engleski

Croatia – the insider’s and the outsider’s perspective

One’s first associations about a place are mostly based on some stereotypical image or symbol related to it. Without even knowing much about a place (be it a country, a region or a city) people tend to have certain perceptions about it. When speaking about place, however, one has to be aware of its dual nature. “On the one hand, there is the physical realm of land and the natural and built objects associated with it. On the other, there is the realm of the imagined, ideological, and interpretative.” (Boissevain and Selwyn 2004: 12) This is one of the reasons why in people’s minds images of a place are very often shaped according to some rather simple clichés, thus Paris is usually related to style and fashion, Switzerland to wealth and precision, Tuscany to good life etc. (Anholt 2007: 1). Stereotypes, however, “suggest a widely held image that is highly distorted and simplistic” (Kotler et al. 2002: 141) In line with this we would tend to agree with (Clancy 2008: 11) that “outsiders frequently ‘know’ nations largely through constructs experienced by tourism…[thus] we may not know very much about Croatia but we might likely construct Croatia through the knowledge of the beauty of the Dalmatian coast and the old city of Dubrovnik”.

guidebooks, national image, tourism,

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