| Tourism is Barbados's main industry, employing approximately 7.5% of the island's population. State discourses of tourism development focus on the economic benefits and employment opportunities offered by the industry. However, competition in the global tourism industry means that islands like Barbados must market themselves as more than sun, sand and sea destinations. In Barbados, the proposed solution has been a two-pronged tourism program that focuses on Nature and Heritage tourism. However, the heritage tourism program is not without its tensions. As I will show, the island's contested colonial past is embraced by the state as a key resource for its post-colonial development. The aim of this thesis was to explore how local workers at a Barbadian heritage site experienced, contested and negotiated state discourses of tourism development and the tension in the state's heritage tourism program in their workdays and daily lives. Ethnographic data was collected through participant-observation and formal and semi-structured interviews. Employees experienced and expressed their perceptions of development and state discourses of tourism in terms of socio-economic differentiation and prestige. In addition, I found that employees expressed a dual consciousness in their understandings and perceptions of history-heritage and development that, I argue, are a reflection of the larger state tension surrounding tourism and heritage. |
