https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477330579/

Interviewed by Kristina Jacobsen

Kristina Jacobsen: Your book takes up two longstanding interests of anthropology: Indigeneity and modernity. Did you originally set out to study these topics or did they emerge through your research process? How is your book pushing beyond current thinking in anthropology on these two age-old topics?

Catherine Rhodes I did not set out to study Indigeneity and modernity specifically; these emerged as topics in my research. I originally set out to study whether there was a linguistic relativity effect from teaching linguistics about the Maya (Yucatec) language in the Maya language. Linguistic relativity refers to the idea that language, culture, and thought are in a mutually informing relationship; loosely, it is the study of how language and its use influences behavior, including thought. This led me to discover that there were more than the two widely known registers of Maya—the so-called purified version (jach maaya) and the so-called mixed version (xe’ek’ maaya)—and that Maya linguistics is not just an academic project but also a political project.

I was also beginning to see how this academic-political project depended upon modern ideas about who and what count as Maya. Depending upon the scale or interlocutor, Maya-ness was sometimes construed as Indigenous; at other times it was not. Maya-as-Indigenous is a useful frame when people want to engage in projects that have a broad-scale of recognizability, particularly within the Mexican neoliberal nation-state. I was finding that, the widely circulating stereotypes about who and what count as Maya typically associate “real,” “true,” or “authentic” ‘Maya’ (language, culture, or practices) with the past and critique present people and their practices as supposedly mixed or inauthentic versions of some past ideal. This often leads people to tap into and mobilize those widely circulating stereotypes to achieve recognition, particularly in institutionalized spaces, like government grant programs or state universities. Yet, I was observing how some students and faculty in the undergraduate program at the university where I conducted the bulk of my fieldwork were doing something different. They were rejecting the dichotomies that modern thinking presented: past=authentic; present=corrupted. Instead, they were affirming their own and others’ contemporary practices as Maya; how they speak today, how they dress, and the activities they engage in (for example, doing linguistics) were being affirmed as Maya. The logics they were using refused to engage modern thinking, which assumed a rupture with the past and choosing between being Maya and being modern.

It was through these alternative logics—what I call ‘demodern’ logics—that I saw how modernity was part of how Maya was made and how Maya as this recognizable category of Indigeneity within Mexico (and beyond) was part of the neoliberal logics of the nation-state: Inclusion without representation (following Deloria). Understanding the logics of Maya-ness as modern also required me to engage with colonial theory for, as many critical Latin Americanist thinkers (such as Dussel, Kusch, Fals Borda, Gonzales Casanova, Ribeiro, Escobar, Mignolo, Quijano, and Walsh) argue, modernity’s onset lies in the colonization of what is now the Americas, not in the Enlightenment as is popularly thought. Thus, modernity and coloniality are intertwined and co-constitutive. If this is true, as I believe it is, then decolonial projects that proceed under modern logics are destined to fail. Thus, I propose demodernity as the counterpart to decoloniality. Taking language politics projects—like creating dictionaries or writing or interpreting standards—as an example, these are premised upon modern ideas about the Maya language. But this modern version of the language is not what people use in their daily activities; thus, it contributes to the idea that they do not really speak or know the language. When, instead, vernacular language and other practices are taken seriously as Maya without their authenticity coming into question, then it changes who can engage in a range of activities. It is this shift—away from institutional lip service (or worse, purist language policies and practices that actively drive language disuse) and toward affirming and institutionalizing vernacular practices—in which my interlocutors are engaged and which I show is part of what is essential to a future for Maya people, language, and their practices.

Kristina Jacobsen: You are an interdisciplinary scholar, and your book engages interdisciplinary scholarship. Tell me about why you chose to engage the literatures you draw from in the book and what you hope to contribute by drawing them into conversation with one another.

Catherine Rhodes: Yes, I am a semiotic and linguistic anthropologist and an anthropologist of education; I consider myself firmly rooted in both anthropology and education, hence my decision to study an educational context ethnographically. In order to conceptualize much less to conduct my field research, I needed to have a firm foundation in sociocultural and linguistic anthropologies and the anthropology of education, knowledge of the history of the Yucatan Peninsula and also how the Peninsula relates to Maya peoples and their histories in other parts of Mesoamerica, historical and contemporary scholarship on the Maya language and its speakers and their practices, as well as an understanding of learning theories and pedagogical approaches in the context of higher education, which is where I was primarily conducting participant observations. I also needed to speak Spanish (Yucatecan) and Maya (Yucatec) and to understand linguistics, given that my study was sited in an undergraduate program in linguistics. This was all very well, but as I was reanalyzing my data in the writing of this book, I found the need to also engage modernity theory, which as I mention above, led me to (de)colonial theory and the relationship of both to the idea of Indigeneity in the Americas.

