Islandscapes and Tourism: An Anthology

By Joseph M Cheer, Philip Hayward, Karl Agius and 14 more

The links between islands and tourism, as sights of pleasure is embodied in the touristification of sun, sand and sea. Islandscapes are central to the tourist imaginaries that shape islands as touristified places - curated, designed and commodified for both mass tourism and more niche inclined versions. Yet while islands are parlayed for touristic pleasure seekers, islands are also home to longstanding communities that have variously battled with the tyranny of distance from metropolitan centres, as well as the everyday challenges of climate change effects, and benefitted from their isolation from modern-day pressures.

To what extent are islandscapes resilient to rapidly changing utilities, significances and ways of life wrought by tourism expansion? The vulnerability-resilience duality remains firmly entrenched in the discourse on islands where tourism has become prominent. Although tourism provides some resiliency, overall, islandscapes remain subject to externally driven fast and slow change that exercises an overwhelming influence.

This anthology of articles previously published in the journal Shima explores emergent themes that describe how island peoples adapt and respond in localised cultural islandscapes as a consequence of tourism expansion. It is aimed at researchers in island studies, tourism, sustainability, human geography, cultural studies, sociology and anthropology. The anthology will also be of interest to those with an abiding interest in the trajectories of islands and their peoples, particularly where tourism has come to shape islandscapes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CAB International
• Release date: Apr 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781800621534

Book preview

Introduction: Islandscapes and tourism – setting the scene

Joseph M. Cheer¹,²*

¹Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia; ²Wakayama University, Wakayama, Japan

*[e-mail]

©CAB International 2023. Islandscapes and Tourism: An Anthology (eds J.M. Cheer et al.)

DOI: 10.1079/9781800621534.intr

Abstract

The links between islandscapes and tourism are unassailable. The essential nature of islandscapes, particularly their backdrop, lends them to touristification in the contemporary globalised context. ‘Getting away from it all’ is central to tourists’ selection of an island as a holiday destination – it is this that is fundamental to making islands favourably predisposed for tourism development. In seeking to inform and shape the islandscapes agenda, the selection of perspectives herein showcases the interactions between islands and the evidently diverse encounters with tourism. On small islands, dotted across the globe, tourism looms large, yet as geographer Stephen Britton forewarns, it holds enormous promise, but can also unravel delicately poised islandscapes. For many small island developing states, their reliance on tourism is well known, yet this very dependence echoes Britton’s assertions, and highlights the vexed articulations that tourism tends to raise, and what this anthology appraises extensively.

Keywords: islandscapes, tourism, island studies, tourism geographies, historical geographies

Preamble

In the past, memorable sea voyages were depicted by writers, artists, travellers, explorers and geographers, and today in the notes of journalists, scientists and tourists. The islanders too have changed, and their insularity has contributed to forging particular cultures, creating unique societies, which in turn have preserved their traditional and ecological systems more than those on the continent. (Pungetti, 2012).

The island imaginary has long pervaded traveller dreaming. Notions of paradise, escape and Eden are commonplace, invoked alongside islands as citadels for nature and as spaces for recreation, relaxation and adventure, of which there are a plethora, as seen in Pacific island countries (Cheer et al., 2018), and elsewhere. For islands, as Pungetti (2016) opines above, the catalogue of agents and actors continue to bump and grind, disrupting, remaking and prefiguring island tapestries, while islanders in situ resist, adapting and acquiescing to external and internal forces, making islands come into their own. But beyond all of that, islands as places of habitation, where islander communities have lived, toiled and thrived for ages, is intertwined with islands as places of colonial (and neo-colonial) endeavour, resource extraction, territorialisation, sites of carceral containment and conflict, alongside a plethora of other antecedents. The history of islands, as Sahlins (2013, p. 152) puts, is one where it is necessary to insist that the possibility that the present will transcend the past, while at the same time remaining true to it and this depends on the cultural order as well as the practical situation. Islands as sights of despoliation loom large in island imaginaries with the deep ruptures of extractive activity redolent in places like Nauru, a once thriving phosphate-rich island that now lies gutted, a poor imitation of its former self – disfigured and disembowelled, bequeathing a wretched legacy for islanders to come. This stands in stark contrast to islands as sites of pleasure for touristic and recreation purposes, highlighting the evident dualities when it comes to queries of islandscapes and their many manifestations and histories.

