Voluntourism as cartography of self: A Deleuzian analysis of a postgraduate visit to India

Tourist subjectivities

Voluntourism has been linked to a search for fulfilment and personal growth, and according to a report from CREST (2013: 3), tourists across generations seek ‘an escape from the stress of urban life … searching for deeper meaning in their vacation experiences’. The escapism that tourism can provide transcends generational boundaries and is also a comment on the demands and stresses of the home society from which the tourist is escaping (Bone, 2013). Benson (2011) has explored the volunteer experience and refers to notions such as journeys of the self and life changing experiences. Tourism offers avenues of exploration and meaning-making; voluntourism can potentially amplify escapist desire by offering new idealistic roles and positionalities.

Everingham (2015) has critiqued the way in which voluntourism is studied and framed (particularly by academics). She found that in her interviews with tourists in Ecuador many did not primarily engage in voluntourism for altruistic reasons as is commonly suggested, instead she found that ‘volunteering was not actually about “saving the world” but gaining experience in the development field, practising Spanish and having a more fruitful “backstage” tourist experience’ (Everingham, 2015: 181). In this case, as probably with many others, the actual intention of tourists is to experience a different type of vacation. It has been suggested that it would be more ‘useful’ to conceptualise tourists as agents who have subjective experiences ‘constructed in interaction with the space and people that form the destination site’ (Wearing, 2002: 239) rather than considering tourist experiences to be homogeneous according to destination. These arguments call for research to address the subjectivity of voluntourism experiences from the perspectives of the tourists themselves who have the authority to comment on their own participation and perceptions of voluntourism first-hand. Hammersley (2014) did this herself and articulated the frustrations of being a voluntourist. She noted that ‘this experience and the personal frustrations of feeling that I was more of a burden (lacking both language and labour skills) than I was of assistance led me to question the role of volunteer tourists’ (Hammersley, 2014: 856). This approach is also recommended by Daly (2013: 68), who describes herself as ‘an unrepentant voluntourist’ and suggests that ‘these trips need to be properly deconstructed and critically examined in order to begin to make them truly transformative experiences’. Like many travellers, Daly (2013) valued the opportunity to unpack the experience once returned.

Voluntourism is commonly critiqued when a lack of critical reflection is not built into the experience. When voluntourism is positioned as a mere consumable product, rather than as an important social experience, there are risks associated with reinforcing stereotypes and neglecting to address issues of inequality (Freysinger and Harris, 2006; Griffin, 2013; Hammersley, 2014; Simpson, 2004). Frazer and Waitt (2016: 176) suggest that it is timely for tourism scholars to ‘think politically about pain’ in relation to volunteer tourism activity. Our research is an addition to the literature that critiques passive voluntourist experiences and our use of the philosophical ideas of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) contributes to this. Colebrook (2006: 36) states that Deleuze and Guattari were always concerned with ‘radical change’ and it is this aspect of their work that we apply to this project, thus opening up to the power of these ideas. According to Colebrook (2006: 36):

Everything in Deleuze affirms the chance of becoming: events of change are truly possible but this is precisely because they are neither likely nor inevitable, and certainly not already given in present conditions.

We take this thought as a sign that the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari have a great deal to offer the field of tourism where transformation and change can be seen as part of the transaction. Voluntourism is theorised here as becoming and we use notions of cartography and de/re/territorialisation as a conceptual framework to guide our analysis and suggest that these voluntourist experiences have the potential to be political (Frazer and Waitt, 2016) rather than predictable.

Theorising the voluntourist experience as cartography

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1987) notion of cartography as a form of mapping is suggested by Elliott (2012: 146) to be ‘a creative act that involves inherent exploration and discovery’. The map, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 21), ‘has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight’. The journey of the participants can be conceptualised as a line of flight, a form of risk-taking where the outcome (whether transformative or destructive) is unknown. The journey is added to the map rather than the map deciding the journey. In this research, the affective experiences described by the participants become part of a (re)mapping or process of exploration. Bonta and Protevi (2004) suggest that Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas are geophilosophical, that is, they encompass movement, experimentation and innovation. In terms of geophilosophy, we also take into account the notions of deterritorialisation, territorialisation and reterritorialisation that feature in this approach.

