Ethnographers and Collaborators in the Voluntourism Encounter

Abstract

Collaboration has been a hallmark of applied anthropology for as long as anthropologists have been putting anthropology to use. The very process of applying anthropological methods and theories to real‐world problems requires an understanding of the needs of the people experiencing the problem. Collaboration also has a long history in both archaeology and ethnography in Mesoamerica. This article explores the relationship between collaboration and applied anthropology in the context of a volunteer tourism program in rural Yucatan, Mexico. Tourism—and especially archaeological tourism—is a driving force in the region's economy. Increasingly, volunteer tourism initiatives provide visitors with the opportunity to contribute to the local community as part of their travel experience. I argue that the conceptual framework of what constitutes meaningful collaboration offers us a way to examine the interactions and power dynamics surrounding the encounter between volunteer, host, and even ethnographer. Specifically, the article questions whether contributions of various sorts are a requisite for achieving actual collaboration in these encounters.

Dividing the Light

“…Volunteer tourism (or 'voluntourism') is a justifiably critiqued practice, with scholarship suggesting it contributes to undermining the longer-term capacities of local organisations and infrastructure and reducing local autonomy (Smith 2015), as well as raising the potential for conflicts and misunderstandings via the brief and prescribed cross-cultural encounters it generates (Taylor 2020). Young women are the most common demographic to engage in voluntourism (Mostafanezhad 2013).…”