Infinite rehearsal of culture in St Catherine Jamaica: heritage as tourist product, implications for Caribbean pedagogy

Abstract

Over the last 20 years educational policies across the globe have become more closely aligned with industry interests. Jamaica is no exception. But what does this mean when the country’s leading ‘industry’ is tourism? It is no coincidence that in this decade the Ministry for Education became the Ministry for Education and Culture. When one of the main threats to the industry is seen to be the country’s reputation for violence as substantiated by rising murder rates and increasingly vicious crime scenarios, what is the Ministry’s response? One has been the introduction of the PALS (Peace and Love in Schools) curriculum, underwritten by the Tourist Board. The article examines the texts within this curriculum and how they position the identity of children and adults, and distinguish between Jamaicans and foreigners. The author then examines material collected during ethnographic fieldwork in the summer of 2000 with Jamaican youth in which issues of violence, tourism and the marketing of cultural products come to the fore. The youth convey an understanding of the facade/reality dichotomy that tourism necessitates across a wide spectrum of activities that make up daily life, and a pragmatism in which innocence is an unaffordable luxury, as are some forms of resistance to the inequalities that tourism brings so prominently into focus in the shape of all‐inclusive hotels and cruise ships. The children’s experiences resonate tellingly with some of the Caribbean’s leading critical thinkers’ misgivings about the tourism project and the schism in identities that it perpetuates.