Hope in the dark: geographies of volunteer and dark tourism in Cambodia

Introduction

The experience of visiting the Killing Fields in Cambodia where dissidents were brutally killed during the Khmer Rouge era leaves many people calling out for hope. Like other volunteers that I came across in Cambodia, the dark tourism site of the Killing Fields was an essential addition to my volunteer tourism itinerary. The legacy of the monstrous history of death and genocide, in the sites of dark tourism, resonates today in the monstrous poverty of the communities where we volunteered. As volunteers, we spent our time in Cambodia building emotional and physical defences against the darkness of sites such as the Killing Fields and the confronting details of a more prosaic poverty. Volunteers gave English and health classes, treated patients in community clinics and helped build houses in disadvantaged areas. In addition to their volunteering placements, many volunteers also made donations and constructed resources that would help the communities. Our efforts were ways of working against the darkness of violence and poverty, but this darkness was also the reason for our presence in these communities. Between the geographies of dark and volunteer tourism, the other volunteers and I found evidence of hope as an ambivalently placed and changeable substance.

Volunteer tourism is putatively virtuous and hopeful work, in which First World volunteers give their time and effort to development and conservation organizations in the Third World. ¹ Dark tourism is, on the other hand, a recent term given to the increase in tourist visits to sites of death and genocide, among them the concentration camps of the Holocaust, the sites of genocide in Rwanda and Cambodia’s infamous Killing Fields. ² The sites of dark tourism in Cambodia, which volunteers visit, mark the genocidal terror of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979. Under the Khmer Rouge, approximately 2.2 million people, or a third of Cambodia’s population, died. ³ The Khmer Rouge practised an ‘anti-geography’ in which any space that did not conform to their agrarian, communist vision of a ‘better’ society was systematically emptied of people, while dissenters were taken to particular sites to be executed or imprisoned. ⁴ The nationalist ideology of the Khmer Rouge was influenced by a reaction against French colonial history and the neo-colonial aggression of the United States during and after the Vietnam War. ⁵ The darkness attributed to the sites made infamous by the Khmer Rouge also reinvokes French colonial narratives of the savage danger in Cambodia. ⁶

Within the post-conflict geographies of popular destinations for volunteer tourism the darkness accorded to sites of Khmer Rouge atrocities converges with the more uneven, globally contingent, landscapes of poverty and disadvantage. While the success of the dark tourism sites in conveying Cambodia’s history of recent conflict has been questioned by some commentators, ⁷ on my own visit and through interviews with volunteers, the gathered weight of the history of the Khmer Rouge violence transcended explanation or sanitization. Tourists at the sites often express an intention of contributing to some form of humanitarian action while in Cambodia, as a reaction to their journey. ⁸ Volunteers then engage with the darkness of poverty and disadvantage as part of their work. It is this material engagement with the legacies of conflict and the continuing tragedies of poverty that is the location of their hopes for the future.

Recent geographies have seen the affective presence of hope and belief in material terms. ⁹ However, much of the work on the hopeful and the imaginative potential of the material is limited in its empirical exploration. This article seeks to explore the becoming of hope in the situated instances within ethnographic research with volunteer tourists who completed placements in Cambodia. Poverty, post-conflict trauma and the compromises of a growing economy in volunteer tourism raise the stakes of these negotiations with the contentious becoming of hopes for a better future in Cambodia. This article will locate hope in various sites of the convergence between volunteer and dark tourism and consider the intervention and inspiration they provide. The recent recuperation of the monstrous in cultural geography is used to further substantiate the way in which the landscapes of terrible events or confrontations with poverty can provide grounds for inspiration. ¹⁰

This article argues that, in a world characterized by exploitative economies and the legacies of violent conflict, a simultaneously material and immaterial hope can be found between the monstrous sites of past violence and the ambivalent manifestations of efforts for a better future. This article will first consider the theoretical and political context behind the geographies of dark and volunteer tourism and their convergence in Cambodia. It will then go on to elaborate on the methods through which hope can be sighted in such ambivalent landscapes. Drawing on ethnographic research on volunteer tourism in Cambodia, it will explore situated instances of hope between volunteer and dark tourism. The central device of a mirror box, ¹¹ which was constructed by one volunteer as a therapeutic tool to help in the treatment of patients, will be used as an example of the many imperfect, but inspiring, forms that hope takes in these converging landscapes. The mirror box will, lastly, be used as a metaphor for the potential of such situated considerations of hope to contribute to a greater understanding of the complexity of working towards a better future between the First and Third Worlds.