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) conceptualise everything as a series of intensities and flows, shifting in and out of territories that constitute zones of movement. Territorialisation is the dimension of the known, so to be deterritorialised involves a disruption of what is local and familiar. Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 70) theorise movement between these planes and strata of the known and the unknown, for example, they ask:

… how can one still identify and name things if they have lost the strata that qualified them, if they have gone into absolute deterritorialization? Eyes are black holes, but what are black holes and eyes outside their strata and territorialities?

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) emphasise the ambiguities of territory; we may cross a border but remain the same, a boundary may be in place but not be a marker of difference. May (2005: 138) suggests that ‘territory needs to be marked out, statements need to be made, identities need to be constituted, people have to live somewhere’. Deterritorialisation implies chaos and destabilisation. Reterritorialisation happens within this and as Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 55) suggest, deterritorialisaton is ‘creating relative fields of reterritorialization’, for example, even as tourists prepare to travel they are also returning home.

In this project, we identified moments in participant narratives where they feel within their comfort-zones (territorialisation), become disoriented outside of their territory (deterritorialisation) and attempt to regain their territory (reterritorialisation) and these conceptualisations are dynamic, rhizomic and full of movement. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of the rhizome is something that is multi-directional, open to the unexpected and connected but not orderly or linear. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 55), territorialities are ‘shot through with lines of flight testifying to the presence within them of movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization’. Territorialisations become the map, a map that is ‘open and connectable’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 12). They make clear that mapping in this sense is not a form of correspondence that will connect experience to what is already known. They conceptualise mapping as pertaining to desires and possibilities that are as yet unknown.

De-terror/torialisation

Amy, Mia and Lydia were interviewed at a point of uncertainty and at the moment of deterritorialisation, only a week before they were due to leave for India. The participants described themselves as well-travelled and two of them had been to India before. This did not seem to reduce their trepidation. Amy was returning to India and mentioned several times how ‘terrified’ she had been on her previous trip and expressed concern for her travel companions and herself embarking on the journey again. However, this was just in the moment, the few days before flying. In another sense, Lydia and Mia had been planning for this trip all their lives – especially through the lived-experiences of their fathers. Lydia had been in a family that travelled because of her father’s profession; she said ‘dad used to bring back videos of India because he used to work on the ships in Bombay’. Her father made videos of the streets of Mumbai (or Bombay as it was then known) and brought them back for the family to look at in suburban Australia. Mia, an international student, described her father as a traveller, he would take long holidays when she was young, she says ‘so I remember as a little child going, where is daddy, where is daddy. And then mum would say, oh he’s in India or like he’s in Indonesia or Thailand …’ The territory already existed in the imagination of the child hearing these stories, so it was a journey awaited eagerly and with anticipation. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) connect deterritorialisation to the process of ‘becoming’, in this sense our participants were in that deterritorialising space, where ‘we can be thrown into a becoming by anything at all, by the most unexpected, most insignificant of things’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 292). Surprisingly, Amy, who had already been to India and who had a real as opposed to a vicarious memory of that place, was the most apprehensive.

