Abstract

Stories about another country are often viewed as filled with stereotypes and prejudices. Still there are other ways to organize foreign experiences, especially for actors needing to achieve an attitude of proximity. This article analyzes arrival stories, in this case Swedish businessmen's stories about their first arrival to a post-communist country, in order to show how such stories may be used to transcend prejudices and to rhetorically construct a socially suitable “tolerance.” Arrival stories interrelate certain kinds of utterances that draw on the narrators' initial impressions of the sceneries and surroundings, and various surprises, dramas, or changes in their impressions and old opinions. By investigating how individual narrators make use of shared interpretative procedures from inside rather than outside their social circle, tolerance can be seen as dialogically produced.