The dark

Despite their important reconfigurations of both post-conflict and ‘developing’ spaces, the geographies between volunteer and dark tourism have not received sustained analytical attention. As landscapes for hope, both volunteer and dark tourism are imbricated within complex geographies of exploitation, violence and inequality. The virtuous reputation of volunteer tourism has often obscured the many less than virtuous effects of the industry. Volunteer tourism often imposes an orientalizing and infantilizing geography on the Third World in which First World helpers reconfigure the developing world into a place of passive need. ¹² The many negative effects of the industry also include the exploitation of local communities, the privileging of corporate interests over local interests, its unskilled intervention into local job economies and its perpetuation of reductive rationalizations of poverty. ¹³ Conversely, after initial expressions of disturbance at the combination of holidays and death in the literature on dark tourism, it has been latterly schematized within a much longer tradition of the human search for meaning in sites of tragedy. ¹⁴ There has also been greater recognition of the complexity of motivations and classifications for visits to dark tourism sites, as different kinds of sites are the location of significant tragedies for particular groups or individuals. ¹⁵ While critics have drawn attention to the ways in which the label ‘dark tourism’ unnecessarily stigmatizes certain sites and those who visit them, ¹⁶ pushing these sites into the realm of the stigmatized, that horror beyond horror because it is real, can be productive. In post-conflict spaces the dark tourism sites leak into the landscape around them and volunteer tourist flows to see poverty in the Third World raise questions as to where the ‘dark’ ends.

The political perpetuation of poverty in Cambodia, as a part of this wider darkness, underlies the convergence between volunteering and dark tourism. The 2010 to 2012 Country Reviews of Cambodia in the journal Asian Survey detail the way in which the Cambodian government has systematically enforced extra-legal acquisitions of land, forcibly relocated communities to less fertile farming areas, systematically silenced political opponents through violence and made private profit from public funds, despite the pressing development needs of the population. ¹⁷ Tourism, as one of the leading contributors to Cambodian economic development, acts as a force of foreign legitimacy for the Cambodian government, despite its oppressive actions. ¹⁸ The careful management and promotion of selected memorial sites to the Khmer Rouge victims reinforces the legitimacy of the ruling political party, the Cambodian People’s Party, which numbers several Khmer Rouge deserters in its ranks.

In addition, the memorialization of specific dark tourism sites over others has raised concerns about the selective appropriation of land from local populations in order to facilitate the presentation of these sites for tourist consumption. ¹⁹ There are many different mass grave sites, some still undocumented, throughout Cambodia, ²⁰ but only selective sites have been reappropriated for memorialization and consequently tourism. Tourists are often ignorant of the larger context of oppression and land acquisition, which underlies the creation of the sites that they visit. For example, none of the volunteer tourists in this study expressed the slightest knowledge of the current political oppression in Cambodia, despite their overt belief in addressing the poverty and disadvantage that Cambodians face and their dutiful attendance at the ‘dark’ tourism sites of the Khmer Rouge regime.

The recent literature surrounding hope argues that it is within such ambivalent political landscapes and situations of need that hope comes to have a profound material presence. There has been a recent trend in the geographical engagement with hope towards ‘a wider recent devaluation of disenchantment as a default mode of engagement with a world that is in a mess’. ²¹ As part of his research on music and its affective presence among the unemployed, Ben Anderson notes the way in which hope emerges through the ‘capacities of the materialities of music to smooth over despair and induce the affective presence of something better’. ²² In his subjects, this something better sharpens their sense of the world and makes other futures materially possible. Utilizing Ernst Bloch’s notion of the utopian as an excess within everyday life, Anderson argues for the ‘immanence of the good’. ²³ Importantly, hope, theorized in this way, is an opening in the actual and materially imperfect world, rather than a bland optimism or blind faith. ²⁴

