Lice work: Non-human trajectories in volunteer tourism

Introduction

I had just had my weekly shower; a nice warm shower after having waited for hours for the sun to heat the water. As usual, I asked Charlotte, one of the volunteers at the orphanage, to check my hair for lice. Since I had learnt that both volunteers and kids had head lice, this microscopic insect had grown to become my biggest fear since my arrival to the orphanage. Charlotte checked my hair one time without finding anything. I asked for a second check to be sure, and to be completely certain that I had no ‘visitors’ in my hair, I asked her for a third inspection. She then found what she was looking for. She found a louse in my hair! She took it in between her fingers and showed it to me with a big smile. At first I thought she was just kidding. As soon as I realised that it was a real louse, I started crying, screaming, and jumping up and down. I was in a complete hysteria. Charlotte began to laugh and said: ‘Come on Amira! I was so proud when I found my first louse! I finally became Nepali!’ Good for you, I thought, you must be crazy. People in the orphanage, who had heard my cries, came into the room. As soon as they heard the story, they too started laughing. That day I hated everyone around me; I hated Nepal, volunteers, even the kids. I hated my PhD project. For me, everyone around me was just a potential lice carrier.

The above excerpt from the field journal of (the first author) illustrates how head lice unexpectedly and dramatically interfered with her stay at a Nepalese orphanage. As she discovered first hand, head lice played a prominent role at the Nepalese orphanage, where she was staying as part of fieldwork for her PhD on volunteer tourism. In fact, their presence would profoundly structure her routines as well as those of the orphanage as a whole – this popular, almost iconic volunteer tourism ‘attraction’.

This invites enquiry into three areas: First, to rethink the role of non-human actors in the tourism experience (Van der Duim, 2007; Van der Duim et al., 2012); second, to reconsider the tourist experience as anything but a solely human-driven or even social accomplishment, but maybe rather as enabled and made up by a multitude of human and non-human actors (Ren, 2011); and third, it addresses the paradox that while the material and non-human are prominent partakers in the composition of tourism and the shaping of tourism experiences, they are usually left unacknowledged and unaccounted for in research (Haldrup and Larsen, 2006).

This article argues that a decentering of the human in volunteer tourism enables us to appreciate identity beyond static and binary subject–object positions as an ongoing ontological choreography also involving human and non-human actors, bodies and affects. To pursue this argument and to amend a human-centric approach to tourism, the tourist experience (and more specifically volunteer tourism), we draw on Actor–Network Theory (ANT) and related work within relational materialism (Latour, 2005; Law and Singleton, 2005; Mol, 2002). As argued in Van der Duim et al. (2012), the material semiotics of ANT enable descriptions of the orchestration and consumption of tourism experiences as not merely human, psychological or social accomplishments, but as socio-material and situated practices.

Decentering the human and social through a post-human ontology ‘engenders new kinds of researchable entities and a new or rediscovered realm of the empirical’ (Büscher and Urry, 2009: 99) and offers avenues for exploring the production of volunteer experiences as ongoing and situated socio-material work. The need for such an approach in relation to volunteer tourism was recently forwarded by Wearing et al. (2017). According to the authors, an ANT approach meets the need for

flexible models that are more in situ and acknowledge the exchange between the actors in that space, rather than those constructed from a distance from a selected menu of theory or value-laden motivations, such as the development industry, which co-opt those actors who are engaged in the exchange via professionalised expertise and standardised models. (Wearing et al., 2017: 517)

By focusing on the complex relationships between networked volunteer tourism actors, ANT descriptions allow seeing tourism as processes through which places are ordered, performed and produced (see also Van der Duim et al., 2012). Finally, the theory brings the researcher to the fore ‘as situated within a network of actors and, in doing so, imbues all actors with agency in relationally constructing their experiences within tourism’ (Wearing et al., 2017: 517).

