Undoing Modernity: Linguistics, Higher Education, and Indigeneity in Yucatan - Softcover

Rhodes, Catherine R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1477331085 ISBN 13: 9781477331088

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 2025

Synopsis

An ethnography of the decolonization of Maya-ness.

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 this bold theoretical intervention informed by ethnographic research, Catherine Rhodes argues that these students are undoing the category of modernity itself. Created through colonization of the Americas, modernity is the counterpart to coloniality; the students, Rhodes suggests, are creating decoloniality’s companion: “demodernity.”

Disciplines like linguistics, anthropology, history, and archaeology invented “the Maya” as an essentialized ethnos in a colonial, modern mold. Undoing Modernity follows students and their teachers as they upset the seemingly stable ethnic definition of Maya, with its reliance on a firm dichotomy of Maya and modern. Maya linguistics 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. An erudite and ultimately hopeful work of interdisciplinary scholarship that brings linguistic anthropology, Mesoamerican studies, and critical Indigenous studies into the conversation, Undoing Modernity dares to imagine the world on the other side of colonial/modern ideals of Indigeneity.

About this title

About the Author

Catherine R. Rhodes is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico. She is a coauthor of Migration Narratives: Diverging Stories in Schools, Churches, and Civic Institutions and associate producer of the ethnographic film Adelante.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1477331085
• ISBN 13: 9781477331088
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304