Such a conception of hope allows for its emergence in the most destructive landscapes of violence and poverty. As Ana Cecilia Dinerstein and Séverine Deneulin note in their recent study of ‘hope movements’, ²⁵ locating hope in ‘the concrete experience of anticipating a better future in the present’ ²⁶ recognizes that there is an ‘unnamed’ ²⁷ something materializing in contemporary challenges to poverty. Dinerstein and Deneulin enlist Bloch’s theorization of hope to understand the hope provided for a new world order by anti-poverty movements such as the Zapatistas in Mexico and the Live Simply movement in the UK. ²⁸ If hope can be found in landscapes of social movements addressing poverty, the question emerges whether hope can materialize in much more ambivalent landscapes in which the movements towards a better world are more ambiguously defined and diversely enacted. Arguably, in order to fully recognize hope when it materializes, we need to make room, not just for the social movements that advocate hope, but for a substantial engagement with the poverty and violence that surround and form them. If locating hope is to be inspiring rather than banal, it requires sensitivity to the ambivalence of its materialization.

Recent theorizations of monstrous geographies provide a way of situating hope within situations of stark ambivalence, such as sites of terrible atrocity or poverty. Deborah Dixon and Susan Ruddick herald the return of the monstrous in academic and popular enquiry as a location of ‘hope for a shift in our moral order’. ²⁹ The monstrous is ‘a condition which expresses the wonder or horror of a different kind of encounter arising from multiple sites of engagement’. ³⁰ In an article within the same issue, Paul Cloke asserts that recognizing the play of good and evil in contemporary social praxis, such as the work of faith organizations against homelessness, can form a way to understand and resist harmful forces. ³¹

The monstrous sites of poverty and violence lend hope an immediacy because the absence of a better world is more apparent in these sites. The nature of this absence is a part of what considering hope within sites of poverty and violence offers to more limited explorations of hope within social movements and successful programmes for change. The implication of hope in the present, which makes hope a part of possible futures, is clearer when it comes to monstrous landscapes because there is little possibility of completely ignoring the realities of disadvantage and the need to address them. There is a sobering weight of loss to the histories of violence, which tethers hope to the intricacies and complexities of the present world. The starkness of the absence of a better world is evident in the disquiet produced both at sites where volunteers worked and in their tourist visits to commemorative sites of past violence. This absence of a better world often provides the condition of necessity for a strengthened hope to appear.

Sites and methods

In this study, the ethnographic methods of interviews and participant observation provide an insight into the materiality of hope at the convergence between volunteer and dark tourism. This study draws on data from interviews with returned volunteer tourists from Australia as well as a month of participant observation in a volunteer tourism programmes in Siem Reap, Cambodia, which took place throughout 2012. ³² The interview material was drawn from twenty-two research interviews with returned volunteer tourists in Sydney, Australia, who undertook placements between 2010 and 2012. There were two interviews with each participant, each lasting an hour. The volunteers quoted in this article took part in volunteering programmes in Cambodia, which were organized by two volunteering companies and one not-for-profit organization. They were recruited through emails sent through the mailing lists of the volunteer organizations with which they travelled. The period of participant observation was conducted through a month long, group volunteering placement, organized by an Australian volunteering company. The placement was located in a school for a community of former military personnel and their families, outside Siem Reap. Ethnographic research has always evinced a strain of auto-ethnographic self-reflection and biographical borrowing, ³³ and this research draws on this blending of subject and researcher rather than aims to privilege the self over the many human and more-than-human others that phenomenological work recognizes. ³⁴

The recent recognition of the materiality of hope emphasizes that the contexts in which hope comes to be, are marked by economies and events that perpetuate suffering and disadvantage. ³⁵ Hope within these messy contexts rarely appears in unequivocal forms, such as shining, utopian movements spreading across the world with their goals fully realized. Tracking hope, then, requires paying attention to the nuances of material experiences and situations where hope may be only implied. ³⁶ The expression of the desire to help communities in Cambodia, for example, often implies a hope that the contribution will help and that the communities can improve. Rachel Hughes, in her study of dark tourism in Cambodia, notes that the material implications of the imaginaries and hopes for a cessation to poverty and violence are located in the ‘facticity’ ³⁷ of particular objects and experiences in dark tourism sites. It remains a challenge, however, to fully contextualize the hope in the detail and to draw out its connections to more clearly articulated intentions. In this study, the volunteers implied this hope when talking about and carrying out their engagement with sites of poverty and the sites of dark tourism. Whether these were hopes for the cessation of the pain of medical patients that they treated or a better education for the children that they taught, the hopes they had were understood to be working towards a future for Cambodia that would honour the victims of the Khmer Rouge regime.

