Reflexive narrative

Most of the volunteers’ narratives depicted host families and orphanage employees as very distant and ignoring. Charlotte was again an exception in her way of analysing and interpreting things, although she was very disturbed by the way kids were beaten by the elders. Her narrative shows an empathetic and reflexive standpoint where she tries to understand the logic behind the other’s behaviour.

“There is the wife of Prakash, she seemed ... at first, I did not want to get to know her.... She spent her time shouting after the children…. And then she bacame more and more kind. I think they too ... we say why they are not nice to us but we must think they’re seeing people running all the time, they’re not going to give their trust to new comer at once.

There are so many people coming in and I also understand that they’re expecting they also know who you are. You are someone according to their criteria like that ... and little by little, they can trust you. “(Charlotte, interview)

In this narrative, she explained how the relationship with a host is progressive.

According to her, it is normal that it takes time for locals before they start to trust volunteers. In fact, the way volunteers see the other and also the role they want the other to play in their journey defines the way they manage otherness and tensions once in the field. In the case of John and Alison, the poor other is

Chapitre 4. Consuming poverty in the volunteer tourism experience: An ethnographic study in a Nepalese orphanage

depicted as inferior and needy. Their role is to help John and Alison to progress.

Thus, being ignored by locals or not recognised deconstructs the pre-established dominant–subordinate relationship. Most of the volunteers have difficulty understanding this and accepting the new power relationship. However, in the case of Charlotte, her aim was to understand another people’s culture.

She did not pretend to help nor felt superior, her need was rather to learn from another culture, which explains her empathetic and reflexive standpoint.

4.4 Concluding discussion

Drawing from insights from post-development theory and society of individuals theory, this paper offers a critical analysis of volunteer tourism and contributes to the cautionary stream of research. My focus was on the way poverty is consumed in the volunteer tourism experience. In my analysis I have explained how postcolonial patterns are articulated and expressed in both narratives and practices by giving some insights from my observational notes.

Most of the volunteers’ narratives (except Charlotte’s, whose narrative I chose to serve as a counter example) reveal a combination of orientalism and development discourse. The separation between a privileged Western self and the miserable other was noticeably established. Behind altruistic motivations and feelings of compassion, a clear separation between “us” and “them” was described. The other was depicted as poor, miserable, naive, savage, underdeveloped, and definitively in need of Western intervention to catch up with progress and reach modernity. The escape to a “third world” country is also good evidence that colonialism has not ended yet and that its shape takes another form through development.

In addition, poverty is romanticized; the “poor but happy” discourse was omnipresent in volunteers’ narratives. As Crossley (2012) explained, encounters with extreme poverty create a feeling of anxiety negotiated by transforming poverty into a source of moral redemption. In the same vein, volunteers tend to

Chapitre 4. Consuming poverty in the volunteer tourism experience: An ethnographic study in a Nepalese orphanage

transform poverty into a seductive issue consumed in terms of authentic experience, wild sexual relationships, and exotic landscapes.

Furthermore, volunteers’ narratives show how the encounter with poverty and otherness helps to reach the aim of becoming oneself, a better self. Ehrenberg (1992) claimed that consumption has recycled the ideals of the liberation movement of the 1970s and builds on it an ideal of personal realization and freedom where everyone could create her/his own “personal legend”.

In addition, Ehrenberg (1995) suggested that the contemporary individual suffers from autonomy and over-responsibility. He explained that some of the diseases of our contemporary society, such as depression, are the consequences of autonomy and initiative. In modern society, individuals are under pressure to become exceptional. Thus, an encounter with poverty is consumed as a breach with materialistic and competitive Western societies.

Chapitre 4. Consuming poverty in the volunteer tourism experience: An ethnographic study in a Nepalese orphanage

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Chapitre 5.Beyond the smile: The infrapolitics of the host in a Nepalese