INTRODUCTION
One of the fastest growing niche tourism markets in the world, volunteer
tourism is a type of tourism where people pay to participate
in conservation or development projects (Lyons, Hanley, Wearing, &
Neil, 2012; Mintel, 2008). Drawing on recent scholarship in critical
tourism studies as well as 16 months of ethnographic research in
Chiang Mai, Thailand, I address the ‘‘politics of aesthetics’’ in development
oriented volunteer tourism in the Global South. By ‘‘aesthetics,’’
I mean two things. First, I draw on Ranciere’s notion of aesthetics as
the structured way human sense is organized or how discourse frames
what is knowable. I also examine how volunteer tourists aestheticize the
host community members’ poverty through their descriptions of it as
authentic and cultural. This reframing of the encounter contributes
to the legitimization of volunteer tourism as a celebrated cultural practice
that perpetuates the aestheticization rather than the politicization
of poverty in the encounter or what Ranciere refers to as postmodern
post-politics. Commenting on Ranciere’s notion of this concept, Zizek
notes that ‘‘today’s ‘postmodern’ post-politics opens up a new field
which involves a stronger negation of politics: it no longer merely ‘represses’
it, trying to contain it and to pacify the ‘return of the