The materialization of hope in the messy convergence of volunteer and dark tourism can best be sighted in the details of various kinds of experience that emerged through the use of ethnographic methods. These were the details of both the expressions of intention to act against violence and poverty and the products of the efforts to do so. Volunteering programmes, in particular, may even provide a structure that maintains hope because they involve effort and its material results, which require some hope that they will create something beneficial in order to be completed and sustained. One of the most important parts of this structure may be that it is contingent on volunteers working on changing a particular situation of disadvantage. Volunteering placements provide a structure that draws attention to the changes of state in hope as a material substance, within the progression of certain programmes. As recent scholarship has suggested, the material is not necessarily characterized by solidity and commonality. ³⁸ Rather, it is characterized by dynamic and variable states of matter with imaginative potential and the capacity to change. ³⁹ These changes of state include experiences of hope becoming monstrously transformed by the context in which it exists. Paying attention to these transformations in how hope manifests allows us to appreciate the complexity of the contemporary contexts in which it is realized.

In this study, auto-ethnographic reflection and interview material on volunteer tourism provide a way to better evoke the richness and detail of changing forms of hope between research sites. Specific sites, actions and objects provide moments of concentration within multi-sited research. Some experiences of hope in this study suggest that hope often changes as community priorities shift around it. Highlighting those transformations in which hope changes from being a productive part of a better future to being a testament to a hope that was held in the past can reinforce cynicism over the futile hopes of agents, such as volunteer tourists, in developing contexts. However, in this study, an assessment of the legitimacy of volunteers’ hopes or the authenticity of their levels of investment in the projects is avoided in order to allow for a consideration of the ambivalence of the situations in which this hope is changed. This study echoes the theoretical shift away from cynical deconstructions of problematic economies and the compromised agents who work within them, which is evident in the recent theories of hope. ⁴⁰ There is no pure, critical position outside the messy contexts of questionable relations between the developing and developed worlds from which to espouse judgement on others’ hopes. Instead participant observation is utilized in this study as a method to highlight the complexity of the contexts of hope in volunteer and dark tourism. This method also allows us to fully celebrate the small instances of hope within economies where violence proliferates and leaves grievous legacies. The history of such instances of hope, and the many ways they are used and left unused, can never be known completely. Finding small instances or parts of this evolving history and drawing on the inspiration that becomes evident within them is the purpose of empirically tracking hope.

The mirror box

Tracking one of the objects, created by a volunteer I interviewed, provided an illustration of the ambivalent and yet materially evident hope found through this method. Spencer, the twenty-two year old volunteer in question, worked with physiotherapy patients at a small clinic in a community for handicapped, former soldiers from the Cambodian military, outside Siem Reap. Some of these soldiers had lost limbs in the civil war, following the Vietnam War, or during the Khmer Rouge regime. The mirror box was used to treat a condition known as phantom limb pain that a minority of amputees experience in their severed nerves. The box has a mirror on the side, the patient puts their amputated limb, usually a hand, into the box and the mirror reflects their other limb in such a way that it appears as if the amputated limb is whole again. The phantom limb can then be subject to exercises to treat the pain felt within it. As Spencer further elucidated, the mirror box ‘tricks the brain into thinking there’s an arm there’.

An imperfect, yet productive, collaboration with local workmen created this hope for the treatment of patients. As Spencer described it, ‘The first weekend, I spent the whole weekend trying to find somewhere to make a mirror box’. He went on to describe the hope he and the other volunteers had for the local economy and their ability to contribute to it amongst the frustrations of making the box. Spencer explained that the reason it took so long to make the box was that

all the equipment and stuff that we wanted to get, we had to source from local places to get money into the economy and . . . I went to this shop, they were making cabinets and at this point I could speak some moderate Khmer so I could ask them to deal with it and describe what it was with a mirror box.

