A Decommodified Experience? Exploring Aesthetic, Economic and Ethical Values for Volunteer Ecotourism in Costa Rica

Our students were deeply moved, as we were, for example, by a bronze flutist from Benin, Nigeria; a Haida mask of western Canada; a Mayan god of Central America—as we saw how in the very purpose and structure of art, such opposites as sameness and difference, surface and depth, the intimate and the wide, hard and soft are made one. And these are the very same opposites we are trying to put together in ourselves. Through the opposites, we see our true kinship to peoples far away in place and time....