The emergent island assemblages showcased in this anthology constitute what is referred to herein as ‘islandscapes’, referencing Appadurai’s (1990) articulation of the dimensions of global cultural flows: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes and ideoscapes. This categorisation of ‘scapes’ as applied to islands, and the term employed, islandscapes, allude to the irregular shapes of these landscapes, shapes which characterize international capital as deeply as they do international clothing styles (Appadurai, 1990, p. 297). Furthermore, and with specific reference to tourism, the term islandscape is used to demarcate between characteristics that are particular to islands (Cheer et al., 2017, p. 41). Indeed, Islandscapes encompass both the landscape (physical and cultural landscapes) and seascape (coastline and other bodies of water that encompass islands) and this intersection makes up the essential character of islands (ibid.). Tourism as an interlocutor of islandscapes is countenanced with the assertion made that, inevitably, islands have become the subject of touristic placemaking (Lew, 2017) by external parties, as well as embraced, developed and spurned all at once by islanders themselves. Where the intersection between islandscapes and tourist endeavour is concerned, islandscapes and their connotations buttress the wider tourism economy and are central to the commodification of islands, and the generation of subsequent livelihoods – usually a welcome respite against what tends to be constrained conditions for economic diversification (Kelman, 2021; Harrison and Pratt, 2015).

The multivalence evident in island contexts typifies the often complex dynamics at play, and where tourism is introduced, and depending on scale, some extent of tourism-led transformation is assured, as chapters in this volume demonstrate. Associating islands with tourism is oftentimes a fait accompli with examples aplenty, highlighting the hypercharged nature of tourism development in places like the Hawai’ian Islands, Spain’s Balearics, the small island nations of the Caribbean and Pacific, Bali, Boracay and Koh Phi Phi. Island-based tourism also lends itself to the fastest growing niche in tourism, cruising, where remoteness and under-development is no longer an impediment to tourism expansion. Ships the size of shopping malls ply the high seas, in search of splendid isolation aboard seagoing craft that have become increasingly prone to gigantism, dwarfing islands where they dock, and raising legitimate sustainability and environmental concerns (Cheer, 2022). Such problematising of the relationship between islands and tourism pervades extant literature, and for very good reasons given the scale at which tourism often takes place in what are usually delicate social-ecological contexts (Cheer, 2019; McLeod et al., 2021).

It’s appropriate then, that the chapters in this volume provide extended understandings of the variegations that emerge at the nexus between tourism and islandscapes, and the two-way relationship that exists. The framing of islandscapes for tourism is an obvious and seemingly inevitable one, with such interventions replete with contestations that acknowledge the trade-off between economic interventions and the ensuing social-ecological implications (Cirer-Costa, 2021; Weis et al., 2021). Islands as a last vestige from the rat race, and more recently as the ultimate bastion against contagion, have been thrust centre stage once again. This harkens back to former times where islands were used to cast aside society’s unwanted, turning them into leprosy and convict colonies and carceral strongholds, among a plethora of other similarly expedient uses (for example see Amoamo, 2013).

In sum, the principal intention of this volume is to situate islandscapes adjacent to tourism as an heuristic device that conceptually frames islands and their encounters with the touristic, and the subsequent disjunctures, complementarities and differences that emerge (Appadurai, 1990). Appadurai says that the central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization. When islands become emplaced in the global travel supply chain, the very transformations that ensue set in train the process of ‘scapes’ formation, whereupon the in situ context of islands embarks on what are evidently and very often unintended and transformative pathways (Cheer et al., 2017).

