Closing the hermeneutic circle? Photographic encounters with the Other

While considerable attention has been devoted to representation of destinations and hosts, less mention has been given to the ways tourists replicate and reinforce media depictions. Guided by postcolonial theory, this study analyzes photographs taken by participants in a study abroad program to determine whether they reveal the completion of a hermeneutic circle embedded with colonialist discourse, whose other component consists of representations of racial and cultural Others in Western tourism-related media. Five binaries of depiction are identified: traditional/modern, subject/object, master/servant, center/periphery, and devious-lazy/moral-industrious. The analyzed photographs are argued to complete a circle of representation that is inscribed with sociocultural ideologies of Western power and dominance.