The materialization of hope required some negotiation on his part; it was imperfect in a way that reflected the naïve cultural translations through which it was made. Spencer detailed that ‘they made it wrong the first time….it had a mirror, then it was glass on the other side and the whole idea is that you can’t see inside the box, so I had to get them to cover it up with white paint’. This is how hope increasingly appears; as already compromised by cultural misunderstanding, incompletely realized and easily overlooked.

The mirror box, like other manifestations of hope, was not impervious to change and reflected the community in which it was positioned. I observed that the hope in the mirror box had changed, when I came across it in my period of participant observation in the same volunteering program in which Spencer had volunteered. The mirror box was rarely used and its interior remained darkened for much of the time of my observation. The community had grown to prioritize their agricultural work over appointments at the clinic and so the need to use the mirror box was rare. Its darkness was a reminder of the realities that the volunteers faced in the community school near the clinic where I was doing my observational research. We had to come to terms with the reality of irregular attendance at our English and health promotion classes. Our hopes for better health and education in the community existed within the contingencies of a pressing need to make a livelihood from farming. Seeing that the mirror box sat unused did not dampen our hopes, it remained as a testament to the complexity of specific instances of hope and their movement in and out of a community’s changing priorities.

When I looked at the mirror box during my period of participant observation, it was because a volunteer had taken it out in order to use it in an upcoming appointment at the clinic. The patient was unable to come in to the medical centre that day so the other volunteers and I scrutinized it with an ambivalent knowledge of its possible, but unfulfilled utility. As I looked at the box, I found that because of its imperfections, in particular a surfeit of glass all around the box instead of just on one side, it offered several reflections of my and the other volunteers’ arms, legs and faces. Due to its imperfections, there were pieces of all of us and the surrounding environment of the community that were implicated in this materialization of hope. The consideration of the mirror box made me reflect further on the contributions that we could make to the community. The mirror box was created to address one of the legacies of conflict for the community in which we were volunteering and there were other reminders of this monstrous context for our hopes as volunteers. The convergence of dark and volunteer tourism provided a depth and weight to our experiences and understandings of poverty. Driving into the community on the first day of teaching at the community school, we noticed a sign saying that the area had been declared free of landmines in the last two decades. Most of all, the eventual visits that we all made to the dark tourism sites of the Killing Fields and the Tuol Sleng prison casted shadows over our work and served to anchor our hope within that monstrous history.

The Killing Fields, outside Phnom Penh, were once a Chinese burial ground and were used to execute prisoners during the Khmer Rouge regime. They have now been transformed into a garden memorial to the horror of the regime. The hopes that they will be able to help address post-conflict disadvantage, which bring volunteers to these sites, contends with the material presence of the dark history of violence that also exists there. When I visited the Killing Fields the contestation between volunteers’ hopes and the monstrous history became a strange scratching presence even as I listened to a calm, audio commentary detailing the rule of the Khmer Rouge in in the 1970s. The commentary provided an immersive experience to each visitor, all of whom were foreign tourists on my visit, through the translations of eyewitness accounts of torture, death and rape. There were different sites where tourists stop to hear more of the details of how prisoners brought to the Killing Fields met their deaths. There were trees against which skulls were smashed, leaves of plants that were used for slitting throats and a lake where thousands of victims still lie. Looking over all of this was the glass, Buddhist stupa in which the skulls of victims were categorized forensically by age and gender. As calmly as the air circulated through this well-cared for site, the absence of those who had passed away had an edge of presence that caught in the eye and scratched at the skin, flickering in and out of perception.