As described in the following, tending to non-human actors and to how experiences and subjectivities are enacted as socio-material processes in and through volunteer tourism challenges the construction and representation of volunteer experience as a subjective and singular achievement. The textual coherence of brochures and websites in volunteer tourism marketing creates a homogeneous, highly proliferated and seemingly coherent reality, with the volunteer as hero (or in the counter-narrative: villain). Less stable realities are enacted by deploying the ANT sensitivities, as materiality and multiplicity are conveyed through stories claiming neither to shed light on or mediate a truth nor to probe the minds of volunteers in a hunt for motivations or desires. Instead, they walk along and bring non-humans to the fore as messy objects (Law and Singleton, 2005) and active partakers in constructing and negotiating volunteer tourism practices and subjectivities.

We proceed with a brief introduction to volunteer tourism and an account of ANT as methodology as well as analytical framework, especially in its later, multiplicity-oriented version, also coined post-ANT (Gad and Jensen, 2010; Michael, 2016). By using ANT as ‘sensitising terms, ways of asking questions and techniques for turning issues inside out or upside down’ (Mol, 2010: 261), we discuss its ontological implications of tending to – or rather enacting – reality(/-ies). Continuing from there, we present the fieldwork upon which this article is based, sketching the background and aim of the study and introducing the orphanage and the material used in our analysis.

In the analytical section, we first present two central but very different Modern and Local lice configurations that entangle and interfere at the orphanage, resulting in yet another Orphanage configuration, which we then introduce. We describe how situated work with lice at the orphanage creates a continuous pattern of absence and presence, a constant movement of proximity and distance to orchestrate, enable and negotiate ‘proper’ volunteer care.

Following the work of Cussins (1996), we propose to see the identity work of volunteer tourism actors as an ontological choreography which blurs and recasts conventional understandings of subjectivities and power relations in volunteer tourism. The account suggests that volunteer tourism encounters – often framed as instances of volunteers doing good, of exploitation or of subjectivation – are far less clear-cut if analysed through non-human actors. Hence, in our case, examining the non-human actors in the work in orphanage to prevent lice offers a novel way of exploring the meticulous and careful unfolding of subjectivities beyond the human-centric confines of traditional accounts of host–guest encounters in volunteer tourism.

Volunteer tourism

According to Wearing, ‘volunteer tourist’ is a term that applies to tourists who ‘for various reasons volunteer in an organised way to undertake holidays that might involve aiding or alleviating the material poverty of some groups in society, the restoration of certain environments or research into aspects of society or environment’ (Wearing, 2001: 1). Wearing’s definition underlines the importance of the alleviation of material poverty as fundamental to the volunteer tourism experience. Volunteer tourism can be seen as a form of moral economy built on the fundamental assumption of development as the solution to alleviating poverty in the global South (Mostafanezhad, 2013, 2014; Vrasti, 2011, 2012). In this perspective, the volunteer tourist experience is shaped within the postcolonial context of global capitalism and social inequalities (Vrasti, 2013). As argued by many post-development scholars (e.g. Escobar, 1997), the global North is represented as the centre and the South as periphery in need of assistance to be able to reach the ultimate model of development and progress.

Paradoxically, few researchers have paid attention to poverty as a central component in the journey. Moreover, the few studies that have explored poverty have focused on the emotional rather than the material experience. These studies have mainly addressed the sentimentality and affective dimensions of encountering poverty (Crossley, 2012; Frazer and Waitt, 2016; Griffiths, 2014, 2016; Mostafanezhad, 2013).

Many scholars have conceptualised affect in the embodied experience of volunteer tourism as an expression of the neoliberal imaginaries of development and the reproduction of power structure. For instance, Crossley (2012) showed how facing poverty creates a feeling of anxiety transformed into a source of moral redemption. In the same vein, other scholars show how discourses on poverty, such as the ‘poor but happy’ narrative, romanticise and contribute to the depoliticisation of social inequalities (Crossley, 2012; Frazer and Waitt, 2016; Mostafanezhad, 2013). Guiney (2018) points out another ethical dimension of the ‘poor but happy’ discourse, arguing that children are forced by the orphanage director to perform the ‘poor but happy’ icon to meet the volunteer’s expectations.

