[Linganth] Catherine Rhodes about her new book
Ilana Gershon
imgershon at gmail.com
Mon Jul 7 14:14:00 UTC 2025
Dear Colleagues,
This Monday, the CaMP blog is featuring Kristina Jacobsen's interview with
Catherine Rhodes about her new book, *Undoing Modernity: Linguistics,
Higher Education, and Indigeneity in Yucatan*.
campanthropology.org
Best,
Ilana
Press blurb: 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.
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