Undoing Modernity: Linguistics, Higher Education, and Indigeneity in Yucatan, Catherine R Rhodes, 2025, University of Texas Press
An awkward postcolonial question confronts marginalised sectors of society across Latin America: can you be both indigenous and modern?
At first sight, it seems both racist but also of dubious relevance even to ask, but this question lurks at the root of much Western social scientific knowledge production about indigenous communities.
While contemporary ethnographies are often at pains to show how indigenous peoples such as the Maya are not relics of the past but culturally alive in the here and now, they also constitute the very categories that they claim to study in opposition to modernity.
That is, scholarship as it has evolved in the Euro-American academy has a circular, self-fulfilling dynamic by which certain disciplines manufacture the objects of their own intellectual perspectives.
A good example of this is the term “Maya” itself which, as author Catherine Rhodes points out, is—at least according to some critical scholarship—a scientific invention.
Citing the work of Castillo Cocom, Rodriguez, and Ashenbrener (2017), Rhodes writes: “The very notion of the ‘ethnos’—the concept of ‘the Maya’ as a discrete ethnic group with a shared consciousness of their ‘groupness’—comes out of Western scientific thought … Approaching ‘the Maya’ in this way, these authors argue, ‘simply maintains the status of westernizing science and the identity structures that hold that science to be true’.”
The authors she mentions have called for an “ethnoexodus” or self-definition by peoples such as the “Maya” outside of the Western, academic production of the ethnic “other”.
Ethnoexodus seeks alternative identifications that are not produced by the usual suspects in this essentialism—linguistics, history, anthropology, archaeology, or Maya culture and identity studies—but instead are grounded in lived relationships between people.
Rhodes examines this complex theme by looking at Maya participation on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico in a key area where modernity “others” indigenous people while creating national identities: higher education.
Public education—from schools through to universities—creates and recreates the “modern” identities that pose a huge challenge to the parameters of what it means to be indigenous. Schools the world over are key sites for nation-building projects and the ethno-fabrication that underpins it.
In order to participate in higher education, “Maya” people must engage in activities widely and stereotypically considered to be not “Maya”—from living and working in urban spaces, to speaking Spanish.
The author’s main focus is one of those four disciplines that have tended hitherto in the Western academic tradition to create “Maya-ness”: linguistics.
She examines an undergraduate programme in Maya linguistics and culture at a university where coursework is taught largely in Maya languages—participation in which is leading many students and faculty to rethink their very “Maya”-ness.
By looking at the case of students who study through Mayan languages, she considers a question about identity formation that many of them are asking themselves: can they be both “Maya” and “linguists” or, put another way, “Maya” and “modern”.
Classic conceptions of “Maya” people and their practices in scholarly, governmental and indeed even popular discourses have tended to locate their authentic identity in the past and position their contemporary engagement with modernity as one that brings the authenticity of their “Maya”-ness into question.
Here, modernity has a strong temporal dimension as the yardstick by which we measure “authenticity” and is used synonymously with “contemporary” or “present”, but in the case of Latin America is also very much a colonial narrative that in effect began with Conquest.
As Rhodes observes, projects that seek to recover an “authentic” past in the present participate in the production of the past as authentic in ways that can systematically devalue contemporary people and their practices in the search for something mythical.
As a result, the study of linguistics here is critically important: as Rhodes points out, the modern approach to linguistics steeped in the Western tradition often locates authentic language in the past and attempts to “recreate” it in the present.
The result can be like that summed up by the chant of many an English schoolboy forced to learn Latin: “Latin is a language, dead as dead can be, first it killed the Romans, now it’s killing me.”
As Rhodes observes in the case of the Maya students, this modern approach to linguistics is in fact well placed to undermine linguistic practice, because people often stop using a language when they feel they cannot achieve unattainable metrics of authenticity.
The author highlights a sociocultural context in which “Maya” people feel that they have to choose between being “Maya” and participating in modernity, in this case as linguists, university professors, and students.
They are confronting a colonial trope: a modern divide between being indigenous and being an “intellectual”.
If you are struggling to understand this, the Celtic heritage of northern Europe provides a valuable comparison, with contemporary scholarship largely rejecting the idea of “Celts” existing as a specific ethnicity at all—yet the undeniable fact that “Celtic” languages persist.
“Celt” is an historical category created largely by English (internal) colonialism for a broader nation-building purpose at a specific moment in the Victorian era, plaguing all subsequent efforts to recreate a Celtic culture with questions about authenticity.
Rhodes argues that higher education in the Yucatán is providing a site in which “Maya”-ness is being reaffirmed, revitalised—but also redefined.
By comparing Mexican students with their peers in Guatemala—who have tended to strengthen their claims to a “Maya” identity by embracing higher education delivered through westernising norms—she finds that the former are rejecting modern understandings about who they are and self-defining on their own terms.
She finds that the academic programme in linguistics is causing some of these students to reject the category “Maya” altogether, while others embrace the term but instead redefine what it means to belong to that category.
Such new understandings of “Maya”-ness often emerge from classic modern dichotomies such as “traditional versus modern” and sometimes articulate belonging to a group outside modern and colonial logics.
Rhodes’ broader aim is to use ethnographic analysis to show how people are rethinking the relationship between indigeneity and modernity—and, hence, coloniality—on the Yucatán Peninsula and, as a result, to provide a case study of “ethnoexodus” among Maya people..
A novel concept she devises to explain what can be possible outside the temporal “traditional versus modern” dichotomy against which some Maya students are rebelling—and thereby locating “authenticity” in the present—responds to what she terms “demodern logic”,
Rhodes writes: “An approach to linguistics that rejects modern thinking and the myth of authenticity seeks to centre cultural-linguistic authority in present, vernacular practices and peoples.
“When the present-vernacular—how people use language right here, right now—is valorised, the future can be constructed on its grounds, with the goal of eliminating the litmus test of authenticity from the future.”
Demodern is proposed as a counterpart to “decolonial” which, when applied to history, implies a shift from “merely interpret[ing] the past” to “aim[ing] to change the colonial present, and to imagine a decolonial future by reconnecting to Indigenous places and histories”.
It is neither non-modern, nor anti-modern, merely an effort to disrupt and undo modernity in a way that the logic of “decolonialism” cannot.
As Rhodes writes: “Enticing as the logics of decolonization may sound, if colonialism produces modernity, it seems that a decolonial project is still a modern project. The very fact that authors seek to engage in a decolonial project, yet continue to ground their alternative approaches in modern thinking, illustrates … how modernity is very much a cultural theory.”
Her work examines contemporary ways in which “Maya”-ness is being created, principally through the embrace of commonly used vernacular language that rejects the formal linguistic purity of institutionalised forms—but also through rejection of the very term “Maya” as, at least for some people, a colonial category.
Rhodes highlights, for example, alternative use of the term “máasewáal” meaning roughly “Maya-speaking peasants” originally used in the language to refer to non-elites which, while having negative and even vulgar connotations, is being employed by some young students of the language.
Undoing Modernity is a thought-provoking and original work of scholarship that offers an alternative theoretical approach to exploring indigeneity with a positive motive—to explore the ways “Maya” people themselves seek to resolve questions of identity and challenge the intellectual frameworks in which their culture has historically been imprisoned.
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Categories: Mexico, North America