Care of self

Safety, health and hygiene seemed to be a focus for concern. Lydia mentioned ‘having to be so careful with hygiene, food and water’; she took a small pharmacy in her suitcase. Mia was specifically worried about health and pollution so she had been immunised, ‘about five shots’, and shared that she would like to cover her mouth and nose but was worried that people would think that she was ill herself and wondered if it would look ‘weird’. Amy was more concerned about ‘psychological wellbeing in terms of culture shock particularly with the slum that’s quite confronting’. She described one student who in preparation for the trip seemed ‘blasé’ and had not researched about India or understood the different dress-codes. She thought that this student was going to be ‘mortified’ when she got to India and realised the differences between cultures. She referred to her own previous experience as a tourist in Nepal: ‘I was too scared to walk down the street when I got there. I was terrified. By the time I left I was in love with it but to begin with I was genuinely terrified’. Amy also described being in India at the time of the gang-rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman on a bus in Delhi in 2012 which sparked national and international critique of Indian culture and the treatment of women. She again mentioned being ‘terrified’ and ‘hating India when I left’. However, upon returning to Australia and reflecting on the trip as a whole she said that Delhi is ‘an incredible city’. Despite her ambiguous feelings, Amy had initiated the development and implementation of this volunteer tour and had obviously found her deterritorialising experiences simply a part of the travel experience and not something that would limit her. In Deleuzian terms this is a majoritarian view and ‘you don’t deviate from the majority unless there is a little detail that starts to swell and carries you off’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 292). It was obvious that these stories of deterritorialisation featured an ethnocentric view of the world and for each participant their norm was their own culture and everything was measured from that.

The territory

We asked participants if they considered their trip to be a form of slum tourism (Aquino, 2012). They found this problematic and a question that de-stablised their notion of themselves as volunteers and therefore good people. Mia, who came from another Asian nation, looked amazed when the researchers suggested that people might visit slums in her own country. It is obvious that ‘slum’ is a stigmatising term. Amy was very clear about the places where she would ‘hang out’ in India and places where this was not appropriate. On her previous visit to India, Amy described buying a sari in a shop in the slum area and said that the local people were shocked because she was considered to be rich and therefore buying a sari there was strange because ‘in India if you’re rich you only buy rich things’. Later in the discussion, when she was talking about this previous visit, she mentioned being challenged by a local person who said ‘oh, but when you go home you’re really rich still but we’re not’. Amy negotiated this experience of deterritorialisation, whereby she was made to feel uncomfortable about socio-economic inequalities, by reasoning with this person. In the interview, she said that she explained to him that wealth is relative to the country you live in and in poorer countries money went a lot further than in Australia; in this way she re/gained territory.

Daly (2013) considers this kind of comment important and the beginning of a dialogue that is more genuine. Amy felt that an understanding of her position was beyond that of local people, she felt that they could not understand that wealth was (in her opinion) relative, and ‘they don’t always understand that when you go home $50,000 a year doesn’t really go very far’. Lydia had already experienced poverty when travelling and said that something she found difficult was ‘little children begging and they just, they follow you for miles and miles and it’s very difficult to say no, please …’ She was relieved that the accommodation was ‘very safe – a gated community type arrangement’. Their fears were outweighed by the thought that ‘we aren’t going to be seeing something that you can buy in a group travel programme … because we’re doing unique things … it’s going to be quite authentic and a really honest view of India’. There was also a perceived safety about being in a group, and Mia said ‘I’ve never really had the guts to do it by myself, going to India’. These perceptions summarise the ambiguity of the voluntourist experience. This tour satisfied the demand for a safe introduction to India as aversive experiences were expected to be minimal. Meanwhile, participants still felt they would engage with their idea of ‘authentic’ India.

Maintaining territory

On their return, the participants were overwhelmingly enthusiastic, they had been sold India mainly by the children who were being helped by the NGO that operated a community centre in the slum district. Mia said, ‘the five days I … we spent at the centre, it was so nice, they welcomed us, like each one of them welcomed us. The ladies who are there as teachers, nurses, they were so lovely, caring, sharing people’. There were a range of children and Mia was expecting ‘a group of older girls but they didn’t exist’. She described teaching the children about her own country, showing pictures, teaching some phrases. The children are used to this as a number of international groups come through this site.