Defining Islandscapes

One of the earlier users of the term islandscapes, Frieman, trained her gaze on the historical geographies of the Isle of Man, arguing that islandness as materialized on the Isle of Man is a socially constructed idea of place tied to the notion of an islandscape, but not limited to an inherently insular environment (Frieman, 2008, p. 148). Moreover, Frieman contends that islandscapes are the product of a culturally constructed island landscape which relies not only on an insular geography but also on a set of socially valorized responses to interactions with off-islanders in the larger region. The extent to which an island’s populace develops a physically bounded islandscape is a dynamic phenomenon, and unique insular developments can only be understood when framed in the context of wider regional patterns. Applying islandscapes thinking to tourism on islands makes inquiring into historical trajectories necessary, as reflected in Butler’s well-established Tourism Area Life Cycle approach that portrays the stages by which destinations evolve from discovery to maturity and decline, and subsequently toward redevelopment or further decline (Butler, 1980).

When it comes to defining islandscapes in vernacular island studies, The integration of physical and cultural attributes within a common spatial framework is not unique to islandscapes and The development of an island-scape typology is a necessary basis for management, and a prerequisite for the evaluation and risk assessment of losses or changes to island-related resources (Vogiatzakis et al., 2017, p. 8). The advocacy for terminology that is distinguished from landscapes and seascapes suggests that adopting the term islandscape has a twofold importance: (a) it continues along the same theoretical inter/trans-disciplinary path; and (b) it employs perhaps the only concept which is holistic enough to account for all of the elements that constitute and influence an island’s character (Vogiatzakis et al., 2017, p. 10).

The landscape–seascape divide is further accentuated by cultural elements in islandscape conceptualisations where culture, and society by implication, has an overarching influence on distinct island identities (Pungetti, 2012). Insularity that classically defined islands, given their distance from the centre, has been severely upended given air travel, and advances in communication technologies, rendering insularity as a remnant of a bygone era and demonstrating clearly the duplex and indivisible relation between the natural and cultural aspect of islands (Pungetti, 2012).Consequently, the isolation and insularity that is so often appraised when it comes to islands and their attendant islandscapes is less prominent, and there is barely an island on the planet’s surface that is beyond reach.

Islands as distinct social-ecological systems is accepted as valorised by the Galapagos archipelago and others (Cheer and Lew, 2017), and in the looming shadow of climate change, islands find themselves at the front line of rapid transformations driven largely by actors and their actions (and inactions) elsewhere (Weatherill, 2022). Islandscapes and their formation are increasingly shaped elsewhere through social-ecological ruptures that have hastened the urgency for indicators that help maintain a semblance of some control, albeit at a vastly diminished rate. The attendant reliance on ecosystem services is demonstrably more profound in island settings because of scale and proximity, meaning that social-ecological system failure on islands usually has more profound and lasting impacts (Moore, 2015; Nel et al., 2021).It makes islandscapes an important resource for local ‘soft’ tourism, although on many islands conflicts exist between the values of landscape and heritage and the large-scale development of coastal mass tourism. In the long term, mass tourism may turn out to be just another phase in this long history of economic fluctuations. (Renes, 2014, p. 56). Islands as sites for renewal, reinvigoration and wellness helps underline their tourism credentials (James and Kearns, 2020).

The links between tourism and the economic geography of islands speaks of the traversal of a not too uncommon path where tourism, one of few avenues for development, emerges as the bedrock upon which local livelihoods are based (Cheer et al., 2013). The cries to diversify are always many, yet the reality for most islands is a shortage rather than a plethora of optional pathways. Britton refers to tourism as an ambiguous alternative for small islands on the basis that control over the tourism supply chain is always held at the metropolitan centre – a situation where disproportionate returns from tourism is often the case for islanders (Britton, 1991).

For many small island developing states, international development assistance, or overseas development aid, is increasingly put towards underpinning tourism sector expansion despite the evidence base being slender (Cheer and Peel, 2011; Holden and Novelli, 2011). Moreover, external assistance for tourism development underscores a reliance on effective governance of tourism on islands which is often its Achilles heel (Sheller, 2021).

