ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on research among three Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) which have adopted volunteer tourism as a social and economic development strategy in the Chiang Mai Province of northern Thailand. It shows how volunteer tourism articulates with sentimentality, neoliberalism and popular humanitarianism through every day experiences of its participants including Western volunteers, NGO practitioners and primarily northern Thai host community members. The book uses the concept of the humanitarian gaze as an organizing metaphor to describe the relational act of spectatorship in popular humanitarianism. Sentimentality intersects with humanitarianism and development discourse in volunteer tourism in ways that reflect an emerging transnational cultural logic. The cultural politics of the humanitarian gaze as assemblage in volunteer tourism has tangible political, economic and cultural dimensions.
