| Popis: |
This article explores how travel influences American attitudes to South Africa and Africa. It draws on long-term ethnographic relationships with American study abroad students in Cape Town, South Africa. Travel is often assumed to be an ideal way of changing how the ``other'' is perceived, but most research on travelers shows only how the traveler is changed. This article is a rare contribution to discussions of what travelers can learn about their destinations. Africa tends to be imagined in the US as a homogeneous entity either good in its primitiveness and wildness or bad in its violence, poverty, and disease. These perceptions color the expectations of students traveling to South Africa and frame their experiences there. Some of their preconceptions are shaken, especially the assumption that racial categories are the same everywhere. The students frequently assert, ``South Africa is not Africa.'' They also learn through their volunteer work, and conversations with South Africans, that poverty is not necessarily a homogenizing, debilitating force and that despite lack of material possessions, poor South Africans have ambitions and pride. The students' image of Africa is disturbed by the combination of their cosmopolitan experiences in South Africa and this unsettling of their preconceptions about poverty |