The Anthology

This anthology draws from articles published in Shima, an open access journal that specialises in research into island cultures, that in practical terms encompasses a necessarily multi-, inter- and cross-disciplinary gaze. The plethora of topics, themes and subject areas are evidently eclectic and wide ranging with authors demonstrating intense entanglements and intimate understandings of island contexts. As a more-or-less independently published journal, contributions to Shima tend to elucidate research that doesn’t set out to be trendy or citable for citation’s sake – rather, they highlight the depth of scholarship that has been undertaken on islands by scholars with a deep and abiding affinity for island studies.

Tourism is written large across the day to day on many islands, and this collection, which sets out to advance the notion of islandscapes, is tacit acknowledgement of that. In their book of over four decades ago now, Pacific Tourism as Islanders See It, Freda Rajotte and Ron Crocombe describe how islandscapes have come to see tourism as a natural extension of their engagement with the outside world, albeit with its many pitfalls and flaws (Rajotte and Crocombe, 1980). Likewise, in Making the Modern Primitive, a treatise on the father of ethnography Bronislaw Malinowski’s time in the Trobriand Islands and present-day cultural tourism development, Michelle MacCarthy (2016) shows just how long the co-option of islandscapes has been going on for.

Accordingly, in this book, we have arranged a collection of chapters that we think exemplifies the complex and interwoven links between tourism and islandscapes, and the vast assemblage that helps shape the contemporary manifestations of many islands. Importantly, as all chapters show, the influence of historical and cultural antecedents is profound over the nature of islandscapes’ evolution and development. Colonisation and the wider introduction of external parties via settlement or migration have also served to cast huge shadows over island legacies, especially in the global south, that now serve as useful storylines and angles for tourism development. At the same time, there are islands in the global north that have not been affected in this way.

The first chapter by Macleod (2013) signals the intentions of the book in dealing with the thorny issue of cultural alignment, and in many ways realignment, given the way islander communities undergo enforced social and cultural change as a result of the long-term presence of tourism and tourists. In employing the case of La Gomera in the Canary Islands archipelago, and its experience with tourism, Macleod is firm in arguing that cultural realignment becomes an aspect and manifestation of power that reveals the relationship between the agents of change and those subject to it. This is a familiar state of affairs, where unique islander communities are packaged for tourism consumption and in so doing diminish their cultural heritage. Furthermore, islands that now engage heavily in tourism have transitioned away from more traditional livelihood sources to one that is notoriously fickle and with far more complex implications.

The second chapter by Cheer et al. (2017) was the lead paper to a special section on island tourism in Shima. Here, the authors follow on from Macleod’s cultural realignment appeals, and extend this to thinking about social and ecological resilience. In essence, the argument is made that islands, in and of themselves, and beyond this fascination with them as nodes within the tourist bubble, are also sites of socio-economic and environmental tension, underlined by the practicality of distance from metropolitan centres, and mostly laden down by terms of trade that are very often onerous and difficult to overcome. Thus, whether tourism serves to bolster social and ecological resilience, or in fact undermines it, is questioned. In particular, the issue of the scale and rate of tourism-induced change is raised, highlighting that it is not so much the numbers of visitors per se, but more the tourist type and the ways by which they impinge on resilience-building (or not).

In Chapter 3, Prince’s (2017) rendering of tourism islandscapes in Bornholm, Denmark, highlights how at a local level the mobilisation of social networks allowed craft artists to harness their collective effort towards shaping better tourism outcomes for themselves, while at the same time protecting their artistic integrity, strengthening the authenticity of their crafts. The Bornholm case speaks of the pressures that bear on islanders from outside, and highlights that giving in to tourism runs the risk of undermining authenticity and islander identities that are rooted in their work as craft artists. The urgency for islanders to maintain their agency in the face of tourism expansion is a salient lesson for islands more broadly.

The long running effects of local resident encounters and tourism is the subject of Chapter 4, in Canfield’s (2020) examination of Catalina Island that lies off of the coast of California. The private ownership and management of the island’s physical infrastructure introduces festering social tensions where the pursuit to grow tourism abuts the desire for local residents to maintain their amenity and sense of place, and to avoid this being comprehensively cannibalised by tourists. This is a common trope regarding islandscapes where tourism becomes the key economic activity, and where the endeavour to sell paradise comes at the cost of local communities who consider themselves living in paradise, and wanting it to stay that way. Questions concerning social and environmental justice abound, as do issues around inclusive tourism development. As Canfield notes, the focus on increasing tourism infrastructure has come at the expense of equitable access to resources for residents, demanding consideration of how ‘Others’ are created as a consequence of development when done without intentional community inclusion.

