Page - 95 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Anna Karina Sennefelder | Revival of the cultural stereotype? 95 understood as context-dependent communicators that cannot be decoded in isolation. Moreo- ver, this article uses the multimodal analysis of documentary film to detect visual stereotypes of cultural identity within the new sub-genre. Cultural stereotypes and visual stereotypes of cultural identity As the social psychologist Henri Tajfel claimed, the emergence of stereotypes can be divided into four processes: categorization, generalization, accentuation and evaluation (Tajfel 1982). A person is assigned to a certain group, general assumptions about this group are transferred to the person, special characteristics of this group are emphasized and finally transformed into a positive or negative evaluation. By resorting to these non-inter-individual classifications, people make generalisations and “de-individualizations” (Hansen 2003: 325). People are no longer per- ceived as individuals, but exclusively as representatives of certain groups. Cultural stereotypes in particular are “cognitive schemata and images of others that are based on a minimum of personal experience and that make reduced and rigid assumptions about the characteristics or behaviour of people from other cultural social groups” (Barmeyer and Genkova 2011: 177). These assumptions about other-cultural groups do not necessarily have to be negative. On the contrary, they are often positive, especially in personalised travel documentaries, but a positive attitude can and does still contribute to and reinforce cultural stereotyping. Therefore, it is important to examine the two travel documentaries in question, Weit and Reiss aus, carefully, because an individual encounter with ‘strangers’ alone, which is said to be positive, may say little or nothing about the individual circumstances and identities of the people described. Stereotypes serve to “handle large amounts of information […and] [t]his is especially true of visual stereotypes” (Schwender and Peterson 2019: 442). However, it is important to realize that it “seems not very auspicious [...] to identify generally accepted formal elements of visual stereotypes. A visual stereotype does not look fundamentally different from a non-stereotypical image. It is not formal features that make a picture a stereotype, but the symbolic charge gener- ated by repeated use in a certain context of content” (Schwender and Peterson 2019: 448). Thus, in order to categorize and examine visual stereotypes within the personalised travel documen- tary it is not enough to look at a single take or shot. Instead, one must study the context of the content and evoked symbolism, and a multimodal analysis can achieve this. Visual stereotypes are expressed in the image motif, in the sense of Erwin Panofsky, who has also described it as the “element of a picture” that evokes “recognition” (Mitchell 2010: 323). Visual stereotypes are thus only those that evoke a certain symbolism through repeated use and are immediately rec- ognised as an “image”. However, research on visual stereotypes is still in its “infancy” (Petersen and Schwender 2017: 448). So far, Kathrin Lobinger has been concerned with stereotypes in special text-image relations, but she addresses motionless images in her article. Lobinger points out that the “constructive character” of visual stereotypes has to be considered “even more” than other types of media images (Lobinger 2017: 111), and she discusses the textual effect of “reducing the image ambiguity” (Lobinger 2017: 114) with the example of representations of the border-zone between Israel and the Palestinian Autonomous Region. She also argues that in order to detect standardised visual stereotypes, non-individual and complex interplays of image and text, there must be a “huge consideration of contextualisation processes” (Lobinger 2017). After having described the importance of the interactive prosumer and produser culture