The children were the focus of goodwill from the participants, as Lydia said, ‘the kids are so happy despite having so little and are so appreciative of you being with them’. On one occasion, she reported that ‘it took us 45 minutes to leave the centre because the kids wouldn’t let us leave’. She said that she enjoyed spending time with the ‘little ones’; she drew pictures with them and felt that this activity was similar to what children in Australia do at that age. This participant felt that the children in India were more easily satisfied and said ‘they’re probably happier because they don’t expect anything else’.

Lydia described some demanding and uneasy aspects of these relationships that, as Daly (2013) mentions, are founded on gratitude and the need to keep the resources flowing in. Lydia described bringing in school supplies and realising that ‘once you had one thing you had to give it to everyone’ because ‘they’ll mob you – they will literally mob you for something if not everyone has one’ and as she said ‘it’s necessarily out of desperation and survival’. On the last day Lydia said, ‘they actually had to shut the gates of the building, which are these old fashioned type things, and they’re all there up against it and yelling and trying to get stuff. It was crazy’. These experiences were confronting for the participants but such challenging issues did not define the experience because participants were much more likely to report on ‘the smiling faces’ of the children and their surprise that the slum houses were clean and people were proud of their homes and welcoming, as is described in the following quote:

They weren’t embarrassed or ashamed or – they were very proud of their homes, they kept it very clean … I’m talking about rooms that are smaller than most offices, and there’s six to eight people living in these places.

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) propose that certain activity, like making a home, is a means of territorialising, a way of marking space, and the space that we call home highlights both sameness and difference. They state that:

The territory is first of all the critical distance between two beings of the same species: Mark our distance. What is mine is first of all my distance: I possess only distances. Don’t anybody touch me, I growl if anyone enters my territory, I put up placards … It is a question of keeping at a distance the forces of chaos knocking at the door. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 319–320)

This can be read as the challenge of voluntourism, the right of entry is only granted one-way, but the rites of hospitality from the host to the tourist may be the factor that encourages the processes of understanding and transformation. Reisinger (2013: xii) notes that travel and tourism with an intention to ‘heal rather than harm’ can be transformational and this is essential if there are to be new ways of thinking about the world. The participants may have sought healing for themselves, by becoming better people or improving the self. The notion of healing happening between host and tourist was unlikely because the participants remained in the position of donor or giver. They did not engage with history or think about how disparities in opportunity and wealth might be bridged or ameliorated within a political framework.

Becoming … soft global citizens

What comes forward in the words of the participants is the desire to do good and the desire for only the good to be visible. The social relationships that the group described are part of a mapping of the self that involves adjusting to a new place and forming a new image of oneself. In this process, it became clear that what Andreotti (2006) calls ‘soft global citizenship’ was relevant to the experience of the participants on this tour. The soft global citizen ignores the structures that support poverty; the systems that give the volunteer a sense of agency and a feeling that they might be saving the community; the soft global citizen operates from a colonial logic. Without a critical element, soft global citizens, in Andreotti’s (2006: 49) view, ‘run the risk of (indirectly and unintentionally) reproducing the systems of belief and practices that harm those they want to support’. The visitors were protected, fed, kept happy by the children and made to feel special. They responded by making adjustments but without asking questions. Their visit to the community was very short and there was probably not enough time to operate in a way that was not superficial.

Mia shared a short video of the postgraduate students in her words ‘teaching’ the ‘children’. It was surprising to see the age of some of the ‘children’. In this video, one of the student groups was leading some singing, a song that in Australia would only be used in kindergartens, but some of the boys who were in a photo looked at least 14-16 years of age. In Australia, where children are kept in age demarcated groups, this would never happen but these anomalies are accepted elsewhere. It was also accepted that the volunteer can walk in and teach a group of children. This is something that would not be allowed in Australia without appropriate checks, but expectations and distinctions blur once in the host community (Guiney and Mostafanezhad, 2015). Conceptualisations of the tourist as teacher/adult versus host community participants as students/children exemplifies one of the problematic features of volunteer tourism when ‘volunteers can sometimes inappropriately take on the role of “expert”’ (Raymond, 2011: 79). Daly (2013: 78) is critical of the social reproduction that takes place when ‘who teaches, who learns, who decides, who serves and who is served, is reproduced’. The participants did not question their right to take on roles that they would not assume when on their own territory.