In Chapter 5, Khamis’s (2007) analysis of King Island in southern Australia showcases how leveraging islandscapes is central to the branding of islands, especially where notions of being ‘clean and green’ are invoked to badge products. King Island had become an enviable brand, underlined by its gastronomic reputation for produce of the highest standard. The gastro-tourism phenomenon was always a likely extension to draw from the island’s key offering – its agricultural produce. The shift from extractive mining to agriculture and then tourism is a familiar path for many islands transitioning from old industries to newer more lucrative ones. Agritourism was a logical progression, harnessing nature’s gifts, as it were. Alas, as Khamis points out, brand integrity remains vulnerable to unexpected and extreme events, and any complacency is fraught with hazard.

The ecotourism theme is developed in Chapter 6 by Agius (2022) who describes how a disparate group of small islands belonging to different jurisdictions saw synergy in working together toward the development of tourism. This model of cooperation appears to be ideal and suited to archipelagic situations where small islands are too small to be competitive on their own. On account of the evidently immense ecological backdrop in islands, it’s unsurprising that ecotourism as a central plank of an island’s tourism marketing strategy proliferates. The case of the Galapagos is an archetype of this where (jumping a chapter for a moment), as Adam Burke (2020) describes in Chapter 8, the intersecting exigencies of residents’ identities and sense of belonging are conditioned by the interconnections in and between aquatic and terrestrial spaces. It is within these spaces that the expansion of ecotourism development takes place, with contestation over the extent to which tourism bequeaths a net benefit to islanders, and whether delicately poised social-ecological inheritances are in fact better off.

Returning to Chapter 7, one of the icons of tourism more broadly, and especially related to islands, is the focus of Araya López’s (2021) account of cruise tourism in Venice and the social movements that are opposing what has been untrammelled growth. López argues that tourism is inherently political, and that the contest for space is unrelenting as tourism demand has climbed to vastly unsustainable levels. While the pandemic gave the island a temporary hiatus, emerging trends see a return to business as usual.

In Chapter 9, the historical geographies of islands and the myriad trajectories that they traverse is addressed in Royle’s (2008) rendering of Irish islands that have gone from bust to boom, aided by a nascent tourism industry. After over a century of stagnation and decline, the tourism impetus has underlined population increase, infrastructure (re)development and bridging of distance between the island and the mainland. The allure of how things used to be is what attracts people to these islands, yet as tourism intensifies, these might be the very things that are compromised. The historical geographies theme also features in Chapter 10, where Hōkūlani Aikau and Gonzalez (2019) endeavour to remake popularly held narratives of the Hawai’ian Islands – many of which are steeped in the colonial project and where native voices are still very much muted or delegitimised. These attempts to wrest back the power held over local stories and conceptualisations of islander people and their places is tied to the pressing decolonial agenda, within which tourism is seen both for its empowerment impetus, as well as its tendency to reinforce neocolonial tropes.

The development of adventure tourism in the wild and rugged landscape of the island of New Britain, the subject of Chapter 11, speaks loudly of islandscapes that still resonate with primordial narratives of unspoiled nature, perfectly positioned for nature-based tourism. Yet as Jennifer Gabriel and colleagues outline, such developments are often driven by non-islander outsiders who invest in, manage and reap the rewards from tourism development (Gabriel et al., 2017). The question of how islanders can regain agency under these conditions is countenanced. The clash that ensues when the commodification of islandscapes takes place signals that tourism, if left to its own devices, might be more damaging for islander livelihoods and empowerment in the long run.

