Branding Copán: valuing cultural distinction in an archaeological tourism destination

Abstract

In this article I explore the phenomenon of heritage tourism branding in the country of Honduras, focusing on the archaeological site of Copán, the country's highest profile cultural destination. Branding operates as a primary mode through which tourism value is presumed to circulate and reproduce, and become available for exclusionary regimes to capture new economic rents. As a heightened mechanism for mobilizing symbolic distinction, branding now also appears to organize value well beyond the domain of economic exchange. Branding the past takes on particular resonance in Honduras, where a claim on the ancient Maya, materialized through the Copán Archaeological Park, sustains a significant sector of the tourism market upon which a regional economy now depends. As in other areas of place-based and culture-based tourism, branding practices and logics increasingly dominate the organization of tourism encounters at Copán in both explicit and implicit ways. I use the Honduran case to focus discussion on the many different dimensions of branding that inhere in heritage sites, and the consequences for how such complexes of value are negotiated beyond the market.

Keywords:

• branding
• value
• archaeological tourism
• Copán
• Honduras

Notes

1. This article is based on ethnographic research by the author with archaeological tourism and heritage management at the site of Copán, and in Honduras more generally, in intermittent periods from 1998 to 2012.

2. See Manning (2010) for an overview of recent critical scholarship on branding in anthropology and related disciplines.

3. This phenomenon developed in spite of the many efforts of scholars and contemporary Maya to debunk the notion that the Long Count calendar was set to ‘end’ rather than simply turn over a new cycle.

4. Tigo is in turn part of an international brand owned by the corporation Millicom, a telecommunications and digital service company with commercial operations throughout Latin America and Africa.

5. See, for example, the list of corporate sponsors associated with excavations at the World Heritage Site of Catalhöyük in Turkey (http://www.catalhoyuk.com/).

6. The banner pictured in Figure 1 features Copán's famous hieroglyphic staircase.

7. The new management plan was part of a larger US$8.3 million World Bank-funded project, ‘PROFUTURO’ (World Bank, 2006).

8. I participated as an informal observer throughout the duration of this process.

9. However, recent research among tourism scholars demonstrates that popular recognition of the World Heritage brand remains limited (King & Halpenny, 2014).

10. World Bank project ID# P081172.

11. It should be noted that while place-branding rhetorically promises civic pride and enhanced quality of living, these are secondary to the market logic that drives the process.

12. Copan Valley Regional Sustainable Tourism and Cultural Heritage Project: An Innovative Approach to Poverty Reduction and Local Development from Central America, p. 7, retrieved from http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTLAC/Resources/Copan_Results.pdf.

13. The value of this name brand is so securely tied to its referent that any alterations to the name or its extensions are seen as threatening that value. Thus, a recent proposition by Honduran president Porfirio Lobo in 2012 to change the town's name from Copán Ruinas to Copán Galel, in honor of a sixteenth-century indigenous leader, was resoundingly rejected by local residents and the business community more generally.

14. These studies offer detailed accounts of how ideas about the ‘mysterious Maya’ have long penetrated the North American public imagination, and continue to circulate through a wide array of media channels.

15. Note that this concept of an archaeological subject as ‘brand’ is distinct from how Holtorf (2007) argues that ‘archaeology is a brand’, and his calls for professionals to embrace the positive popular appeal the discipline enjoys.

16. A detailed discussion of the halting business of nation-building through nation-branding in Honduras is beyond the scope of the present article.

17. However, this distinction is also increasingly porous. For discussion of the recent proliferation of legally branded and incorporated cultural collectivities in North America and Southern Africa, see, for example, Comaroff and Comaroff (2009).