Griffiths (2014, 2015) challenges this assumption and claims regarding the autonomy of affect, arguing that ‘affective bonds can transcend the subject positions circumscribed by power’ (Griffiths, 2014: 126). In the embodied experience of volunteer tourism, the power of emotion and affect that construct the host–volunteer relationship has a ‘potential of transformation and transcendence of the inequalities’ (Griffiths and Brown, 2016: 16). While these divergences on the interpretation of the embodied experience show the messiness and complexity of the host–guest encounter in volunteer tourism, they have been limited to the human encounter thus far.

Much research has focused on volunteers, locals or non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as main actors and drivers (Broad, 2003; Brown and Morrison, 2003; McGehee, 2002; Palacios, 2010; Wearing, 2001; Wearing and McGehee, 2013) and on the broker role of volunteer organisation as intermediates (Coren and Gray, 2012; Cousins, 2007; Tomazos and Cooper, 2012). Meanwhile, little attention has been paid to objects and materiality, much less so as non-human actors or as entities worth a symmetrical analytical approach (Callon, 1984). A dominant part of the current research is concerned with cognitive and behavioural aspects of the volunteer tourism experience, such as the motivations and expectations of volunteer tourists (Wearing and McGehee, 2013). This has meant that the practised and performative aspects of the volunteer experience – as well as a view on volunteer tourism as a situated, networked and socio-material accomplishment – have largely been neglected.

Few seem to address the power relations between hosts and guests as something more than unevenly distributed and constant. For example, Wearing’s definition reflects a general ‘human disposition’ in the volunteer tourism literature, as it points out the volunteer’s agency over the host community. Most of the research on volunteer tourism more or less explicitly discusses the power relations between host and guest, between the volunteers (often from the global North) and their host, predominantly finding themselves in much less auspicious socio-economic circumstances. Drawing on postcolonial, critical or post-structuralist work, important issues of gazing, othering, uneven power relations, cultural clashes, commodification or pure and simple exploitation have been raised (Conran, 2011; Guttentag, 2011; Mostafanezhad, 2013; Palacios, 2010; Sin, 2009). While such work adds significantly to the ongoing development and critique of the volunteer tourism industry – also questioning its social sustainability – it tends to be based on power structures rather than exploration of how power unfolds on the ground through relational work. An exception is Griffiths (2015), who shows how the dynamism of the situated experience has the potential to deconstruct the dichotomies of us and them ‘helper–helped, volunteer–volunteered, North–South’.

As argued here, a relational approach that decentres the human (and in most cases, the tourist) in volunteer tourism opens up for more complex and situated understandings of how subjectivities are (co-)produced. By exploring how, quoting Haraway, we all need to ‘stay with the trouble’ as co-inhabiting earthly critters (Haraway, 2016), the often binary, attributed roles of the host‒guest relationship unravel themselves as much messier and more entangled.

ANT: a methodology of stories

The head louse is a tiny, wingless parasitic insect that lives among human hairs and feeds on tiny amounts of blood drawn from the scalp. Lice (the plural of louse) are a very common problem, especially for kids. They’re contagious, annoying, and sometimes tough to get rid of. But while they’re frustrating to deal with, lice aren’t dangerous. They don’t spread disease, although their bites can make a child’s scalp itchy and irritated, and scratching can lead to infection. It’s best to treat head lice quickly once they’re found because they can spread easily from person to person. (Head lice, www.kidshealth.org)

This description provides a sober, scientific account of lice. Lice are parasites, feeding on blood in the human scalp, and head lice should be removed quickly to avoid contamination. While they are contagious, annoying and tough to get rid of, they are also harmless. Amira’s introductory journal excerpt described a very different experience with lice. Thus, feelings of anxiety, hysteria and aversion (together with close physical examinations and amusement among local staff and children at the orphanage) were central to the volunteer lice encounter. The lice were also attributed with a transformative capacity, as Charlotte linked their presence to the transition of the lice-bearer to ‘become Nepali’.

This unsettled character of the louse illustrates one of the central anti-essentialist assertions of the material semiotics of ANT, which contends that things do not ‘possess’ any clear identity, sense or value. Rather, realities and identities are enacted (or ‘done’) through relational and situated work.

