„Interkultouralität?“ oder: Kritische Überlegungen zu interkulturellen Aspekten des Tourismus

This paper critically scrutinizes the relevance of tourism for intercultural learning. It shows that travelling abroad does not automatically enable tourists to engage in a deeper intercultural understanding of their tourist destinations. In most cases, travelling abroad seems to merely reinforce stereotypes and clichés centered around a tourist destination’s people, places, and culture. These clichés get intensified by the many ways in which foreign culture is being staged in order to cater to tourists’ pre-conceived notions of what a culture is about. Moreover, intercultural communication and interaction get hampered by the fact that tourists have a status that is substantially different from that of members of the local communities they visit, and that tourists typically are exposed to a destination’s culture only for a brief period of time.