A Reflection on the Work and Legacy of Professor David Harrison (1941–2021)

David Harrison was a major intellectual figure in tourism studies whose work as a scholar, writer and educator made an enormous contribution to the sociology and anthropology of tourism and the political economy of tourism development. His legacy of published work is brought together in his final book, published only this year (Harrison, 2021). His was an unconventional career path compared to many of his academic contemporaries. Aged 16, David left school to work as a bank clerk, then as an HM Customs officer and finally as a teacher in a boys’ secondary school in a working class, increasingly diverse borough in West London that was beginning to experience mass immigration from south Asia. These early working experiences undoubtedly helped to shape both his undogmatic intellectual outlook and commitment to giving voice to the people who experience and enact tourism in everyday life, typically through ethnographic fieldwork. Aged 26, David enrolled at Goldsmith’s University of London in 1967 to read sociology. This was followed by a PhD in social anthropology at University College London, under the supervision of the Jamaican anthropologist, M. G. Smith, which he was duly awarded in 1975. Following his postgraduate ethnographic fieldwork in Grande Riviere, Trinidad, an area to which he later returned (Harrison, 1976; Harrison, 2007a), David took up a research fellowship looking at the impacts of tourism in the Caribbean at University College, Swansea, funded by what was then the Overseas Development Administration. It was at this point that his attention was increasingly being drawn towards tourism and its relationship to processes of modernization and development, principally in former British colonies and island states in the Caribbean, and later in sub-Saharan Africa and the Pacific region. A particular strength of David’s work lay in his ability to combine a keen eye for ethnographic detail with a theoretically inspired analysis of tourism’s relationship to the politics of development. This is demonstrated in his study of the packing and selling of “tradition” by the Swazi monarchy (Harrison, 1992), and later in his fascinating and nuanced examination of the World Heritage nomination process in the former colonial capital of Levuka in Fiji (Harrison, 2004a, 2004b). Furthermore, contrary to many of the economistic analyses that had been so prevalent up until that point, David was keen not so much to reject numerical-positivistic evaluation of tourism development but, rather, to view the dynamics of tourism development through a social and cultural lens. Having witnessed the birth pangs of modern mass tourism in the Caribbean during the 1970s and 1980s, one of David’s most significant contributions to tourism development thinking has been to interrogate the claims of modernization and dependency theory, drawing on critiques already developed in his first book, The Sociology of Modernization and Development (Harrison, 1988). Although modernization theory had fallen out of fashion by this time, he argued that “a modernisation orientation” had persisted as a the “default mode of thinking for policy-makers throughout the world” and had taken on a new lease of life under the framework of neoliberal globalisation. Equally however, David had little time for the generalizing abstractions of dependency and underdevelopment theories which, he argued in a