Handicraft Market Battles
Tourism, Power & the Value of Place in Pisac, Peru
In Latin America, the plaza is the heart of the community — but who owns it after the tourists arrive?
by Rosa Codina, Peter Lugosi, & David Bowen
Tourism as an Economic Activity
TOURISM as an economic activity can transform unequal power relationships by creating new employment and educational opportunities for Indigenous people and women who are otherwise marginalised.
However, tourism as a social phenomenon perpetuates divisions of power based on ethnicity, culture, and gender through “othering” those who are different than the dominant majority, as well as through the emergence of a new business elite.
Academic researchers have shown that residents in tourism destinations have considerable potential to expand their political and economic standing through tourism development. To do this requires an understanding of how local residents exercise power over the places that they call their own — a struggle among themselves and in their relationship to tourists and the tourism industry.
Place Making & Power
POLITICAL and economic power relationships can be understood by examining how we create places, both as individuals and as communities. The study of place making (Lew, 2017) examines how people participate in interpreting, transforming and using places to meet their diverse social and economic aims.
Places are created, shaped and claimed by those who inhabit them through the everyday things they do. This includes activities such as shopping, selling, eating, and socialising. These seemingly mundane activities are the natural, organic, and bottom-up basis for the creation of all human places.
Places become part of the tourism landscape when locals and visitors share the same facilities and services. When that happens, such places can become contested resources — are they tourist places? or are they local places?
Furthermore, tourism places have an extra layer of top-down ‘placemaking’ that occurs through the marketing and product development activities of the tourism industry. This includes travel related companies, tour guides, and government tourism agencies.
The tourism industry often brings non-local, outsider priorities into their placemaking activities, which can conflict with interests of local residents. Their forms of placemaking tend to simplify local symbols (which locals may not like) and include activities that locals would seldom use (such as tours).
In this way, top-down and outsider touristic placemaking becomes part of wider power struggles between competing groups over place ownership and identity — is the place controlled by the tourists?, or is it controlled by the locals?
These issues are particularly evident in shared public spaces, such as plazas.
Public Plazas in Latin America
PLAZAS in Latin America, which are often central sites for both resident and tourism activities, primarily facilitate interaction and trade — but their importance is much deeper than that.
Because of their high visibility, plazas have become valued resources, as well as places of surveillance, control, and resistance. And because of the multiple practical and symbolic functions of plazas they are often contested by different users and stakeholders.
Plazas are common locations of everyday encounters between residents themselves, and between residents and tourists. Through these encounters, power relationships are negotiated, mostly in subtle, unconscious ways.
Plazas are also ‘valued’ as symbolic places, over which different stakeholders, including tour operators, local business owners, and government decision makers seek to exercise power and control.
In the Peruvian town of Pisac, tourism activities are focused in and around the central plaza, which has made it an increasingly valuable resource for diverse groups with competing goals and claims of control.
Changing Tourism & Plaza Ownership in Pisac
PISAC is situated in what is known as the “Sacred Valley”, close to the city of Cusco, Peru. The town is mostly known for its handicraft market and its adjacent Inca ruins.
According to locals, in the last twenty years, Pisac has experienced a relative decline in independent day visitors as organised group tours have increased at a much faster rate.
This is most likely due to the rise in international tourism to Peru. Most international tourists have limited time to visit Peru, in comparison to the exploratory backpacker tourists of the past. So they take tours to save time and to get what they believe is the most value for money.
Organised group tours usually only spend about one hour in Pisac and visit a spatially concentrated set of attractions. This is because Pisac is only one of several villages they will stop at in the Sacred Valley. These visitors have few opportunities to explore the town, and they are influenced by their tour guide’s suggestions when visiting shops or restaurants.
Consequently, tour group visitors spend less money in Pisac than independent travelers, they cause overcrowding in the centre during peak times of the day, and they tend to concentrate their spending in a select set of souvenir shops.
The narrow spatial-temporal concentration of tour groups in Pisac focuses tourism on the plaza and its immediate side streets. This has made these particular locations much more desirable for those who sell to tourists.
Importantly, the limited time spent by group tours in Pisac has encouraged those who sell to them to increase the number of “handicraft market days” (days when the temporary handicraft stalls are operating) and the total number of tourist oriented stalls in the plaza. They do this to maximize their profits during the brief period that tourists are in town.
Unfortunately, the expansion of the handicraft market has made the plaza more congested for everyone. Local residents fear that the congestion has created a negative image of Pisac as being too touristy. They also feel there are too many stalls — depriving them of their shared communal social space.
Over the years, handicraft market traders have progressively territorialised the plaza. They have done this by gradually expanding the size of the market and expanding the number of days it operates.
Handicraft market traders are of three types: (1) local Spanish-speaking mestizos, who live in Pisac, (2) Quechua speaking natives who live in indigenous communities near Pisac, and (3) non-local mestizos who are from outside the region. The local sellers have attempted to restrict access to the market for indigenous Quechuan sellers, denying them space to sell, and on at least one occasion resorting to hiding their stall signs to render them invisible to potentially interested visitors.
The presence of handicraft market sellers in the plaza has become so normalised that some of them will rent stall spaces in what is, in principle, a public space.
Thus, Pisac’s plaza has come to be symbolically (not legally) ‘owned’ by individuals and groups through their ongoing practices of “envelopment” — gradually expanding to encompass most of the plaza.
In this way, tourism has increased conflicts over this important community place by creating economic value for one set of stakeholders (the handicraft market sellers) at the expense of the larger group of local stakeholders. The purpose of the plaza has come to be defined, controlled and exploited by the tourism stakeholders.
