C ONCLUDING DISCUSSION : V OLUNTEER EXPERIENCES AND

Drawing on the two dominant configurations of Western Lice and Local lice, this article first sketched out the lice work of marketing and Nepalese everyday life.

Exploring situated orphanage lice work, we further explored how lice challenge the experience and identity of volunteers and offered examples of how care and subjectivity are negotiated at the orphanage. While we showed how the marketing of volunteer tourism product was riddled by a modern configuration of lice as ‘messy objects’ stigmatized through connections to poor hygiene and poverty, a local lice configuration was described as part of a mundane and inevitable part of everyday life. At the orphanage, lice were constructed through a pattern of absences and presences of closeness and proximity, of hair, turbans and of shaves. At the same time, the lice enables a turning of tables through it capacity to engage in ontological choreography, were power and object/subject positions shifted. While lice have been used as the analytical entry points to describe this, non-human actors such as diarrhea and Dhal Bat (Traditional meal that consists of steamed rice and a cooked lentil soup called dal) constituted other instances in a choreographed relationship were power and subject/objects positions were challenged.

We explored the unsettled position of the lice, looking at how it was continuously negotiated through everyday practices and offered different possibilities to shape and engage in 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 present analysis are not meant to provide a covering 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 absents and presents 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

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of a culture or situation unknown to them. Their subjectivities and bodies are not separate, nor are their constitution purely an individual or singular affair. By situating the volunteer tourism experience to socio-material practices modest, and often overlooked stories from the everyday life of volunteer tourism are brought forward. By shifting our attention from inside the mind to the messy material relationships between human and non-humans in volunteer tourism, we hope to have exemplified the potential of similar future explorations.

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Chapitre7. Conclusion 145

Chapitre7. Conclusion

“All the world’s is a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts “ William Shakespeare's in “As You Like It”, 1623.

This dissertation does not pretend to tell a unique truth. Rather it tells a unique story, a piece of theatre where different actors interact to co-create a story that is both old and new. When everything seems written in advance, the unexpected happens to destabilize the order of things and leads to a new balance.

The aim of this dissertation has been to critically analyze the volunteer tourism phenomenon, using an extended case methodology (Burawoy, 2009). The field study took place in an orphanage in Nepal. In this concluding section, I present firstly a summary of the main results and contributions. Then I use the metaphor of theatre to conclude. I will continue with the limitations of the research and finally I will propose some future research.