ those on the margin from the influence of modernity – by keeping the marginal on the margin – is not unfamiliar. Montgomery summarises this sentiment:

It is easy to look back to an idealised and static past where the peasant lived happily in his or her community, did not aspire to own consumer goods and did not migrate to cities looking for work. This world, however, is largely imaginary. Peasants have always migrated and aspired to better ways of living, although their options were always limited. While industrialisation and Westernisation have brought many social problems, they have also increased the options available to peasants. Indeed, these are the very conditions which have also produced a new and wealthy middle class, some of whom are now exhorting the peasantry not to aspire to similar lifestyles. In promoting such an ideal, any form of social change is ruled out. The peasants will be kept in their place and consigned to a life of producing ‘traditional culture’, even if it is economically impractical and unrewarding. (Montgomery, 2001: 150)

These perceptions and sentiments towards rural and hill tribe people may have been implicitly expressed during the trips, but they came to the fore during the recent (and indeed ongoing) political crisis. The middle classes, including the majority of the volunteers I had met, were quick to dismiss the protestors from the north and the northeast who descended upon the streets of Bangkok to demand political rights as ‘rural hordes’ or ‘stupid buffaloes’, who had been bought and corrupted by the ‘evil’ ex-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. ²⁰ As James Stent (2010) writes:

Many of them [the Bangkok elites] are extraordinarily intolerant of the red shirts [protestors] and do not distinguish the legitimate grievances of the protestors from the interests of Thaksin and are dismissive of the protestors as a ragged bunch of paid hooligans with whom it is useless to negotiate. Most have rarely had interaction with villagers or workers so do not know what they think. Their intransigence seems to be the largest obstacle to reconciliation.

Conclusion

In this article, I have traced how the cultivation of morality, both on individual and societal levels, has come to be the dominant way to approach development and humanitarianism in Thailand. I have also discussed how this focus on morality is connected to contemporary Thai politics, particularly the politics of ‘good people’, of which contemporary volunteering is part. I have argued that voluntourist trips exemplify the type of volunteering activities that are being promoted, in that they offer a variety of choices for the participants and they do not require a large amount of commitment. Voluntourist trips also provide a rather unique space for the participants to experience and embody the ideals and the utopianism associated with the popular Volunteer Spirit discourse. The subjectivity and the social relations being reproduced on the trips, however, tend to preserve, rather than challenge, existing power relations and the economic, social and political status quo.