The participants in this study were quite authoritative about their position on this trip as educators. Mia said that on the whole they were working with children aged between 5 and 11 years and ‘their English was very bad. So the preparation that we’d done, we prepared for kids who were older, and with high levels of English. So we had to adjust’. The adjustment involved teaching yoga (the irony of this was not articulated) and singing songs with actions. Lydia described the teaching moments in glowing terms:

The ideas coming out from the (participant) students were phenomenal. I mean one of the girls was teaching origami, one of the other girls … she wrote the values (the Christian values of the school community) on a piece of paper and the children chose one of the values and then they expressed their – how they practice their value … and she put those all over the walls when they’d finished …

Mia, who said that she completely rejected the word ‘slum tourism’ or ‘voluntourism’, said that they did something different, she described the trip as ‘a study tour’. Andreotti (2006) finds such beliefs an aspect of soft global citizenship and a form of misguided missionary zeal. It is essential to a successful experience that volunteers feel that they are useful and liked. Their counterparts, the recipients of charity, know that ‘the constant performance of gratitude shows that the host community views the visitors as charitable providers’ (Daly, 2013: 74).

Lydia struggled with the children who were also keen to show what they could already do. She said:

It was the same with everything you taught them … they did it and they’re like, ‘mum, mum, mum, look, look, look, mum, mum, mum’ and you’ve got twenty of them doing it, putting this … they wanted your approval, you attention, your … it was like dealing with a lot of three-year-olds.

Lydia was critical of the talking and sitting that usually went on in the host community as far as she knew and felt that the children loved to have fun and do something different. This was found in another study where voluntourists interacted with children in a refuge in Mexico where ‘the children sought attention by acting “silly” or trying something dangerous in order to monopolise the attention of a volunteer’ (Tomazos and Butler, 2012: 183). If it got too much, Lydia had her own techniques for maintaining separation, including listening to a mindfulness recording on her phone to provide ‘some calming’. Andreotti (2006) argues that this disenchantment is typical when people who feel that they have a duty to save the world are not critical of their own motivations.

Reterritorialisation

Lydia felt that the tour constituted volunteer tourism and was ‘overwhelming’; there was so much going on. In her interview on her return she said, ‘do you know what, it’s amazing how quickly you forget, because I got back here and I’ve just spent $120 on a top, you know, and I can’t believe that I’ve done that …’ These aspects are the essence of soft global citizenship, the unproblematised adaptation from one context to another. Lydia described her relief on returning to Australia, she explained, ‘this is my world’. Tourists simply return home and their experiences become memories and life continues. Andreotti (2014) explores the notion of complicity and the challenges of addressing systemic issues. This is where critically engaging at an intellectual level, questioning events and becoming politically aware is essential. In terms of tourism, Guattari (2000: 17) states that it is easy for journeys to remain ‘no more than a journey on the spot, with the same redundancies of images and behaviours’. One question that arises is whether reterritorialisation is simply returning to the same spot and if so what might constitute transformation? A feature of cartography of the self is that there are inevitable dead ends and ‘rigidified territorialities’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 15) that have the potential for transformation even if at the time no movement seems to have been made.

Self-mapping

Singh and Singh (2004: 188) have suggested that volunteer tourism requires ‘self-engagement’. In this research, we analysed participant stories as a form of cartography that Guattari (Holmes, 2009: n.p.) proposed to be ‘an ethical-aesthetic act that provokes an event of existence’. It is clear that for these students their planning, their concerns for themselves and their desire for a new experience constitute a significant life event. There is also some ambiguity in the sense that while a transformative experience is desired this is balanced with the wish to be safe and protected.

