As far as a historical look at cultural stereotyping goes, Edward Said's book 'Orientalism' is not a bad starting point. From reading it I became far more aware

As far as a historical look at cultural stereotyping goes, Edward Said's book 'Orientalism' is not a bad starting point. From reading it I became far more aware that the way that a culture is described is usually far more to do with the culture that is doing the describing. edit - A good example being the British tabloid view of Japanese animation. If you were to trust the UK press, then Anime is all about sex and violence. However about half of Japanese tv is animation, and most of it is pretty innocent, but what the British buy is all the sex and violence, so then we think that is what Anime is.