Branding Copán: valuing cultural distinction in an archaeological tourism destination
Bibliographic record
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".