The participants are displaced and their settled perception of self is disrupted and shifts as they experience what Guattari (2000: 20) calls ‘zones of misery, hunger and death … in the monstrous system of “stimulation” that is Integrated World Capitalism’. In her interview, Lydia described driving down the motorway and in the middle ‘you’ve got these kids, tiny, tiny little kids … wearing their pyjamas, ready to go to bed and you’re like “you’re sleeping there, seriously?” And they’ve built this little fire with their mum and dad, and you’re just like, “Oh my god”’. This moment, the cry from the heart, is when lines are redrawn and the map changes.

The realisation that lives are different obviously caused shock but this was balanced with the fact that participants are fulfilling a long-term desire to travel to India and as Bosteels (1998: 147) points out, they now have the potential to think in and about a new space instead of being stuck in what he calls ‘the lived thickness of historical time’. This research can only reveal so much and maybe participating in the research supported further reflection. A cartography of self is a form of mapping that is never complete and in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987: 14) opinion has ‘multiple entryways’. The journey undertaken, the interviews, and reflecting on the experience, as part of the research, constitute different points on the map. Meanwhile ‘a map, then, is never just a mirror of nature’ (Bosteels, 1998: 147) and our interviews possibly only minimally penetrated each individual’s protective shell and was only a small part of the map that supports a cartography of self; a form of mapping that is always becoming and is always in movement.

Tracings

In these deterritorialising spaces of movement and travel, something happens that comes to the surface in the words of the participants as tracings that contribute to the map. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), the tracing can only reproduce itself. Amy, Lydia and Mia make statements that appear as one thing and are then contradicted. For example, the children are described as benign (happy and smiling) and yet they are also described as a ‘mob’; the roles taken up by participants slide between effective and ironic (taking yoga to India); serious goals that included contributing to education in a structured way became ‘fun’ and ‘play’. As Amy, Lydia and Mia behaved in new ways, so the children, who are the recipients of the volunteer tourist’s attention, enacted their roles and adapted to their unique situation as a tourist attraction. In the interviews, we heard the participants start to think about the children differently. In another study, as well as seeing attachments forming between children and tourists, the researchers saw how voluntourists think about the children’s ‘level of understanding and even manipulation of the situation, and how they have been affected when the volunteers are gone’ (Tomazos and Butler, 2012: 183). In these tracings, the voices of the participants can be heard trying to maintain roles and make relationships in this very different place. This is challenging because they retain their known frames of reference even as they are caught-up in deterritorialising processes.

Transversality

Guattari (2000) describes transversality as a cut between segments. This can be seen as the gaps between the dream and the reality. The students are attempting something that can work both ways: they want more than a trip, and also just a trip; their desires and dreams, transitions, memories and narratives form an assemblage that changes the way they see themselves and others. Cushner (2004: 118) recognises that on this kind of tourist journey ‘disconfirmed expectations’ intersect to disrupt the experience. The participants travelled not only from Australia to India but also had the daily experience of making the more significant journey from comfortable and carefully chosen accommodation into the Delhi slum, and as individuals they were always in movement and being destabilised. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) idea of the map itself is something that is always in movement, changing direction and scale, moving into undiscovered spaces and shifting lines and boundaries. Amy, Lydia and Mia map new territory and draw new lines in their de/re/territorialising struggles. No matter what label they gave their endeavours, it was clear that their intentions were similar. They experienced what Ingold (2007: 103) calls the ‘zone of entanglement – this meshwork of intersecting lines – there are no insides or outsides, only openings and ways through’; a very Deleuze and Guattarian (1987) thought. As researchers, we were also caught-up in this meshwork, our own narratives and memories contributed to the assemblage and influenced our work. We conceptualise a shared struggle as we re-write and map ourselves inside this process: always becoming, always between, always in the middle (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987).