REPRESENTATION AND IMAGES OF PEOPLE, PLACE AND NATURE IN GRENADA'S TOURISM

ABSTRACT. The purpose of this paper is to examine the visual images occurring in Grenada's place promotion materials. Tourism has become Grenada's principal source of foreign exchange and employment generation. With the increasing popularity of eco- and nature-tourism, the island has looked to this form of specialty tourism as a way to diversify its tourism product. Tourism is a uniquely visual industry; thus semiotics, the study of signs, was chosen for this study because of its ability to analyze the representations a tourist would encounter prior to reaching a destination or prior to participating in activities at the destination that would influence his or her expectations. Emphasis was placed on the images found in promotional materials and advertisements of Grenada to determine the mythology and ideology behind them. These images fell broadly into one of three categories: people, place or nature. Each category was represented as an 'other' that may be discussed in terms of dualities such as natural–artificial, exotic-familiar, and active-passive. The study concludes that images take on the myth of something different breaking the routine of the tourist's ordinary, daily life.