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Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Anna Karina Sennefelder | Revival of the cultural stereotype? 99 and openness, Weit is normative and unreflective with regard to its own perspective. This becomes evident in the sequence discussed here. The credo, communicated from the beginning, must be adhered to, the couple’s ‘own images’, which are intended to oppose the ‘one-sided reporting’ must be delivered, and Allgaier’s VO commentary delivers them promptly: “The people in this part of the world have a great aura”. This statement is placed before the three shots quoted above, which rhetorically reinforces the function of visual evidence: the VO serves as argumentatio, the images of the men wearing a turban and the laughing children authen- ticate what has been said. They serve as confirmatio in the rhetorical sense, and as “authentic signs” in the sense of Jonathan Culler’s semiotic understanding of authenticity within travel writing (Culler 1988), because they are read by the recipients as ‘people who symbolise people with a special aura’. I consider this sequence in its discursive function to be a visual stereotype, which becomes particularly clear here through the spoken text in the VO. There is no marking of a personal, subjective opinion in the text, no commentary on one’s own observer’s perspec- tive, and the statement turns out to be categorising, generalising, accentuating and evaluating: “The people” is generalising; “in this part of the world” is categorising; although vague, “have a great aura” is accentuating, because the people are reduced to a certain, controversial charac- teristic even when evaluated positively (“great”). Although the opening of the sequence aims to give a political classification to the setting shown and introduces the travellers as vigilant people who know about the dangers of travelling and make their ambivalent feelings transparent, the sequence runs towards an orientalist stereotype, evoking the typical cliché of the ‘orient’ as space of the other (Said 2017) and as a “projection surface of social counter drafts” (Deeken and Bösel 1996: 23). The people shown merely represent the image of ‘oriental’. Viewers easily recognise the typical image motifs, which have been reproduced countless times: dark skin, turban, smile — and those signals are enough. It is not about an “inter-individual” encounter, which Hansen explains as an ideal that never can be absouteley realised (cf. Hansen 2003: 324) but for which one always should strive in order to avoid as much group-orientated thinking of another person as possible — but about keeping a promised counter-perspective according to which, contrary to the one-sided images circulating ‘in the West’, there are beautiful and ‘great’ people in Pakistan, too. Quite apart from the fact that this counter-narrative is as flat as the template against which it is supposedly directed, because superficial positivity is opposed to superficial denigration, it is of course very problematic to talk about a ‘magic aura’ of the ‘people living in the Orient’. A self-observed stereotype — the one-sided news on terrorism and danger in Pakistan in Germany — is contrasted therefore with an orienatlist stereotype. The people shown only have a confirming function, in that they are used as authenticity markers, because the commentary in the VO about the people shown is intended to visually ‘prove’ to the view- ers the sympathetic and open attitude of the travellers. However, by simply attributing a “great aura” to complete strangers, Allgaier and Weisser are implicitly ascribing a cultural identity to these people, without allowing them to confirm or reject this identity. In defence, one could argue that this is only a small unit of text from a 127-minute film (although there are other scenes in Weit that serve cultural stereotypes, which, due to the scope of this article, I had to exclude), and that the filmmakers, preoccupied by their own experiences and associated emotionality, can inadvertently reproduce certain stereotypes dur- ing the production process. However, I consider this to be an analytical short circuit. If the