The Tuol Sleng prison, a former high school where prisoners were tortured during the Khmer Rouge era, is usually tied to the Killing Fields in a tourist itinerary. It was opened as a memorial site in 1980, only a short time after the Khmer Rouge had been removed by Vietnamese forces. In contrast to the well-tended gardens of the Killing Fields, the various blocks of the S-21 prison have had little renovation or attention. Although there were rooms with information and stories about the genocide, the torture rooms and the rows of small holding cells where prisoners were kept were empty and stained dully with blood. Confronting too, were the rows of black and white photos of prisoners, some of them children, on the ground floors of the cell blocks. The scratching presence at the Killing Fields became a deadening weight at the prison, pulling me out and back from the tortured spaces. In the enclosed, cloying cell blocks the absent presence felt like a sickness for sickening things, calling up a nausea and repulsion that took days to disappear.

The experience of horror in both the Killing Fields and the prison verged on the monstrous, and in doing so brought about a change in the state of volunteers’ hopes. The nature of hope for a better world became a different, sometimes stronger material underneath the shadows of these sites. They took the shape of the learning aids, such as books and flashcards that we had brought with us because we hoped for enthusiastic and engaged classes where we would automatically be able to enrich the lives of disadvantaged students. At first, these hopes proved to be weak and inadequate in the context in which we were volunteering. As Hannah, one of the other volunteers I was teaching with, reflected after yet another class where the students found the tasks we set too difficult or uninteresting, ‘I don’t know what more to do. I’ve used all the ideas that I prepared before I came’. Referring to what she would be able to achieve with the children she said that she was disappointed and that ‘I thought I would be better at this’. I shared Hannah’s disappointment when our hopes flagged, because the things we had thought to bring and teach were not connecting with the children or completely addressing the realities of their disadvantage.

It was the hope itself that changed through our visits to dark tourism sites and closer immersion in the community. After these visits and immersion the hope became a revitalized energy, which volunteers used to work harder at the English classes and health promotion efforts for the community. There was also a continuing struggle with the limitations of that hope, as we saw the scars of the past conflicts in the former soldiers’ families; in their lack of education and physical disabilities. The changed hopes became a tangible medium in which we could cloak ourselves when we were confronted by the poverty of the community. The addition of a sobering weight of experience to our hopes was necessary to anchor decisions of how we could best contribute to the community. As we inhabited these changing hopes, we could better make sense of the small things we could give to the community and replace our ambitious teaching plans with ideas for enjoyable activities that we could do with the children in our short time there. Hope, in this case, was marked by a realization of our powerlessness to fundamentally alter monstrous structures of poverty and the legacies of conflict. Through this process, hope also gained a humility, which helped us better understand what we could achieve as volunteers.

Volunteers’ journeys demonstrate the capacity of hope to converge across many different sites. Lianne, a thirty-two year old volunteer who took part in a two week teaching program at a school in Phnom Penh, saw the ambivalent hope in a better, post-conflict future converge across the school, the homes of families in the community that she visited and the sites of dark tourism. Lianne’s hopes for contributing to the children’s education were contained within a desire to see the sites of recent conflict. Lianne said she decided to volunteer in Cambodia because,

their war history is so recent, people are still touchy about it so I wanted to go there and just see for myself what it was like . . . I guess volunteering in Cambodia, it’s making some form of impact on the kids . . . to inspire them on some level to continue with their English, make plans to continue their education and empower themselves; to get them out of poverty.

Lianne’s visit to sites of dark tourism changed the nature of this hope in confronting ways. On her visit to the Tuol Sleng prison Lianne described the way in which,

They had pretty much left it as it was when the Vietnamese came in and ended the regime in 1979. Blood stains have not even been mopped up off the floor of the rooms of what was once a high school . . . it was a very harrowing place to be . . . some of the rooms I couldn’t even walk into as they just felt so wrong and full of death.

The convergence of the remnants of tragedy with Lianne’s hopes had such a strong material presence that Lianne struggled to move through it. Lianne recalled that in the Killing Fields, ‘most of the bodies have now been exhumed, but bone fragments still appear after the rains…one of the most horrendous things that I have ever witnessed is a tree next to the mass grave where women and children were killed’.

The disturbance that Lianne felt over visiting these sites followed her back to the school where she was teaching and surfaced when she saw the poverty of where the children lived. Lianne described the way she

came back a week later and looked at them in a different way . . . wanting to help them, empower them to be able to better themselves to improve the country and get their communities back up and running . . . just to educate themselves and move away from that history.