Tour Guides as Place Makers
MANY of the tour guides visiting Pisac have set up special arrangements with select local business owners. As is common in many countries, these businesses pay the guides a commission in exchange for directing tourists to their shops.
Not all shops do this, however, causing tensions and resentment from the market traders, jewellers, and other local businesses who refuse to offer commissions to guides. They consider such practices as unfair and unethical, and consequently they end up with a lower share of local tourist spending.
Tour guides, however, rely on commissions due to their low salaries. They are caught in their own exploitative employment arrangements.
In addition to discouraging tourists from buying souvenirs from ‘uncooperative’ vendors, tour guides shape how tourists experience and engage in Pisac in a number of other ways.
Tour guides constantly vary the amount of time that they spend in Pisac, which is actually one of the few areas in which they have some control in their itinerary. They use time as a way of exercising their power, limiting access to certain places, and consequently limiting encounters between tourists and handicraft market traders. They often do this based on how well they are getting along with the traders.
Guides also use their position of authority and ‘expertise’ to influence tourists’ perceptions and experiences of places. They do this mostly by advising visitors on which businesses, people and souvenirs are “untrustworthy” and how much they should pay to avoid being ripped off.
As a result of these practices, tour guides in Pisac directly shape power struggles among locals in the plaza, while also shaping how tourists engage with that place.
Tour guides, therefore, have also territorialised the plaza through similar practices as market sellers. They shape encounters between local hosts and tourists by deploying subtle tactics of micro-aggression to create images of good and bad, safety and risk, in the way tourists engage with the place.
The guides redefined the plaza in this way, transforming it from a heterogeneous tourist space, where locals and tourists interacted relatively freely, to a tourist enclave with highly prescribed rules and expectations of behaviour and a heightened sense of risk.
Lessons from Pisac’s Plaza
OUR RESEARCH shows how tourism places change and evolve through the decisions, preferences and practices of the different stakeholders involved. In Pisac’s plaza, the stakeholders mostly include handicraft market traders, shop owners, tour companies and their guides, as well as local residents.
Each of these stakeholder groups contributes to the creation of a place through how they define and extract economic and cultural value and meaning out of what would otherwise be a neutral landscape.
This is how place making works. If there were no people, there would be no place making — at least not from a human understanding of place.
When tourists first discovered Pisac it was a remote but culturally rich place. Its remoteness restricted sightseeing, making shopping the dominant tourism activity for those staying in the town. The natural setting and qualities of the place shaped the form that local tourism place-making took at that time.
The explosion in global tourism in recent decades eventually gave rise to itinerary-driven tour groups in many destinations. In Pisac, as elsewhere, this resulted in substantial growth in top-down, outsider placemaking influences.
Pisac became less remote, but the new tourists also had less time. As a result, the relationship between hosts and guests became more superficial, dominated by the desire to generate profits as efficiently as possible. This has had direct impacts on how the plaza is understood, used and experienced by residents and visitors alike.
Tensions are now common among competing stakeholders over how tourism should develop in places throughout the world.
The broader macro-level experience of Pisac’s plaza helps us to appreciate the role of the larger, global context of tourism in the economic, cultural and political making of destination places.
At the local, micro level, Pisac’s plaza shows how competing actors (such as market traders and tour guides) use tactics such as location and visibility, micro-aggressions, and perceived expert knowledge to exercise power, establish territorial control, and extract economic value from place.
PLACE MAKING is something that everyone is always doing (Lew, 2017). We all contribute in many ways to creating the places we live, work and play.
As our world becomes increasingly global, so too are local places increasingly challenged by the arrival of non-local influences. Tourism has a huge role to play in this globalization process. At the same time, tourism sits at the interface between what is local and what is non-local. It is where the two meet, exchange, and come to know one another.
In an ideal world, this is what tourism should be about — coming to know one another in a respectful and meaningful manner. Many are hoping that we will see more of that form of tourism in our post-pandemic world. This could evolve into a new and more positive place making for destinations, such as Pisac, with money-based transactional tourism replaced by human-based transformative tourism.
This Article was Based On:
Codina, R., Lugosi, P., & Bowen, D. (2020). Place, power, and tourism in value-creation: contesting the plaza in Pisac, Peru. Tourism Geographies. DOI: 10.1080/14616688.2020.1819399
(available for free download from the publisher through late April 2021)
- Please see the journal article for a full list of references.
Also Referenced:
Lew, A. (2017). Tourism planning and place making: Place-making or placemaking? Tourism Geographies, 19(3), 448–466.
- Note: In this article, Alan Lew defines “place making” (two words) as the overall process of creating places through human activities. Whereas, “place-making” (with a dash - ) is the bottom-up, organic creating of places by local residents. And “placemaking” (one word) is the top-down and often more external influences that contribute to how a place is created and experienced.
About the Authors
Rosa Codina is a Senior Lecturer in Tourism and Events at Oxford Brookes University, UK where she conducts research into the socio-political aspects of tourism and events, with a particular focus on developing nations.
Peter Lugosi is a Professor at the Oxford Brookes Business School, Oxford Brookes University. He has researched and published on a wide range of subjects including parenting cultures, migration and migrant labour issues, research methods and ethics, consumer experiences, and organisational behaviour. Peter cofounded and co-edits the Hospitality & Society journal.
David Bowen is a Reader and Head of Doctoral Programmes at the Oxford Brookes Business School, Oxford Brookes University. David’s interests focus on tourist consumer behaviour and research methods.
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