151 research outputs found
'Half-hearted tokens of transparent love?' Ethnic postcards and the visual mediation of host-tourist communication
One negotiation site of heavily mediated, indirect, and usually inadvertent communication between
hosts and tourists is the picture postcard rack. As “hegemonically scripted discourses,” postcards
make important assumptions about the tourist’s touristic experience, as well as the image of that
experience she/he will want to communicate to others “back home.” Of more importance, however,
are the assumptions being made in postcards about the people actually represented in them. Certainly,
postcard images of local people (locals rather than necessarily hosts) are often designed specifically
to communicate their ambassadorial hospitality—their host-like qualities—and to promote the kind
of ethnotourism discussed widely in the tourism literature. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the
postcard images of local ethnic minority people such as the Zulus in South Africa and the Sámi in
Finland. In these two instances of intense exoticization and commodified cultural representation, and
in stark contrast to postcard images of the Welsh in Britain, this study was interested in exploring the
ways in which both the “represented host” and “consumer tourist” understand and view these visual
representations. In this programmatic article, we therefore report our initial analyses of three distinctive
sets of postcards as a means for discussing how research might seek to situate and, thereby,
complicate assumptions inherent in these “ethnic” postcards about both the traversed, mediatized
Other, and the constantly directed tourist gaze
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