As a merely sketchy label for a plurality of research undertakings, ANT offers methodological guidance to describe (and, hence, to enact and interfere with) reality by analytical symmetry to humans and non-humans alike. While earlier ANT analyses were characterised by (and criticised for) a more ‘managerial’ approach to how things were made to work (see Callon, 1984; for a critique of this, see Star, 1990), multiplicity-oriented approaches have since encouraged a sensitivity towards the multiple and ‘mess’ (Law, 2004; for examples in tourism, see Beard et al., 2016; Van der Duim et al., 2017). This turn understands the social as an ongoing, strenuous and always situated enactment consisting of humans and non-humans partaking in the crafting and stitching together of partially coherent realities (Latour, 2005; Law and Urry, 2004; Law and Singleton, 2005; Mol, 2002; for examples in tourism, see Ren, 2011; Van der Duim et al., 2012).

For our current purpose, Haraway’s (2008) idea of becoming with many is useful to rethink tourism ‒ and more specifically the orphanage ‒ as a constantly changing organism composed of messmates – a multitude of discreet, often unacknowledged human and non-human builders and building stones. Exploring the orphanage through the notion of becoming with many rather than as an encounter or clash between delimited and pre-defined entities or subject positions enables us to think beyond ‘usual suspects’ and to expand the range of actors contributing to the collaborative shaping of the volunteer tourism experience.

In the following, the heterogeneous collectif of volunteer tourism is described using Mol’s praxiographic approach, according to which knowledge is enacted in and through specific socio-material settings, which should accordingly be studied. In her seminal work The Body Multiple, Mol (2002) shows how the body is enacted into being as a multiple object through the practices by which it is represented, handled and researched at a Dutch hospital. Through a praxiographic (as opposed to ethnographic) approach, it is not the ‘ethnos’ (or meaning or understanding) which is studied but rather concrete practices. Her praxiographic approach entails that we do not study fix objects ‘out there’ from a (potentially infinite) array of angles and perspectives (described by Mol as perspectivism); rather, our study should be concerned with how objects, in her case bodies, are continuously ‘done’ and the implications that such doings may carry.

The procedures and implications of the objectification of bodies are also discussed in the work of Cussins (1996), who introduces the concept of ontological choreography to describe how women relate to technologies of reproduction and fertilisation. Cussins explores the relationship between female patients and medical technologies, using the concept to challenge the common perception that reproductive technologies inevitably lead to a (harmful, unwilling) objectification of the female body. Going against the human-centric assumption that technology is dangerous per se and that patients require protection against their annihilation, Cussins displays counter-narratives suggesting the different and less unequivocal configuration of the agency and objectification of the female body. So while women might become objects of medical scrutiny during fertility treatment, Cussins insists that such processes are still agential, as they are directed and purposive for the objectified women in her wish to become impregnated. The concept suggests that subjectivities are continuously constituted and negotiated through procedures, through which bodies ‒ in our case, those of the orphans, staff and volunteers ‒ are subjected to different levels of surveillance, care and control.

A sensitivity towards multiplicity, towards reality as constantly enacted and towards subjectivities crafted through socio-material arrangements allow us to include a number of incompatible realities in our analysis. This becomes apparent below, where discourses and practices converge, but also conflict – or, to use a different term, other one another – in ways that rule out not only a cohesive or reconciled object, in this case the head louse, but also an unwavering volunteer subjectivity.

The interest in mess and multiplicity begs the question of how such accounts ever become credible and trustworthy as research and entails, more widely, a re-appreciation of what constitutes good research accounts. According to Law, ANT tells stories about how relations (do not) assemble, stories which avoid grand claims of coherence and purity (Law, 2004). Stories should not seek to represent or transcribe reality, as reality in ANT is seen as enacted through the concepts and theories applied to it (Law, 2004). How we present our research is performative, and we as researchers are also partaking in world making or, as in Mol’s words, in ontological politics (Mol, 1999; see also Jóhannesson et al., 2015, for tourism-related examples).

