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The portrayal of other groups of people than our own often run the risk of depicting the individuals in these groups in a simplified way. We often view ourselves as complex beings, with several defining memberships connected to our person. These memberships can be as students, siblings, religious, political, friends, and musicians, to name but a few. This definition is not always as certain in our portrayal of others, more foreign to our everyday life. The supporters of the opposing football team or voters of the rivalling political party might just be defined by these confining identities. Examples of this phenomenon are legion in human history, whether it is nazi Germany’s propaganda that dehumanized the Jewish population or Apartheid’s definition of worth through skin colour. The understanding of how this style of simplified portrayal dehumanizes the portrayed subject is important to teach in our schools. The power of our choice of definition of the people around us needs to be taught to students. The first step towards giving students an understanding of the subject is to show them solid examples of this in history. The focus of this study is therefore to analyse letters from Swedish missionaries in South Africa and how they portrayed the South African population during the official introduction of Apartheid. Amartya Sen’s theorem of identity and violence has been used as a tool during the analysis to achieve this goal. The results showed that many of the missionaries changed their portrayal of the black population during the investigation period, 1945–1951, from a simplified to a diverse description. Their depiction of the white population, however, stayed relatively the same during the entire period.

A new form of foreign travel called “voluntourism” has emerged in Sweden. In advertisements that invite to “make a difference”, travel agencies promote short- term aid opportunities at for example orphanages or schools in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. International volunteer work is nothing new. Rather, the volunteer agencies have entered an old and established organizational field. Using theories of new institutionalism and the analytical phrase “the story about”, this thesis investigates the way international aid work originated and evolved, and how commercial volunteer agencies entered the field. The thesis is partly based on historical data from organizational reports, biographies of aid work icons, and interviews with volunteers active during the 1960s and 1970s. Additionally, it makes use of contemporary data from interviews with representatives from volunteer travel agencies and volunteers. It also includes an analysis of how the travel agencies present their business operations on their websites. The thesis concludes that travel agencies apply the common perception of international aid work’s characteristics when marketing volunteer travels. This common perception can be traced through the evolution of international aid work. Travel agencies attract volunteers by offering access to this exclusive field. The volunteers are well-educated young women from middle class families. They are looking for experiences from international aid work, perspective on their own lives, and first-hand knowledge of local and traditional societies in poor countries. Nevertheless, due to the esteem in which the organizational field is viewed, a brief period spent as an aid worker is considered a desirable qualification for a job applicant. I interpret volunteer travel as a “grand tour”.

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