I got to know Dennison personally through the meetings of the Academy. He recruited me to be his sous-sommelier for our Academy wine-tasting – he was the initiator of the tradition of the tasting. One of my favourite memories – trivial but tender - of Dennison is sitting in the lobby of the Great Hall of the University of Joensuu in Savonlinna, Finland, watching him read the labels of a nearly a hundred bottles of wine brought by Academy members for the wine tasting. He inspected, arranged, and rearranged the wines for hours, like a child sorting out his baseball card collection.

He was a warm, gentle person but with a sharp mind and wit. Dennison was also a prolific and elegant author. His most recent edited book, The Study of Tourism: Anthropology and Sociological Beginnings, was the inspiration for my own edited collection of the personal histories of tourism geographers, The Discovery of Tourism.

Dennison described himself to me as always feeling like an outsider. He did march to the beat of his own drum, but I prefer to think of him as an explorer of the human experience. On 20 March, Dennison embarked on the greatest exploration of all. Travel well, Dennison, and travel happily.

Steve Smith (University of Wateloo)

Dennison Nash died on March 20, 2012. His passing evokes many memories and an appreciation. He it was who used to visit us at our home in Barbados overlooking the little fishing village of Martins Bay in the parish of St John. In those days we kept a small blue visitors’ book which, similar to a photograph album and its many pictures of departed friends and relatives, acts, according to Susan Sontag, something like a memento mori. Dennison’s first entry covered the period 28 December 1985 to January 3 1986. Then his voice from the past prophetically recorded the following words, ‘When you read this over at some future date you may remember a visiting anthropologist from the U.S. sticking his nose into this and that, trying to grasp the lingo, insulting Douglas [a neighbour] and marvelling at the bucolic atmosphere of the place. That anthropologist, in looking back at the time will remember the many pleasures, the unfailing hospitality, the interesting conversations, the work and the visits round about...’ His second entry was on 30 December 1986 when he wrote, ‘Encore une fois... [he liked dropping the odd expression in a foreign language since he typically represented those Anglophone anthropologists of tourism who are also multi-lingual; another of his favourite expressions was in vino veritas that he often employed as a parting shot]. He continued, ‘As I have said several times, I feel at home here. I have come to feel very much a part of this ménage and its operations...May it not be too long before we see each other again.’ True to his word, on January 7-8, 1989 we find another entry from him where he admitted, ‘My feeling of instantaneous at-homeness attests not only to the congeniality of the setting, but also to your many hospitable actions. I’ve just come ashore from a luxurious cruise with many amenities, but the simple amenities of this hotel are more than a match for those. It’s good to be here once again. May you both have a good year; and may we meet again soon,’ [now something of a recurrent ending]. At which point he drops off the radar, only to be seen again by me at the last two Academy meetings he attended, those held in Turkey (Fethiye) (2007) and Mallorca (2009). By the time of the first of these two reunions, Dennison had been diagnosed with an illness that he later apparently successfully overcame, only to be subsequently beset by a recurrent version and new variety of the same disease. He shared this information about his earlier condition with me in his typical matter-of-fact fashion as we sat in the front seat of the bus that transported us to the different venues. On one such occasion we joined in a quiz that had been set by our hosts for members of the Academy, a competition that we both very much wanted to win, but which in the event was taken from us by our equally perfectionist colleague, Erik Cohen. On the second of these two IAST meetings, Dennison went out of his way to be helpful to my wife who relied on others to assist her in her sightlessness. She referred to him then as her comfort zone. After all, and even though many participants asked her whether she could see anything, he was the only person there who typically went straight to the heart of the matter by asking her “can you see light?” Nevertheless, and in spite of these biennial gatherings of what Dennison used to call “alcoholic assemblies”, (maybe because he was an active wine producer and consequently the natural Academy choice for the chief organiser of the wine and cheese party used to introduce new members and more recently to acknowledge the contributions of deceased members), we kept in touch by email. In the beginning, these messages related to his role of Associate Editor in the Tourism Social Science Series, in which I had a co-edited volume, where he picked his way through the manuscript with a fine tooth comb much to the annoyance and frustration of myself and my editor colleague. Subsequently, once the volume had been published, his messages began to assume a much more amicable quality and he began to cite the work with approval. Via email Dennison often shared his technophobe experiences with me (as I was similarly inclined). He also continued to tell me about his health and here the tone was much more positive than had been the case in previous messages or conversations. On 27 October 2010, for instance, he wrote, ‘I am getting along with my recovery.’ Then, as recently as 15 September 2011 he boasted that ‘I am swimming three mornings a week and trying this and that.’ A few weeks later on November 11, 2011, I was told by him that ‘you should know that my recovery seems to be completed and I am looking forward to attending the meeting in Portugal’ [to be held in 2013].