Finally, in Chapter 12, Navalón-Garcia’s (2017) examination of Nueva Tabarca maps out several hundred years of developments on the island that showcase how islander communities have adapted (or not) to the buffeting winds of change. More recently, resilience-building has been tied to tourism expansion, as other typically island endeavours in fishing have waned. Reconciling the priorities of investors from outside, versus islander exigencies, highlights the common tensions that occur when islandscapes are co-opted for development. Here, the issues of peak seasonal visitation, and the bifurcation of the built environment alongside high value natural areas highlights the way islandscapes try to serve multiple purposes – all at once. Balancing the economic imperative of tourism expansion, versus social-ecological resilience-building, is central to islandscape utilisation.

In all, these vignettes of islandscapes across the globe highlight the way islander people and their places are constantly subject to external ‘trade winds’ that blow in and through, and enforce changes that are both needed and unnecessary encumbrances. Tourism is one such trade wind that, as Britton (1991) has said, is an ambiguous alternative – it holds enormous promise, but can also unravel delicately poised islandscapes.

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1 Cultural realignment, islands and the influence of tourism: A new conceptual approach

Donald Macleod*

University of Glasgow

*[e-mail]

©CAB International 2023. Islandscapes and Tourism: An Anthology (eds J.M. Cheer et al.)

DOI: 10.1079/9781800621534.0001

Abstract

This chapter introduces a new concept: ‘cultural realignment’, which embraces phenomena such as cultural representation, interpretation, stereotyping and branding. Cultural realignment is the intentional depiction or interpretation of a culture (or part of one) for a specific preconceived purpose. It relates directly to power, and there is a need for this broad concept to help comprehend processes in an era of increasing globalisation, the growth of cultural commodification and the proliferation of representations in media including the Internet. A prime concern of the chapter is the way that cultural realignment impacts on the identities of the communities subject to the realignment. The main examples given relate to island communities and their representation by anthropologists, and to island tourist destinations that have been subject to various descriptions, physical transformations and commodification driven by the tourism industry. A case study is examined as an example in the Canary Islands, using original research material related to longitudinal fieldwork.

Keywords: cultural realignment, identity, islands, tourism, anthropology, Canary Islands, La Gomera

1.1 Introduction

This chapter investigates processes and impacts that include and involve creating or changing a representation of a cultural group and associated place. These processes are to be denoted by a new overarching term ‘cultural realignment’. It can relate to the marketing of images and branding of a group of people, dwelling place or cultural site; the promotion or reorganisation of tangible and intangible heritage; as well as the written description of such phenomena where the specific intention is to realign the subject matter. As such it is a new concept that embraces others such as cultural representation, cultural interpretation and cultural commodification. Island communities provide the focus of the chapter as they make appropriate examples and have featured prominently throughout anthropological writings, the central disciplinary approach of this chapter; additionally, they play a prominent part in the history and development of tourism.

The primary concerns of this chapter are the actual processes of cultural realignment, the actors involved and the impacts of the processes on inhabitants of the places. It will also explore the qualities of islands, especially in relation to anthropology, identity and tourism. It is argued that the process of realignment is growing rapidly in occurrence, especially because of tourism, and has major impacts. This new concept is suggested to help answer the question: how can we improve our understanding of cultural change, especially concerning tourism and island communities? The case study provided shows some of the processes and results of tourism-driven cultural realignment, which is able to impact on all levels of society from nation-state to villages and their inhabitants.

Anthropology is especially suited to investigate these influences due to its focus on ethnographic fieldwork and its holistic bias, as well as its method of comparative analysis, and it will provide the main disciplinary approach, reflecting the researcher’s background. Moreover, anthropologists have had a strong history of work on islands. The newly emerging multi-disciplinary study of islands (e.g. Baldacchino and Milne, 2000) suggests their potential for utilisation as models for other types of locations, implying that the improved understanding of the specific influences of tourism on islands has importance far beyond their shores.

