Rzeczpospolita, Europa i reszta świata: obraz "innego" i "obcego" w staropolskich dziennikach podróży
ENObservations made by old-Polish travellers about foreign countries and nations provide a wealth of interesting material for the popular subject of national identity or development and functioning of cultural stereotypes, very popular nowadays. A thorough examination of the travel accounts from the perspective of the opinions expressed about foreign culture leads us to the conclusion that many of our travellers had an intuition of ethnographer. As a result, in the travel texts we find not only research material for cultural stereotypes but also the examples of verification of commonplace opinions. There is no trace of the conviction present in the belles-lettres and educational treatises that an alien culture could destroy our own; on the contrary, sometimes foreign customs and values are presented as examples to follow by the fellow countrymen. In general, a phenomenon of xenophobia is nonexistent here - the authors of the travel accounts present both full acceptation of the cultural distinctness and a slight distance towards it. Undoubtedly they took pains to explain this “otherness”, while the xenophobic attitude has an inherent dislike of search for reasons. It seems that a special situation of a multiethnic state such as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth developed in its citizens a certain openness and tolerance for other cultures.
