Tourism accounts for a large portion of the cross-cultural contacts occurring in the contemporary world. This project will use innovative cognitive anthropological methodologies to investigate the local effects of tourism. The researchers aim to discover residents' understandings of tourism and its impacts in a developing tourism destination, the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI). The TCI government has worked with outside developers and hotels to craft an upscale tourism program. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the resident population regards tourism positively but does not fully appreciate its impacts. This two-year research project is designed to reveal the range of understandings among residents with respect to several concerns: knowledge of the tourism system, perceptions of tourists, evaluation of tourism's impacts, appreciation of economic opportunities, and the sources of information that they rely on with respect to tourism. The theoretical framework for the research comes from cognitive anthropology, which is concerned with how humans develop collective mental models of natural and social domains. In particular, the project will develop a composite cultural model of tourism and then refine and test that model using systematically collected survey data.
The scientific benefits of the project include: providing a new case study of tourism in the Caribbean region; demonstrating an innovative methodology that conjoins qualitative and quantitative data; and illustrating how cultural model theory and cultural consensus theory can be used together to produce a more complete cognitive ethnography. The research also will contribute to the education of American students who will participate in the research and to evaluation of economic policy initiatives that support tourism as a development strategy.