1.2 Islands and Anthropology

Islands are good to think with. This statement paraphrases Levi-Strauss (1969) who noted that ‘animals are good to think with’ in relation to the way that different human cultures have used animals as symbols and as means of classification, creating boundaries and identities in human society. In a similar manner, writers and scholars have used islands (both real and fictional) as symbols and models to represent places and communities where distinct and unusual events happen, or to explain circumscribed communities, seemingly isolated, relatively untouched by other cultures. This attribute of islands is a cultural construction and has appeared in literature and art in western societies as well as others including Japan and Indonesia. More pertinent for this chapter however, is the fact that the island image of a self-contained homogeneous unit has been very appealing to anthropologists seeking distinctive groups of people. Indeed, for many anthropologists, islands have been very good to think with. This tendency has altered in time with the broadening of research interests, the general challenge to essentialism and a greater awareness of communication and acculturation. However, other groups in society continue to represent islands in a way that does not reflect their actual cultural composition, and one such group is the tourism industry.

Islands have featured prominently in anthropological work. Malinowski’s experience in the Trobriand Islands (Malinowski, 1922) was instrumental in the paradigm shift towards ethnographic fieldwork and a powerful model, especially in British anthropology (Kuper, 1989). His focus on small, seemingly insular, discrete communities inspired others and preceded many influential anthropological outputs based on island experiences (e.g. Mead, 1928; Firth, 1936; Bateson, 1939; Geertz, 1963). This might be partially explained by a desire to research a discrete community, along functionalist lines, perhaps an isolated community which retains its culture and traditions, or demonstrates a unique pattern of social organisation, cosmology, kinship patterns, economic activity, and so on. In this the island represents or contains a ‘whole’ culture, one that is physically and metaphorically bound and relatively isolated from other influences. This was certainly a motivating factor for some anthropologists, and it has been criticised as leading to deliberate ignoring or diminishing of the socio-cultural variety of the island community, as well as intercultural impacts from overseas such as colonialism, missionary work, trading exchange and eventually, tourism when writing about the community (cf. Kuper, 1989; Eriksen, 1993, p. 34). Perhaps the earlier writers were realigning the fieldwork material into a readable product suited to their own worldview or a particular intellectual theory.

More recently, anthropologists have continued to research on islands, sometimes with similar aims to the early pioneers (Herzfeld, 1991; Palsson, 1991) but also, and contrastingly, sometimes to investigate the strong influences of external phenomena: acculturation, trading, colonialism, migration and tourism (e.g. Mintz, 1960; Cohen, 1982; Sutherland, 1986; Boissevain, 1993, 2010; Crick, 1994; Waldren, 1996; Pickering, 2010). The island often represents (sometimes erroneously) the notion of cultural uniqueness, a level of inaccessibility, with water as a physical and cultural boundary: all are factors especially pertinent for the examination of identity.

1.3 Islands, Identity and the External Market

Islands, because of their discrete, physically clear boundaries have often served well to describe the parameters of individual groups of people, even though there may have been strong communication networks by sea or air: again, they are good to think with. Consequently they also serve to act as models of impact analysis, whereby specific groups encounter other groups through various processes of acculturation. For some they have served almost as laboratories, bound and observable, for medical experiments as well as for isolating sectors of society. They have also been seen as repositories and examples of cultural survivals in terms of practices, arts, social organisation or systems of belief. Islands have been seen as distinct by artists, writers, natural scientists and governments, islanders themselves and by some social scientists. Anthropologists researching aspects of identity on islands have included Waldren (1996) on insider-outsider relationships, Cohen (1982) on belonging, Galvan-Tudela (1987) on festivals and religion, and Macdonald (1997) on cultural heritage.

Despite the rich body of work described above, there has been little research by anthropologists into the market-oriented cultural realignment of island identity in terms of cultural heritage interpretation, and island branding, its actual process (actors and agency, structural relationships and power), as well as its impacts on local populations; although Selwyn (1996) provides a relevant collection on mythmaking in tourism. In recent years this type of representation has become a large part of island identity construction in terms of an image for consumption by outside parties. This may be combined with more local and specific image building and reinvention, such as new interpretations of cultural heritage (both tangible and intangible), all of which activities can be considered to be ‘cultural realignment’. Islands are particularly vulnerable to this type of activity if they are tourist attractions because they need to distinguish themselves in the marketplace, and are likely to become