Tourism and Place in Treasure Beach, Jamaica: Imagining Paradise and the Alternative.

The tourism production system has been generating images of the Jamaican landscape and culture since the mid-nineteenth century. This system consists of those individuals and corporate entities who produce and market the product itself, including travel writers, airlines, advertising agencies, hotel owners and government agencies; and the people, their culture, and elements of the landscape which are commodified as tourist attractions. The tourist gaze has traditionally focused on an idealized Caribbean landscape. Because of a shift in Western patterns of consumption, the focus of the gaze has shifted to emphasize the culture and people who inhabit the landscape. As the tourism industry seeks to differentiate Jamaica from other destinations, those aspects of culture which originally evolved as forms of resistance to Western domination, Rastafarianism and reggae music, are now valued and marketed as part of the tourism product. All-inclusive resorts have successfully packaged selected elements of culture and landscape as a simulated and safe experience of the real Jamaica for mainstream post-tourists. Alternative post-tourists, on the other hand, seek out experiences in undiscovered places. Treasure Beach, Jamaica is an alternative destination being drawn into the formal tourism production system. Remote places may be so commodified as to lose their distinctive sense of place that attracted tourists in the first place. Although Treasure Beach is caught up in a process of change, the local power structure and the people themselves are adapting and have retained a strong sense of their place in the world