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Hands-on Learning Practicum at Chichen in areas such as Archaeological Heritage, Tourism Resource Management, Museum Management, Community Education & Outreach, Restauration
OSEA is partnering with Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) to offer students a unique and rewarding opportunity to work as an intern at Chichen Itza. This is an ideal internship for anyone seeking direct hands-on, practical, on-site guided learning experience in the various subfields of archaeological heritage and tourism management.
Chichen Itza was among the very first archeological sites of Mexico to be designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1989. In 2007 the main temple pyramid dedicated to K'uk'ulcan was designated by a popular vote lasting seven years as one of contemporary global society's New Seven Wonders of the World. The archaeological site began to be intensively studied during an 18 year archaeological project by the Carnegie Institution of Washington (1923-1940) and a joint Mexican archaeological project that focused on the main pyramid and plaza of K'uk'ulcan (also known as Quetzalcoatl in the Nahuatl language of Indigenous central Mexican peoples).
The archaeological site has a rich history not only for its glorious precolumbian days as dominant city state in the northern Yucatan Peninsula, but also because of the political, economic, and social struggles to control, regulate, define, administer, and manage the officially designated Zona Arqueologica de Chichén Itzá (Z.A.) and the zone of tourism activities within this encompassing national patrimony.
The latter is governmentally organized under CATVI aka "the Tourist Attention and Visitor Information Center". CATVI is a federal entity within the INAH
It replaced CULTUR which is the name of the State Government of Yucatán agency with the long name Patronato de las Unidades de Servicios Culturales y Turísticos del Estado de Yucatán. CULTUR controlled and regulated tourism activities at archaeological sites from 1985 until the federal take over by the INAH in approximately 2023.
The actual official Chichén website is the INAH website for the Zona Arqueologica (Z.A.)
The INAH operates CATVI ( aka Tourist Attention and Visitor Information Center ) This website is not the INAH website but a commercially owned page to sell package tours.
There are innumerable websites and social media posts about Chichén, some of these claim to be "official" sites as they are cleverly branded tourist agency sites.
Snapshot Understanding of the Importance of Chichén Itzá
Chichen Itza was among the very first archeological sites of Mexico to be designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1989. In 2007 the main temple pyramid dedicated to K'uk'ulcan was designated by a popular vote lasting seven years as one of contemporary global society's New Seven Wonders of the World. The archaeological site began to be intensively studied during an 18 year archaeological project by the Carnegie Institution of Washington (1923-1940) and a joint Mexican archaeological project that focused on the main pyramid and plaza of K'uk'ulcan (also known as Quetzalcoatl in the Nahuatl language of Indigenous central Mexican peoples).
Archaeological Heritage and Tourism Resource Management of Chichén Itzá
The OSEA internship offers a range of highly enriching opportunities to work in one of the many areas of the archaeological and tourism complex of Chichén Itzá. There are three basic or core areas of the Chichen:
CATVI "Tourist and Visitor Service Center" includes not only that part of the archaoelogical site that is visited by tourists, but also the institutional regions and activities that are "behind" the front stage of tourism. This includes administration and management of all tourism activities and services, such as the operation of stores, restaurants, and independent handicraft venders.
The INAH Museum of Chichen. This is a drammatically new building with state of the art exhibitions, replicas, display, and information. The museum space is also often used for community educational activities, archival collections of images and texts, and events in the three dimensional total immersion room.
the INAH Archaeological Lab and Restoration. The INAH archaeologists continue to do both major and minor excavations within the site of Chichén proper as well as at nearby locations with the "greater" city perimeter. The restoration team is in perpetual work of restoring and cataloguing previously excavated materials as well as new finds.
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Work Areas of Internships
OSEA participants can choose to work in one of these four areas below. Specific kinds of work opportunities might be limited or restricted due to the significance of the work or the need for the OSEA participant to have certain kinds of prior work experience.
OSEA application materials provides students the opportunity to explain their goals and work experience that makes them suitable to the internship area desired.
1. Internships in Community Outreach and Educational Programs
Interns gain practical experience working with INAH staff in developing and doing educational activities and outreach with children and adults both in the Chichen Museum and in Maya communities within the greater Chichen microregion.
