The Formation of Ethnic Representations: The Vietnamese in Poland

The research aims at identifying the main representations of the Vietnamese existing both in popular knowledge and in the mass media and examining the relationship between them. The paper argues that Vietnamese immigrants are unexpectedly well perceived by Poles, which is rather surprising taking into consideration the low familiarity with, and dissimilarity of this ethnic group, the economic crisis, the hostile attitudes towards immigrants in general and towards different groups of immigrants, and a negative por-trayal of the Vietnamese and their country in the Polish mass media.

The divergence between media and popular representations mainly result from a lack of long-term, deeply ingrained negative representations from the past, the richness and complexity of emerging images and the appreciation of what the Vietnamese offer in the impoverished Polish society. A significant role of economic interests in ethnic perception and rep-resentation can be seen as another confirmation of importance of economic factors in contemporary Poland.