TOURISM PIONEER HONOURED
Aformer University of the South Pacific Professor David Harrison, has been honoured with an orbituary in Britain’s The Guardian newspaper.
Professor Harrison was a leading figure in tourism studies.
He died aged 80 after a long battle in England with cancer.
He was at the USP from 1996 to 1998, helping to start a programme in tourism studies. Returning to Britain, he was professor of tourism, culture and development at London Metropolitan University from 1998 to 2008. He then came back to Fiji for six years from 2008 until 2014 as USP is professor of tourism and head of school.
In 2012, he married Senimili Kamikamica.
Months before his death he published Tourism, Tradition and Culture: A REflECtIon on tHEIr RolE In DEvElopmEnt, the capstone of his distinguished career.
The Guardian also said: His path to becoming an academic was unconventional and unlikely. Leaving school at 16, he was a clerk in Barclay’s bank, an HM Customs officer and a teacher before starting university aged 26. He read sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. A postgraduate student at University College London, he did ethnographic fieldwork in Grande Riviere, a village in Trinidad, and took his PhD in social anthropology in 1975.
The following year he was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Sussex, where he taught sociology and development studies, and supervised an international group of doctoral students from such places as the Philippines, Trinidad, Fiji, Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Britain and the US – he was my DPhil supervisor from 1985 to 1991. At Sussex he also published the important book THE SoCIoloGy oF MoDErnIzAtIon AnD DEvElopmEnt.
Harrison’s interests turned
towards tourism as a development strategy, and he did research in the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and Asia and the Pacific. Until the end of his life, he held part-time appointments at Middlesex University, King’s College London and the University of Surrey.
A lifelong Chelsea FC supporter, he was an extremely productive scholar who spent considerable time mentoring students who, in turn, admired him.
Mr Harrison is survived by his wife, Senimili Kamikamica, his daughter, Asha, and son, Ian, from his first marriage, to Greta Bowman, his grandson, Jules, and his sister Maureen.