The Contact Hypothesis suggests that contact between people of different cultural backgrounds may result in positive and negative outcomes. As people are more likely to develop social contact with their own national group, or those with a similar background, it was posited that Dutch hosts were more likely to develop positive social contact with German tourists than with East Asian tourists. Our in-depth interviews with Dutch tourism-related business participants suggested the opposite. Furthermore, it was found that stereotypes attributed to a culture travel with its people as tourists in different ways, depending on cultural distance. Cultural distance seems to mediate the host gaze in different ways, and new hypotheses have emerged calling for more research on tourism encounters in different geographical contexts.

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This introduction offers some conceptual discussion on peace, the contribution of tourism to the pursuit of peace, and the role of tourism education in the light of the peace proposition, before providing a preview of the individual book chapters.

By examining the host gaze in a third space, this article proposes "liminal gaze" as a concept to study service encounter in light of liminality and cultural hybridity. The dynamics of gaze is examined through the lens of cultural distance with London's Chinatown as the study area. Gaze in tourism has mainly been studied in relation to two distant cultures gazing upon each other. The study tries to understand what happens to the gaze when two cultures, which are neither distant or proximate nor identical but in-between here and there, gaze upon each other. The focus is on Chinese immigrant workers (the guesthosters) gazing upon Chinese tourists dining in Chinatown. Chinatown represents a third space where natives, tourists, and guesthosters meet, gaze, and perform. The gaze of the Chinese guesthosters upon their Chinese guests is negative despite their cultural similarity/ proximity and norms of behavior rooted in Confucian belief. This finding challenges the postulate of cultural distance. The five themes which strongly emerged from the interviews as gaze moderators, including the perceived "boorish" dining behavior of the guests, power distance, acculturation and hybridization, and the perception of the authenticity of the food served, are explained.

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