In the present work, we attempt to tell meaningful stories which relate to our concern about non-human agency and subjectivities in volunteer tourism. Our stories of how lice work carried out at the orphanage reconfigures host‒guest relations seek to craft and bring forward certain realities (rather than others) without claiming that they offer ‘the whole story’. They do not claim to represent reality, but are modes of discovery, or perhaps ways of ordering in a highly disorderly fashion. They do not wish to efface incoherences, but rather to shed light on reality as messy by describing complex workings – or lice work, as we have termed it. As modest accounts, they distil insights of the effects and interference of the material. In our case, this was done through the ANT ‘following the actor’ credo and the careful composition of heterogeneous elements (Latour, 1999). Such elements were observations and descriptions of daily life activities, informal discussions with locals and volunteers, observations, fieldwork experiences, and interview snippets that were collected, shared and discussed along the way; see below for more detail.

The fieldwork

On the basis of the first author’s PhD project, which provides the empirical foundation for this article, an ethnographic methodology was adopted to study the volunteer tourism experience. The lead author carried out 2 months of fieldwork over two periods (December 2013‒January 2014 and January‒February 2015) at a Nepalese orphanage in the district of Lalitpur, herself participating as a volunteer in the daily volunteer activities. The orphanage is home to 20 children aged 3‒18 years. The head of the orphanage also lives in the same building as the orphans together with his family.

The participation in the everyday routines of the orphanage, taking part in defined chores and interacting in different settings and situations with children, local employees and volunteers allowed for immersion in the field and affective and material embodiment. The initial aim of the study was to explore the interaction between the usual (human) stakeholders in volunteer tourism: locals and volunteers. Having worked extensively with social work and volunteering fieldwork in her native Tunisia, Amira remained confident that the hard conditions in the Nepalese orphanages would not be as difficult as for others coming from the global North and without any volunteer experience. As we already witnessed in the beginning of this article, this did not always prove to be the case.

Exactly because of the surprising and unexpected but much-felt presence of the non-human lice as active participants in the structuration of the everyday lives of the volunteers, it became increasingly apparent that the ‘expected’ actors ‒ children, volunteers, staff and volunteer organisations ‒ were not alone in shaping the volunteer experiences at the orphanage. Not only lice but also water (or lack thereof), food, infections and other illnesses had a tremendous effect, not only on how experiences were shaped and narrated by the volunteers but also on the crafting of subject positions in the field. Consequently, the interest in exploring non-human agency at the orphanage gradually expanded during and after returning from the fieldwork.

The first author’s lived experience at the orphanage cast light on how volunteers like herself composed and negotiated experience drawing on a complex mesh of activities, objects, relations, and affect. This recognition led the research in a new direction, where attention to and inquiry into motivations and ideas of self were gradually replaced with an interest in the heterogeneous conditions and actors for the co-creation of volunteer tourism experiences at the orphanage. In order to add substance to the analysis of the work with lice, additional material on lice discourses, technologies and treatments was collected after returning from fieldwork through volunteer blogs and Facebook pages. Historical, ethnographic and medical documentations were consulted. Through a heightened material disposition and by tending to lice work as an alternative approach to the study of volunteer tourism, new insights emerged on how subject positions in volunteer tourism were constructed and negotiated in situ through the doings of a range of actors: volunteers, children, staff, objects, physical structures, technologies, chemicals (or the lack hereof) and lice.

The following analyses offer three lice configurations, which allow us to describe how volunteer experiences are enacted at the orphanage through the everyday negotiations of issues such as hygiene, care and subject positions. Our present concern is not only to problematise how non-humans are left out of or ignored in research on volunteer tourism but also to offer alternative accounts of how they matter in unexpected ways as they partake in shaping relations, encounters and sociality, and how they enable (or disable) subjectivities and experiences. While most lice are invisible to the human eye, we argue that they play a crucial part in the construction and negotiation of volunteer tourism and volunteer subjectivities at the orphanage. Through patterns of absence and presence, together with what we refer to as ontological choreography (Cussins, 1996), subjectivities (and objectivities) are destabilised and host–guest scripts are rewritten.

Local lice: mundane sociality

Lice are addressed very differently in Nepal than in the modern lice configuration of the problematic stigma. This is clearly illustrated in an email to the first author from a local field coordinator in the organisation where the author was volunteering: ‘Searching for head lice is a beautiful way to bring pleasure to life’. In this correspondence, the field coordinator was asked to describe how rural Nepalese societies address the lice issue. His account shows how lice work is performed very differently from the discrete, chemically mediated and slightly shameful removal in our previous configuration; rather, it is a social act where ‘neighboring women gather in a place and start to do head lice searching’ (Saman, email excerpt).

