Tourism and Intercultural Communication

Abstract

Tourism as a global economic activity utilizes communication to create and represent cultural differences between the tourist and the Other through various media and spaces, despite the fact that such differences have become weaker and deterritorialized due to transnational mobility and globalization. Tourism communication reinscribes ethnocultural stereotypes, and this action is often motivated by a quest for cultural authenticity in the Other. The Other commodifies its cultural stereotypes with various discursive and semiotic tools and is often motivated by the exchange value of its cultural identity. Most previous scholarship on global tourism communication focused on North-South tourism mobilities, based on the stereotypical image of the tourist as an English-speaking white male. The recent demographic shift in world tourism presents us with a different picture. There are touristic encounters between people who move from one part of the Global South to another, and English does not necessarily serve as the default language of communication in these exchanges. There is also a shift in theoretical orientation in understanding what intercultural communication entails. Instead of treating culture and interculturality as essentially determined by broad variables such as nationality or ethnicity, attention is now given to the process that individuals engage in and perform via communication. Although there are some scholars who view intercultural communication in tourism as a positive force in raising people’s cross-cultural awareness, recent scholarship is mostly informed by a critical lens in that tourism is used to (re)produce, maintain, and justify relationships of inequality between the traveler and the local. A critical focus on intercultural communication provides important insights into our understanding of contemporary tourism and its situatedness within broader societal structures of power and ideologies.