This paper’s treatment of tourism in Dominica is part of a wider study of how
Dominicans relate to nature: how they conceive of nature and how they perceive
nature, what they think nature is, the role it plays in their lives, and their
attitudes towards it. In the discussions presented below, and the wider research
from which these discussions are drawn, the aim is to examine how Dominicans
come to know and understand nature through their co-presence, that is, by living
and interacting with it.
I am interested in how Dominicans know nature, not via objective observation or
detached contemplation, but by means of personal everyday associations.
Consequently, this research involves an attention to the way people apprehend
the world around them through a variety of sensuous and bodily encounters and
engagements; consideration is give not only to how people make sense of nature,
but also to how they use their senses to perceive nature (Rodaway, 1994). This is a relatively novel approach for research about perceptions of nature and the
environment in the Caribbean, which has tended to investigate perception in
terms of cognitive constructs such as awareness, memory, explanation,
justification, understanding, and, of course, knowledge (see for examples, Potter,
1992; Bailey, 2003; Momsen, 2003; Christian et al., 2009), and to focus on mental
insights and thinking processes rather than on the reception of embodied sensory
impressions. This research draws on an expanded definition of perception
(Rodaway, 1994) that includes sensation as well as cognition, and that allows for
analysis of how the sensual, as well as the intellectual, functions to give people
“a sense of [their] world” (Rodaway, 1994:11)