In Nepalese society, women are generally responsible for checking (mostly children’s) hair for lice, and this constitutes a recurrent (if not daily) activity, especially for mothers in Nepali families. During the field stay in Nepal, it is not unusual to observe this activity in public places, where it is a social and communal activity – groups of children and women sitting and talking together while removing lice (see Figure 1). Lice inspection involves close physical contact, and removing the lice offers relief and soothes the child of discomfort or irritation. It is a way to show affection and to offer care towards children. Unlike the modern configuration, where chemical lice treatment is usually oriented towards absolute extermination, the local counterpart is not oriented towards such an (unrealistic) end.

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Figure 1.

A mother checking for lice in her daughter’s head.

In stark contrast to the configuration of the modern louse, where the classification of lice as impure entails the delegation of its treatment to the private back regions of social life, lice work in Nepal is connected to practices of sociability and recurrent public rituals of hygiene and care. Through its mundane, regular and physical character, local lice work becomes a constitutive and visible part of everyday life. No stigma or shame seems attached to having or removing lice, as it is publicly performed. On the contrary, it is linked to accept or even a certain appreciation, as exemplified through proverbs referring to lice, which, loosely translated, state that ‘If someone has lice, s/he will earn more money or money will come to the home’ (Saman, email excerpt).

By now, we have outlined two radically different lice configurations. In the first, lice are connected to stigma and, consequently, othered in public life. While lice as a symbol of poverty under modernity could arguably have been used to underline the marginal positions of orphanages in the marketing of volunteer tourism, they are conspicuously absent. In the second configuration, lice are enacted through public and mundane displays of sociality in rural Nepal, where we find our orphanage.

The two configurations are relevant in order to appreciate the orphanage configuration, which we will now explore in further depth. As a prelude to the orphanage lice work narrative, the configurations seem to prepare the ground for the culture clash between a poor but authentic local population and the modern disenchanted tourist (MacCannell, 1976), as described since the early start of the anthropology of tourism (Smith, 1977). As we show in the following, however, reading the encounter through the lice unravels a far more complex situation, which cannot be contained within a binary host–guest structure. Correspondingly, power relations and identity positions are far less stable. We now follow the lice inside the orphanage to explore how this work unfolds.

Orphanage lice work: negotiating care

Lice are a widespread problem in Nepalese orphanages, and the orphanage we visited was no exception. Lice are predominantly spread by the children at the orphanage, who play, eat and sleep in close proximity to one another. They share hats and other items of clothing and generally pay little attention to the lice contagion. One of the first things that Amira noticed was the prominent effect the lice had on a very central part of the volunteer activities: the caring for the children. In her research diary, she describes this during the very first week of her stay, long before the lice entered into focus as a possible research object: ‘My biggest concern is how I can avoid getting lice while playing with the kids’.

Observations, interviews and informal conversations at the orphanage soon revealed that other volunteers shared similar concerns. Having to deal with lice was an unpleasant surprise for newcomers. As lice had not been mentioned in the volunteer tourism marketing and represented a rather uncommon concern for young adults from the global North, the lice were reiterated as something shocking and to be avoided in line with the modern stigma of lice related to poor hygiene.

However, putting yourself at risk of lice infestation could – and would – not be entirely avoided. In her study of love and emotion in orphanage tourism in Cambodia, which she terms the ‘hug an orphan vacation’, Guiney (2018) argues how volunteers were primarily concerned with providing love, care and most importantly hugs to children. Conversations with volunteers at the Nepalese orphanage revealed a similar interest, as a good volunteer experience at the orphanage was largely equated with close contact with the orphan children. Avoiding lice would therefore mean separating oneself from the ‘consumption’ of the orphanage and a missed opportunity to fully immerse oneself in the volunteer experience.