After visiting the houses of the families in the community, which had few possessions and ramshackle facilities, Lianne said she found it difficult ‘going into a place and knowing that this is their everyday’. Her volunteer placement evokes the contiguity between the violence of the Khmer Rouge and its legacy in contemporary poverty. Her hopes for the children became stronger in this ambivalent journey. Through her increasing knowledge of the Khmer Rouge era and the crimes of its leader Pol Pot, Lianne said that her hopes for the children’s education were tied to the history of ‘these generations, when Pol Pot was in, they missed that education because they killed all the teachers . . . they realize, now, how important their school is’. On the last day of her placement, in a speech to the other volunteers and the parents of the children, Lianne ‘decided to get a little political and talked about how important education and learning English was for the future of the children and for the future of Cambodia’.

Hope can also be born of everyday and continuing attachments to the ‘ghosts’ of violence in post-conflict landscapes. This was what Jemma, a twenty-seven year old volunteer in a four week program at another school outside Siem Reap, found in that her hopes for education and a better future were manifested in her everyday connections with the community around the school. As she became closer to the community, she found that they overflowed with stories of the monstrosity of the Khmer Rouge era. These stories were living memories to what happened so recently and they were not contained in the tourist sites of the Killing Fields, but were a part of their ‘homelands’; the monstrous existed as ghosts around them. It was amidst these ghosts that Jemma decided to start up a vocational program for the children, with whom she had been volunteering. Living with the stories of the community was an inspiring experience for Jemma that filled her with enough hope to sustain the development of a community training program for the kids who graduate from the school where she volunteered. Jemma saw the sharing of the hope that she had for the children’s education as ‘very individualized . . . making a difference in a community through a single person, through a relationship with a person’. And eventually the grounds for hope created between countries, between developed and developing contexts and between individuals would be ‘passed on from person to person as a ripple effect of positive change into the wider communities’.

In contrast, hope became a ‘scattered energy’ for twenty-three year old Jessica who volunteered in a building program and helped build a house for a Cambodian family in Phnom Penh. Jessica explained ‘that because the genocide happened so recently I think there’s still a lot of emotional healing happening’. While she started the build filled with hopes that ‘we can as individuals make a difference’, as the build progressed and after the visits to the sites of dark tourism Jessica found that her hopes for herself as an individual broke apart into something much more polyvalent. Jessica reflected on the change occasioned by traversing the monstrous landscapes of dark tourism and those of volunteering. She said that it was ‘just walking, there’s the opportunity to visit the sites of genocide and there’s, you know, piled high skulls . . . there’s more just a feeling constantly, of feeling a little overwhelmed’. The scattered and scattering energy that resulted from the convergence of these landscapes was a material condition for the convergence of the determination to finish building the house for the impoverished family and the realities of the post-conflict, poverty stricken darkness in contemporary Cambodia.

While Spencer did visit the memorial that the Killing Fields have become, it was his work with the amputees and former soldiers at the community clinic outside Siem Reap that most contributed to his hopes for a brighter, post-conflict future in Cambodia. Spencer suggested that the persistence of phantom limb pain may have been a result of the nerve damage caused by the explosion of a landmine or a war wound, rather than a controlled amputation. Reflecting on his patients, Spencer observed that,

we didn’t actually know who would have been Khmer Rouge and who would have been Cambodian Army, but we knew that some of them would have been either . . . the population were kind of split like that and I was just . . . shocked . . . you know these Khmer Rouge people you know they did all these horrible things, but I found out more about it and how it was so . . . confusing.

The normalization of violence in the Khmer Rouge era and its aftermath had rendered monstrosity as the norm within the community. The phantom limb pain, as a kind of pain for things that are no longer there, evinces the way in which a monstrous absence can come to matter. Through such pain the body becomes the ground on which atrocities are enacted and then later remembered. It reminds us of how the immaterial and material grounds go on as a testament long after conflicts are officially over. The convergence of these grounds with the materialization of hope in Spencer’s mirror box sustains and builds on the collective hopes for a better future between volunteers and the communities they help.