2. Internships in the Museum
Interns gain practical experience working with Museum curators and administrators to create and manage displays, visitor experience. Interns have the opportunity to work in the Museum visual archive and Museum Library Collection.
3. Tourism Administration and Resource Management
Interns gain practical experience in the daily management activities and processes of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This includes shadowing INAH Site Wardens ("caretakers") in the supervision of tourists, venders, guides, support services, site maintenance, and administration. This is an ideal area of work for those OSEA students who would like to do participant observation research on any aspect of the on-site processes of tourism at a major cultural heritage and tourism destination.
4. Archaeological Heritage Management
Interns gain practical experience working in the INAH Archaeological Lab curating and documenting
materials from ongoing archaeological excavation. This can include providing support in restauration work. Interns may have the opportunity to shadow archaeologists doing research in accordance with the Mexican laws that define restrictions on foreigner participation in archaeological research.
Internship Program Mechanics and Structure
OSEA participants enroll in either the 4 or the 6 week internship. In either case the the intern works for 4 to 5 hours a day at Chichén during the week in the specific area of interest. The number of hours varies based on the area of work. The first week of the program includes a four day classroom and community orientation during which participants learn basic cultural ways of being and doing things, OSEA educational processes, and historical background of the archaeological site and the Pisté community. During the final week, internship work time at the site is reduced or eliminated to allow interns the time they need to write up their final project report and learning assessment.
OSEA Internships are supervised directly by an INAH
worker who functions as hands-on instructor on the practical activities on-site and the OSEA staff who provide guidance, oversight, resources, and a framework for further developing the experiential learning into professional knowledge. Interns can come to OSEA from any variety of fields of study and degree programs. OSEA can accomodate students with specific requirements to satisfy their institutionally designated practicums.
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Ethnography of Tourism and Heritage: Research Strategies
♦ Community Tourism Resources
First, what are the community resources and impediments, actual and potential, through which tourism can be developed so as to increase or minimize local control and benefits? This issue is investigated through projects of documentation and assesmeent of material and immaterial resources that range from urban infrastructure, disposal capital, existing business structure, and ecological attractions to local attitudes, expectations, and understandings of tourism/tourists. The documentation and assessment of these wide ranging cultural, socioeconomic and ecological resources allows for a greater understanding of the potential for capacity building for community controlled tourism and it allows for community members to be able to convert this knowledge into innovative tourism projects.
♦ Tourism Experience & Encounter
Second, what is the lived experience of tourism understood analytically in terms of encounters, experiences, performance, social dynamics, cultural interactions, misunderstanding, mutual exoticism, consumption, and communicative styles? This issue is investigated using humanistic ethnographic methods of interviewing and participant observation as well as quantitative survey methods in a variety of settings in which tourists and tourism providers can be found engaging in tourism activities. Different types of student research projects are developed in order explore the crucial question of what is the meaning, value, and experience of living in and through tourism by being a tourist, working in tourism, or providing tourism products.
♦ Tourism Events & Performances
Third, what and how are various activities in everyday life —
such as eating, sleeping, buying food, looking at piles of stones, walking about, talking with strangers, praying, going to a doctor, missionizing, trying to hook up, etc. — shaped into performances and practices that constitute the representation tourism as discourse and event? What are the modalities of tourism -- travel, adventure, heritage tourism, sex tourism, educational tourism, health-medical tourism, missionary work -- that occur in this sociocultural space of the community and how are these sites for the negotiation of class, gender, ethnic, cultural, age, and sexual identities of Self and Other? In the context of a community that has been receiving mass volume of international tourism for nearly fifty years, the question is how are everyday activities constituted as having the meaning and value of tourism, and of what type, and why? The study of this question in ethnographic contexts and situations provides a means to understand globalization as a local mode of negotiating cultural identities in contexts of mutual and reciprocal discourses of exoticism.
Ethnography of Tourism Research Topics and Issues Include:
⇒ Community Capacity Building
⇒ Tourism Infrastructure and Community Attitudes
⇒ Tourist Experience and Desires
⇒ Sustainable Resources
⇒ the Touristic Encounter as cultural communication and (mis) understanding
⇒ Living and Working in Tourism
⇒ Consumermism -- local and tourist styles of and objects of consumption
⇒ Eco and Adventure Tourism
⇒ Performance of Culture Exoticism
⇒ Missionary travel as tourism
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