The caretaking duties delegated to volunteers usually include teaching, playing with, bathing and dressing the children. As most of the children, especially the youngest (age 3‒7 years), speak little or no English, the easiest and most common way to perform these caretaking duties is through body language and play, which often involves close contact with the children. During interviews and conversations, ‘getting lice’ (or not) was referred to as an encapsulation of a complex relationship of negotiating hygiene and care, as the lice had unexpectedly impeded the central activity that volunteers had signed up for (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Charlotte changing the bandage of one child while another kid is playing with her.

During fieldwork, volunteers shared thoughts of how close contact with the children over long periods of time was a crucial and valuable part of the good experience. As one volunteer explained,

Charlotte and I were trying to be with kids every single moment. Get up at six and we would be with them from six, do homework with them, and walk with them to school every day. And we get the little ones and big ones, we hang out with them, we play with them. We were with them all during homework time from five to whenever was eating time. (Alison)

The local lice practices, which were introduced earlier on, encompassed the very forms of sociality and caring craved by many of the volunteers: long stretches of close contact, intimacy and relief. Yet the orphanage management and staff usually assumed responsibility for lice control, as they were acutely aware of how uncomfortable the volunteers felt about lice. While the management and staff tried to reduce the presence of lice by shaving the youngest children, this managerial consideration hindered the ability to ‘live the experience’ and to appropriate a desired volunteer subjectivity through close proximity to the children.

Still, other tasks were delegated by the orphanage management, which volunteers saw as part of ‘proper’ caretaking and as contributing to a good volunteer experience. These often involved close physical interaction with the children. At the orphanage, recommendations and advice were shared among volunteers about how to avoid lice while still offering care, such as wearing hats or scarves. The meticulous hiding of the hair demonstrated how the caring for children and, hence, living up to external and own expectations of care without risking lice contagion entailed a careful manoeuvring between closeness and proximity, between patterns of absence and presence (Law and Singleton, 2005).

The first author’s lived experience while performing her role as volunteer and researcher illustrates this negotiation. In order to immerse herself in everyday life at the orphanage, she had to epitomise the role of the good volunteer, including close proximity with volunteers and children. While she had thought she was familiar with poverty and volunteer work and would not have any adaptation issues, she found herself fighting with lice. To gain the trust of the host and volunteers, she first had to resolve her own stigma and discomfort towards lice, which involved a range of emotions ranging from anxiety and disappointment to humiliation and self-awareness.

Likewise, other volunteers would undertake strategies, sometimes radical, to balance the will to care and avoid lice. An example of this was when one young volunteer, Alison, shaved her own head (Figure 3). While shaving was a common strategy to reduce lice infections among children, they were rarer among the volunteers, especially the girls. By cutting her hair, Alison conspicuously avoided the tension associated with close proximity and lice. By doing so with a big smile and posting a picture of her deed online, the act becomes one of ritual (gendered) sacrifice, transition and identity creation as part of a memorable, life-changing experience. As Alison adds to the pictures on her blog, ‘Really, everyone should do this once in their lifetime’. As an example of orphanage lice work, this demonstrates how lice force volunteers to rethink their caring activities, to deploy lice counterstrategies and to negotiate their engagement in relation to care and to their experiences as volunteer tourists.

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Figure 3.

Volunteer lice practice (Alison, Blog).

As the lice work in the orphanage is continually carried out around shifting patterns of absence and presence, the lice manifest themselves in sometimes destructive, sometimes creative ways, as they challenge the volunteer identity while also adding to its crafting in productive ways. While the fear of lice has an impact on the interaction with the children and impedes the ability of volunteers to go about their work in a satisfactory manner, it also confirms and sometimes reinforces the ‘will to care’. In such work, the lice are not merely a prop, a backdrop or an inconvenient element to ‘get over’ but also an instigator of self-inspection, raising concerns and sparking negotiations about personal limits, contagions and immersion. As part of complex and at times contradictory orphanage practices, lice are an active element in shaping the emotion and identity of volunteers.

