Poverty is an abyss that everyone wants to avoid. Those who are cruelly acquainted with it, stake everything to climb out of it, and those who are bestowed with riches, do everything in their power to avoid being engulfed in it. This avoidance manifests as either making oneself more rich, or maintaining the status quo and keeping the poor bound to poverty.
Tourism, on the other hand, functions inversely with respect to poverty. While poverty is characterised by a lack of money and resources, tourism is just the opposite. Tourism is one of the largest industries in terms of money spent by tourists and money received by the tourist agencies and respective Ministries.
How then, by virtue of being so contrasting and inherently different, do poverty and tourism combine to produce a larger issue?
Poverty and tourism combine like yin and yang, to produce something known as “Poverty Tourism”, which essentially entails ‘touring’ or a personal observation of poverty. It functions in the same way as regular tourism does, be it paying a tourist agency for a day trip to the Grand Canyon in Arizona, USA, or a full-fledged package for a stay at a luxurious hotel in Maldives. Poverty tours promise their customers ‘authentic’ experiences of poverty. These authentic experiences however, are marketed as ‘safe’, which is contradictory to the fact that we most often associate crime and danger with poverty.
To some, the idea of touring an impoverished neighbourhood, slum or region, might seem bizarre. After all, why would one pay to venture into unsanitary and dilapidated environments? A primary goal of poverty tourism is to provide the tourists with a sense of gratitude for the things the slum dwellers are not capable of acquiring. Tourists wearing good quality sports shoes and sunscreens with strong SPF protection, carrying borrowed mineral water bottles, are exposed to the plight of those who can barely afford 2 square meals a day. While practicing is a great way to grow as an individual, doing it at the expense of others in a dehumanising way is certainly not the way to go about it.
Advocates of poverty tourism argue that it provides an impetus to the local communities, by generating human integrations, connections and also an economic boost to some extent, by drawing attention to the locally produced products. Furthermore, advocates also strengthen their case by bringing in the “Pareto superiority” argument in their favour. Pareto superiority is a concept wherein during an exchange, one party gains something, but the other party is not necessarily made worse off, or does not lose anything.
Applied in this context, it would mean that the tourists who engage in poverty tourism gain insight, knowledge, experiences that they can learn from, but the poor residents do not necessarily lose, say, money or anything material by being observed by the tourists. While this is not entirely false, it is not entirely ethical either, since the residents are dehumanized and treated as ‘showpieces’, as if they were in a ‘human zoo’. Those on the criticizing side could also stretch the Pareto superiority argument against the advocates and say that while the residents do not lose anything, it does not stop them from being looked down upon and being subject to voyeurism under the garb of altruism.
At the end of the day, the truth remains that the residents being observed are in unfortunate conditions, and this misfortune of theirs is converted into a ‘spectacle’ to be exhibited, ultimately bringing in profit to the tourism agencies. Would we then agree that poverty tourism is a kind of indulgence, which the privileged use to satisfy their curiosity about others’ unfortunate conditions? Tours and ‘entertainment’ of this kind loop the poor residents and the well-off tourists into a cycle of social subordination, degradation and disdain. Moreover, when the conditions and daily lives of the residents are presented in distorted ways to match the preconceived notions and assumptions of the tourists, it only serves to reinforce the beliefs, ideologies and superiority of the privileged class. One such agenda that has recently taken the spotlight, is the White Saviour Syndrome, where white skinned individuals believe that owing to their relatively ‘more advantageous’ or ‘more privileged’ position in the social hierarchy, they are responsible for liberating BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Colour), since BIPOC are incapable of helping themselves. This is socially ingrained into people via movies, elite ideologies and regional/ national political narratives.
While poverty tourists are without doubt a large stakeholder in this business of turning misfortune to riches, we must not forget about the accountability that the tour operators owe the poor residents. The likelihood of exploitation in this business is dangerously high. Since the tour operators and agencies possess cultural, knowledge and wealth capital, they are in a position to socially dominate the poor. The terms of the tours are dominated and manipulated single handedly by the agencies, and grounds for negotiation are slim; not to mention the privacy and consent violations that the poor are often forced into.
Many academicians have discussed the commodification of love, local and regional vulnerable identities, peoples’ bodies, so on and so forth. Poverty doesn’t seem to have made it out of the list either. This industry not only commodifies and capitalises upon the disadvantageous social standing of the poor residents, but also the inherently curious nature of human beings, who seek answers to anything unfamiliar, which in this case would be the poverty stricken lives of the residents that the wealthy, world travelling tourists are not acquainted with.
An interesting variant of the regular day-trip type of poverty tours are the “Poverty Tourism Homestays” where the tourists cohabit with the poor residents and cultivate comparatively more rich interpersonal exchanges with the residents. The residents are of course compensated for this cohabitation with the tourists, but if we delve deeper, we are prone to recognise the psychological catch here.
