One of the perpetual dilemmas of tourism studies is how to generate natural interaction between hosts and guests. Cultural centres, often being used simultaneously as community meeting spaces and as tourist attractions, have the potential to be spaces that foster these meetings and provide cultural tourists with the more personal and ‘everyday’ experiences that they arguably increasingly seek.

This thesis is a case study of Katuaq Cultural Centre in Nuuk, Greenland. Combining theories of cultural contact, cultural hybridity and placemaking, the study examines how locals and tourists make use of and experience the centre, and how it responds to the expectations of different cultural groups in a context of colonialism and increasing tourism.

A series of anthropological research methods are used, including participant observation in the cultural centre itself, and informal and semi-structured interviews with local residents, users of the centre, local artists and employees and management at the centre.

Concluding that, from various perspectives, Katuaq fails to perform as a ‘centre of culture’, the project offers innovative insights into how cultural centres can be operated more inclusively and as spaces in which members of different cultural groups can reach more profound levels of understanding.

The study highlights the value of cultural centre case studies to tourism scholarship, arguing that they provide tangible and localised cases through which scholars can explore the meeting of cultural groups and tourism dichotomies in action.