The orphanage lice work narrative shows how the volunteers’ roles and identities are dislocated through the non-human encounter. The concept of ontological choreography (Cussins, 1996) can offer a useful analytical lens with which to probe the construction of volunteer subjectivities at the orphanage even further, acknowledging them as far more dynamic than otherwise conceived in traditional accounts of hosts and guests (Ren, 2010). An example of how volunteers lend themselves to objectification is the delousing of volunteers, which took place regularly at the orphanage. Commonly, the caring mother (didi) teaches the volunteers how to get rid of lice. The volunteers sit down on the floor and entrust their hair to didi – or even to the younger girls or the grandmother – to check for lice. As part of these delousing sessions, didi and her helpers teach the volunteers how to accept the presence of lice and live better with these little critters.

Throughout the lice inspections, the agencies of care are blurred; it is no longer the guests who are caring for and teaching the children, as marketed on sending organisation websites and in popular media. Instead, the host is in charge of instructing and caring, relieving the volunteers while teaching them how to find lice. The roles of knower and known are reversed on such occasions due to the concern with lice, displaying what Haraway (2008) has termed a ‘becoming with many’, which entails a mutual requirement of unexpected and caring collaboration (Haraway, 2016). As but one of many examples, it displays the meticulous procedures through which volunteers are subjected to and subjugate themselves to lice, control, and to care.

Exploring how volunteers search for lice, delouse, cover themselves, distance themselves from the children, freak out, shave, take pride and in some cases give up entirely and overcome to lice infestation through play and hugs offers a new understanding of guest‒host encounters at the orphanage as a messy and anything but clear-cut relationship. It also shows that in order to care and to uphold a volunteer identity, subjectivities are challenged. In this process, human activity is inextricably linked to the workings of non-human actors. Incessant becoming-with not only acknowledges the entanglements of host and guest, known and knower, human and non-human, but also foregrounds extension as a starting point for agency, and as we see here, for care: ‘No species, not even our own arrogant one pretending to be good individuals in so-called Western scripts, acts alone’ (Haraway, 2008: 100). As we hope to have demonstrated, this was certainly the case at the orphanage.

Concluding remarks

Drawing on the two dominant configurations of modern lice and local lice, this article first sketched out the (absent) lice work of marketing volunteer tourism and the (present) lice work in Nepalese everyday life. Exploring a more situated configuration of the orphanage lice, we went on to show how the work with lice challenges the volunteer experience and identity and offered examples of how care and subjectivity are negotiated at the orphanage. While the marketing of volunteer tourism experiences was affected by a modern configuration of lice as stigmatised due to associations with poor hygiene and poverty, a local lice configuration was described as part of a mundane, inevitable and fully public part of everyday life. At the orphanage, lice were constructed in a far more contested manner through shifting patterns of absence and presence, constantly negotiating closeness and proximity, care and contamination. Through the meticulous ontological choreography of volunteer bodies and subjectivities, the lice-stirred power relations recast the positions of care and subjectivity.

Lice have been used in this article as analytical entry points to describe the disruptive power of bodies and affect. However, non-human actors such as diarrhoea (a very likely and severe disease to catch as volunteer) and Dhal Bat (traditional meal consisting of steamed rice and cooked lentil soup, which served as the sole meal at the orphanage) constitute other instances in an ongoing, everyday ontological choreography at the orphanage. In this work, relations of power and subject/object positions are constantly reworked through the straining of volunteer bodies and bowels. Exploring the unsettled position of the lice revealed how this non-human actor was continuously negotiated in everyday practices and how it affected the provision of good care and volunteer subjectivities. The lice as non-human actor and the materiality of care entangle with and negotiate issues of comfort zones and mental and bodily immersion in the construction of volunteer tourism experiences.

The situated lice work practices explored in the work at hand are not meant to provide a comprehensive explanation of how volunteers deal with otherness at the orphanage; rather, they suggest how subject positions in (volunteer) tourism can be studied through configurations of absence and presence and as an ongoing ontological choreography, where volunteers are neither in full control as powerful (Western) consumer subjects nor fully powerless ‘dupes’ at the mercy of a culture or situation unknown to them. Their subjectivities and bodies are not separate, nor are their constitutions purely an individual or singular affair. By exploring the volunteer tourism experience through socio-material practices and non-human agency, modest and often overlooked stories from the everyday life of volunteer tourism are brought forward. By shifting our attention to the messy relationships between humans and non-humans in volunteer tourism, we hope to have exemplified the potential of similar future explorations.

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