ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how cultural stereotypes are constructed in instructional discourse for tourism workers. The analysis of stereotypes is important because it reveals some underlying ideologies about intercultural communication in tourism by providing insights into what to say and how to say it in tourist–guide communication. The analysis shows that the training discourse homogenizes foreign tourists by creating categories utilizing the nationality and ethnicity talk. Foreign tourists are ethnified and their diversity is simplified into a set of tidy, concise and knowable categories that get tied to a specific set of attributes and activities. Interculturalty is portrayed as a problem to be addressed in tourist–guide encounters. Learning about tourist categories is part of developing cultural and linguistic repertoires for the guides to manage such encounters. The chapter discusses tourism as a site where inequalities among individuals and societies are created and sustained through various forms of language and discourse. The discursive construction of tourist stereotypes in the instructional discourse is analogous to a global power relationship between stronger and weaker nations and communities within the current economic order.
