Volunteer tourism: contradictions and dilemmas

Abstract

Volunteer tourism or voluntourism is a topic that has been increasingly researched, as it is becoming a common practice. There are several ways to practice this tourism and, in general, specialized agencies promote it, as a new modality that can be offered to a specific public, who seek these trips based on several motivations. They vary from the real desire to practice solidarity, to taking vacations with some “purpose”, or even to have in the curriculum the practice of good actions while learning new content that can be valued in the search for jobs. In addition, practicing volunteer tourism in remote locations, in communities around the world, can also serve for sociability purposes, and to discover new places that are often the object of desire for many people. The encounters produced by these tourists and the communities they seek to serve are full of interactions and can result in countless concrete gains for both, but also can cause new conflicts that did not exist before. The logic that promotes these meetings, that often does not show concern and effective preparation and qualification of those involved for the activity, can bring unexpected and inappropriate results. There are several reports in this sense that have already been publicized, some of them even being alarming, especially when they show cases of volunteer tourism whose actions perpetuate situations of poverty in order to continue offering the activity as a source of income for some entrepreneurs, without concern for the populations that motivated the initiative. This book is based on a MsC thesis that accompanied a volunteer tourism expedition promoted by a tourism agency, to a community in the Brazilian Amazon. Through observation of this activity, interviews with those involved, in addition to documentary and bibliographical research on the subject and the mapping of other experiences, it aimed to contextualize the subject in a didactic, reflective, and critical way.