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“Those Venezuelans are so easy-going!” National Stereotypes and Self-Representations in Discourse about the Other
1. Self- and Other-Representation
Talking about other people, or groups of other people, is an activity in which people not only engage frequently, but also invest a considerable amount of emotional energy. The emotional investment can be best be explained by the fact that this activity is not fundamentally about giving neutral and “objective” characterizations of the others but about accomplishing implicit aims while we ascribe properties to the others: we may wish, for instance, to corroborate our worldviews, and by doing so we may also hope to corroborate and reproduce, for ourselves and for our ingroups, the picture we have constructed of ourselves.
This contribution deals with outgroup and ingroup representation in dialogues and in discourse where the otherness referred to is about nationality and national-cultural differences. Self-and other-representation involves activating cognitive categories, which, if they are not satisfactorily “qualified” (and how could they be in an absolute sense?), will be likely to be understood by those who do not share our views as “stereotypes” or even “prejudice.” Even though the concept of stereotype is commonly taken to be fundamental in intercultural communication studies, it needs some “unpacking” before it can be meaningfully used. “Stereotyping” will here be regarded, not as the expression of simplistic or prejudiced ...
