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Cruising For Culture: Mass Tourism And Cultural Heritage On Roatàn Island, Honduras, Melanie Nichole Coughlin Depcinski

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the relationship between mass tourism and heritage tourism in the construction and perpetuation of histories and identities of local stakeholders on Roatàn Island, Honduras. I explore how identity is constructed by and through the tourism industry, and how much of the agency in forming identity and telling cultural stories resides in the hands of key stakeholders involved in the development of tourism on the island. Local cultural stories that focus on the people who live and have lived on the island for centuries are becoming increasingly silenced by a more commoditized, tourism driven, picture of life on …