Apart from these optimistic utterances about his physical well-being, Dennison also had a number of scholarly concerns which he shared with me. One of these worries, perhaps the most important in his eyes, was about the future of the Academy. In a nutshell, he detected what he currently viewed as a two tier organisation (my words) comprising on the one hand founding scholars grounded in the social sciences, and now either dead, resigned or emeritus, and, on the other, those of a (slightly) younger generation who were of a more practical frame of mind brought up on a diet of management and marketing. The former tended to stress propositional knowledge (see John Tribe) and qualitative approaches, while the latter emphasised procedural knowledge and quantitative methods. It seemed to him, and I must say that I wholeheartedly agreed (even to the point where I was quoted by him for sharing his point of view) that many of the more recently inducted members represented the second cohort in terms of their training and this background was also reflected in their research and publications. Such was the present situation. However, continued Dennison, if such a trend were to prevail then the Academy would become even more intellectually lopsided and, dare one say it, less scholarly. Of course this topic can be debated heatedly and ad nauseam, just as we could continue to discuss the representativeness of the Academy according to such variables as age, linguistic ability, nationality and gender. But the framework for the argument derives from him and to a certain degree from some of the exchanges that he conducted between himself, myself and others. For those interested, the contents of the paper he presented in Mallorca outlining these ideas appeared in April 2012. It was published in revised article form under the title “Balance of Power in Developing an Association of Tourism Researchers” in the journal Tourism, Recreation Research 37(1): 91-97, 2012, though unfortunately posthumously. Happily, however, I was able to congratulate him in time for the article’s having been accepted.

Dennison described himself to me as always feeling like an outsider. He did march to the beat of his own drum, but I prefer to think of him as an explorer of the human experience. On 20 March, Dennison embarked on the greatest exploration of all. Travel well, Dennison, and travel happily.

Of course I was also aware of many of Dennison’s other writings, but since this obituary is intended to be more personal than academic, the emphasis has naturally been on the human side. Even so, he is well known for his papers on tourism as a form of imperialism (drawn no doubt in part from his work on pre-Castro Cuba), as well as tourism as an anthropological subject, and his books on the anthropology of tourism and on the study of tourism along with its anthropological and sociological beginnings. Our editorial article with Philip Pearce on the methodology of tourism research which appeared in a special issue of Annals of Tourism Research 15(1) dedicated to that theme is also frequently cited. However, for me, what sums up the originality of his contributions is an early volume of his entitled A Community in Limbo which I continue to find useful, even though it was rarely cited and written as long ago as 1970, because it invites comparison with Cohen’s (1977) relatively and unjustifiably neglected monograph on expatriate communities and the later development of stranger-hood in tourism as a seminal and surviving theory in its own right. But all this really reinforces his previously mentioned ideas about the future of the Academy since it almost goes without saying that unless its fellows are known for their theoretical originality then we cannot be sure that it comprises the leading exponents in the field. That to my mind is the real challenge thrown down by Dennison Nash. For this insight alone we should acknowledge his distinct contribution. I am just so pleased that our paths coincided and proud to have benefited from his insights and friendship.