The first catch comes from the concept of Cognitive Dissonance, introduced by the renowned social psychologist Festinger, in his study on “forced compliance”. In this experiment, participants were given extremely boring tasks to complete. After the boring tasks were completed, the participants were given either one dollar, or twenty dollars to lie about the task actually being fun.
The participants who were paid only one dollar, rated the task to be more enjoyable than their twenty-dollar counterparts. The idea behind this is that $1 is not sufficient compensation to lie, and hence leads to an experience of ‘Cognitive Dissonance’. Cognitive Dissonance, is essentially the mental discomfort caused by a gap between an individual’s beliefs and actions. There are three ways in which we can reduce the Dissonance we feel: first, is to trivialise the situation as not important enough and dismiss it. Second, is to change our actions to match our beliefs. Third, is to change our beliefs and/or attitude to match our actions, which is unfortunately the hardest of the three.
Those paid $1 experienced more dissonance, and hence changed their beliefs about the task being fun, to match their lies, while the $20 participants experienced less Cognitive Dissonance, owing to the $20 payment justification.
One might ask, “What does Cognitive Dissonance and psychology have to do with Poverty Tourism? When applied to the context of poverty tourism, the tourism agencies structure their compensation system in such a way that they induce forced compliance. The residents are paid just enough (akin to $1) to comply with the demands of the agencies, allowing the agency officials to use their cultural and economic authority and take charge of the situation without resistance. Furthermore, the payment is so less, that the residents do not opt to change the behaviour of their daily lives to match their beliefs. Hence, this also kills a second bird and curbs the ‘observer bias’ that might dilute the ‘authentic experience’ that the tourists are promised. In observer bias, a person who is aware that he or she is being observed, might change their behaviour and act differently from usual, in order to ‘look good’ to the person who is observing him or her.
The Cognitive Dissonance experiment is a classic example of ‘less is more’, which holds true in the context of poverty tourism as well — less payment for more profits.
As mentioned earlier, this side of tourism runs a high risk of exploration, since the impoverished residents are vulnerable in terms of money, resources and access to systems that can improve their condition. They are also subject to privacy intrusions and violations, which they cannot protect themselves from, because they lack resources to start with. Objecting to these tours and an attempt to protect their privacy means that they are narrowing down their already slim chances of acquiring some monetary benefits or two. The poor residents cannot take measures to protect themselves the way celebrities can in celebrity tourism, as they live in gated communities and have unrestricted access to monetary and social capital.
Poverty tourism field trips are another sub-branch within this sector, but are carried out for more educational purposes than voyeuristic ones. Mostly students and faculty engage in this kind of poverty tourism and there is a higher likelihood of having obtained some prior consent from the local communities. However, while this is consensual in nature and serves educational objectives rather than commercial ones, we still need to make sure that not only the procedure, but also the substance and content of the consent is sound. In some cases, consent might be established for these tours, but information gaps and mediating parties looking for a profit might use foot in the door persuasion techniques to serve their interests. An example of this, would be asking the residents for consent regarding a half-day poverty tour through their neighbourhood showcasing their daily activities. During the tour, the initial small request is upgraded into a larger request of selling to the tourists, the local products at a discounted rate, or for that matter, letting the tourists stay in their households. This way, once they agree to the small request, it is snowballed into a larger one, and it puts the residents in a dire situation.
Most social issues have a for and against party vying for different outcomes, and it is no different for poverty tourism as well. What is paramount, is that we ask ourselves about whether we ‘need’ to experience poverty in a superficial manner through such tours, or can education and awareness remedy not only our preconceptions about poverty, but also the way we treat such individuals.
The harms of poverty tourism cannot be uprooted right away, but we can start by taking small steps to initiate a change that will prove to be cohesive to our societies, rather than divisive.
For starters, giving the poor residents veto powers that help them assert their agency for or against these tours would make a world of difference. The ability to assert agency is in itself a type of social capital and resource, that will help them battle privacy invasions as well as commercial exploitation by refusing to accept such tours.
If the residents/ communities consent to these tours to boost their incomes and livelihoods, making sure that a fixed proportion of the profits made by the agencies are given to the communities to enrich them and better their positions rather than preying on their vulnerability, that would be a great initiative. Employing the locals in the agencies solves the problem of labour shortage for the agencies, as well as provides a means of livelihood for the locals. This also ensures that the cultural authenticity of these small communities is not lost during the tours and provides a better understanding for those who genuinely want to study these communities.
The dangers of a capitalistic world and way of life is that almost anything imaginable can now be turned into a profit-making enterprise. However, we can combat these dangers by one, acknowledging these dangers and two, by being ethical in our methods so that they mutually benefit those around us, rather than pitting people, communities and societies against one another.
Yashee Jha is an avid commentator on various topical issues. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.