May 10, 2025 3:00 PM - April 10, 2025 4:00 PM
Zoom

Join the LAII and the UNM Department of Anthropology for a presentation on Dr. Catherine R. Rhodes’s book, Undoing Modernity: Linguistics, Higher Education, and Indigeneity in Yucatan.

On the Yucatan Peninsula today, undergraduates are inventing a new sense of being Maya by studying linguistics and culture in their own language: Maya. In so doing, they are engaging and challenging stereotypical understandings of what counts as ‘Maya’, be that people, their language, or other cultural practices. Undoing Modernity follows students and their teachers as they upset the seemingly stable ethnic definition of Maya, with its reliance on a firm dichotomy between Maya and modern. Doing linguistics in Maya does not prove that Maya is modern but instead rejects the Maya-ness that modernity built, while also fostering within the university an intellectual space in which students articulate identity on their own terms. Created through colonization of the Americas, modernity is the counterpart to coloniality; the students, Rhodes suggests, are creating decoloniality’s companion: “demodernity.” Undoing Modernity dares to imagine the world on the other side of colonial/modern ideals of Indigeneity. 

Catherine R. Rhodes is an Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department and affiliated faculty in LAS; Educational Linguistics; and OILS at UNM. She is a semiotic and linguistic anthropologist of education and conducts research primarily on the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. She is a co-author of Migration Narratives, co-producer of the film Adelante, and is co-authoring with Ahearn the 4th edition of Living Language and Spanish-language 1st edition, El Lenguaje Vivo. She is currently a Fulbright U.S. Scholar fellow to Mexico, where she is internationalizing linguistic anthropology by developing curricula in Spanish. Dr. Rhodes holds a dual-Ph.D. in Anthropology and Education (UPenn), an M.A. in the Social Sciences (Linguistic Anthropology) (UChicago), and a B.A. in Latin American Studies (UNC-Chapel Hill). 

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