Residents' Understandings of Tourism in the Turks and Caicos Islands, British West Indies

旅游业占当代世界发生的跨文化接触的很大一部分。本项目将采用创新的认知人类学方法来调查旅游对当地的影响。 研究人员旨在发现居民对旅游业的理解及其对发展中旅游目的地特克斯和凯科斯群岛（TCI）的影响。TCI政府与外部开发商和酒店合作，制定了一个高档旅游项目。坊间证据表明，居民积极看待旅游业，但没有充分认识到其影响。这个为期两年的研究项目旨在揭示居民对以下几个问题的理解范围：旅游系统的知识、游客的看法、旅游影响的评估、经济机会的评价以及他们在旅游方面所依赖的信息来源。该研究的理论框架来自认知人类学，它关注人类如何发展自然和社会领域的集体心理模型。特别是，该项目将制定一个旅游业的综合文化模式，然后利用系统收集的调查数据完善和测试该模式。该项目的科学效益包括：提供了一个新的加勒比地区旅游业案例研究;展示了一种结合定性和定量数据的创新方法;并说明了如何将文化模型理论和文化共识理论结合起来，以产生更完整的认知人种学。这项研究还将有助于美国学生的教育，他们将参与研究，并评估支持旅游业作为发展战略的经济政策举措。

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.