Conclusion

The many sites of engagement between the memorials to the Khmer Rouge and volunteer tourism in Cambodia exist in a kind of metaphorical mirror box, reflecting back to the theories of the materiality of hope in cultural geography. ⁴¹ It is in ambivalent journeys, such as those of volunteer tourists, that hope materializes within the inequitable economies of mobility and resource distribution between the developed and developing world and the dysfunctional global community, which perpetuates these economies. Inside the mirror box there is evidence of the monstrous in the convergence between the history of the Killing Fields and that of the poverty of communities hosting volunteering programmes. There are also the ghosts that existed outside the mandated sites of memorial and in the everyday lives of the communities with which volunteers became close. In the recounted experiences of volunteers from three different volunteer programmes in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh various kinds of hopes became evident within specific material configurations. These include Lianne’s renewed commitment to the children she helped teach in Phnom Penh after seeing the darkest parts of their historical circumstances and Jemma’s continuing project to consolidate the vocational future of the school children with whom she volunteered. As their experiences demonstrate, the hopeful quality of the volunteer tourist’s journey into the darkest of spaces is comprised of a convergence between a kind of pain felt by volunteers for the poverty and violence faced by disadvantaged communities in Cambodia and the practicalities of their efforts to contribute to change in those communities.

The pain that volunteers feel does not stem from an easily evident hurt. Rather the pain is felt through the experience of becoming conscious of the poverty and violence faced by communities far away from them. This pain is something of a phantom limb to the journeys that volunteer tourists make into the dark tourism sites. Their journeys and the articulation of hope for a better future, in their commitments to volunteering projects, enact a kind of reaching across distances and hierarchies of power, which mandate where the hurt that lingers from multiple conflicts can be made evident and where it goes unrecognized. They reach the phantom limb, this pain they feel for faraway violence and poverty, into Cambodia’s post-conflict sites of memorial and continuing poverty. To acknowledge such a phantom is to question the careful demarcation between the frightening, post-conflict mess of poverty and violence in Cambodia and the kinds of hopes that volunteer tourists bring with them from their ordered, still violently colonized homes in Australia.

The materialization of hope for a better world within the mirror box is significantly more ambivalent than the ascription of hope to particular social movements or pre-fabricated solutions for dynamic and expanding global challenges. Volunteer placements allow volunteers to reach into communities and be inspired by hopes for a better world, but what materializes is characterized more by the ‘scattered energy’ and dragging ‘weight’ that both the volunteers and I noticed. Critically analysed, this energy and the naïve articulated hopes of the volunteers in substantial progress converge with and camouflage the ongoing post-conflict violence of political oppression and land dispossession. ⁴² Hope of this kind is both tangibly material and immaterial; it is not only productive of the capacity to do good or a monstrosity beyond the pale. This ambivalence gives the journeys of volunteer tourists and their efforts towards a better future for disadvantaged communities the appearance of a trick. As one of the volunteers explained, this is how the real mirror box is built to work, it tricks the brain into thinking there is a real arm or a real solution there, through which to treat pain. The journeys of volunteer tourists into the metaphorical mirror box may well be a trick that fails to appease substantial longings for equitable change. However, even if the journey into the mirror box enacts a trick on our consciousness of disadvantage, the hope it produces helps to assuage the pain that exists after violence and through poverty for communities in Cambodia. It also helps assuage that pain and disquiet that is the knowledge and experience of inequality for those volunteers who are driven to help others. The incommensurable hurt between distant sites is a legacy of multiple conflicts and histories that, through such phenomena as the convergence between volunteer and dark tourism, refuse to stay separate.

The immaterial and material presence of hope can shape the complex negotiations of building a better future, both for those communities in disadvantage and those that become aware of the pain of this disadvantage. Agents, such as volunteer tourists, with privileged, inspired and yet ambivalent movements across disparate sites are proliferating and creating new ways to connect and collaborate on a shared future. Rather than depleting hopes for the future, their confrontations with monstrous sites bring about changes in the substance of hope and it is these changes that can help ensure the resilience of hope within uncertain economies and environments. If these hopes are not dependable in the sense of being part of predictable and unequivocal forces for good, their changeability may gesture towards how hope can come to matter in the future; that possibility of living through the shared legacy of violent histories, feeling the hurt and healing.