Much of the scholarship in Native American and Critical Indigenous Studies carefully details how coloniality and modernity are intertwined and how both make the category Indigenous. This also necessitated engagement with literature on neoliberalism and nation-states as well as with how Folklore Studies engages ideas about authenticity. I used linguistic anthropology as a guiding lens through this diverse literature because it provides me with a framework for understanding language use as a form of social action in the world; as something we do, not something we have. It also provides me with the concept of language ideologies, which refers to the relationship between people’s ideas about language, its practice, and its users and observable examples of these in the world; language ideologies link these and through interpretive and evaluative judgments. Language ideologies helped me to show how linguistics specifically and academia more broadly are necessarily political projects and what the stakes are for my interlocutors who are engaged in doing academics in Maya. I believe that it was precisely engaging this interdisciplinary scholarship that allowed me to theorize demodernity as the counterpart to decoloniality and to understand how the work in which my interlocutors are engaged is producing this new theoretical perspective in praxis (that is, the wedding of theory and practice). It also allowed me to see how some Maya scholars in Guatemala have been using demodern logics for decades, but they had never been framed as such.

By bringing these diverse literatures and ethnographic/geographic contexts into conversation, I hope to show the value in thinking across geopolitical regions and languages in our scholarly engagement as well as in interdisciplinary ways, for this opens the door to pushing our thinking past the logics in which we were trained and typically operate and toward new logics that create room for conceptualizing the world differently. This is so important, I believe, because what is at stake under modernity/coloniality for Indigenous people (not all of whom would use this word) is precisely the present and possible future.

Kristina Jacobsen: Your book takes up the concepts of time, space, and scale, key analytics in linguistic anthropology. You argue that the project your interlocutors are engaged in—centering their Maya-ness in the present—is not a utopian project. You also argue that it is one that hinges upon its ability to be “scaled up.” Tells us more about how you think this scaling-up might happen, why it is not a utopian project, and what consequences both have for your interlocutors.

Catherine Rhodes: The demodern project in which my interlocutors are engaged is taking place primarily in one undergraduate program in one university on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Of course, some of my interlocutors are trying to spread their demodern thinking beyond this undergraduate program, such as in their binational collaboration with Guatemalan scholars or in the language workshops they offer for schoolteachers in the Yucatan State’s capital, Mérida. For example, the proposal that people be called máasewáal (‘Indian, peasant’, from Nahuatl) instead of Maya circulates beyond the campus already. The question is, can the demodern logics that students and faculty are employing—affirming vernacular practices in the present—begin to circulate more widely as well? So far, we do not have good evidence of such projects being institutionalized beyond this one undergraduate program. I am part of a binational, multidisciplinary project team that is trying to create a dictionary that is developed using demodern logics. It would document the breadth of variation—not prescribe a norm—and provide examples from use in daily life. Once funded, we hope this project will be part of scaling up these new logics of understanding the Maya language, which, of course, we hope will also have effects on how people understand Maya language speakers. We hope the project will influence widespread ideologies about what counts as the Maya language and who count as Maya speakers and foster increased use, in all its variation. By scaling up, I am following Carr and Lempert (2016) in the idea that scaling is something that one does and that scales do not exist a priori (Wortham 2012); instead, resources are construed as of a scale through a process of scaling. I understand scaling to be a shift in indexical order (Rhodes and Leiter n.d.). This refers to the process whereby a sign can become (re)contextualized, thus shifting the social-organizational context within which the sign points to its object. Scaling up considers whether resources used to construe some social phenomenon as meaningful can circulate more widely and hold that same kind of meaning for a greater number of people across different contextualizations.

My colleagues and I do not describe the slow scaling up of demodern logics about the Maya language, Maya people or their practices as a utopian project precisely because demodern logics attempt to obviate the kinds of modern ruptures that utopianism engages. For example, scholars like Joanne Rappaport, in her discussion of the intercultural project in which her Nasa collaborators are engaged, or Arturo Escobar (2007), in his discussion of the “political desire” reflected in his Afro-Columbian intellectual-activist interlocutors’ alternative modernities, express a “utopian imagination” not, as Escobar points out, “a statement about the real, present or future” (206). Instead, my interlocutors are trying to center the here-and-now; to make a statement about the real present, and the kind of future that could make possible. Here, I am thinking with Jessica Hurley’s (2020) work. She describes how apocalypse, as a narrative device, “negates both the future and the present’s claim upon the future” (29). Apocalypse creates a rupture between the present (and any claims on the future) and the past; in this way, it is modern. The counterpoint to utopia—dystopia—“see[s] the future evolving unavoidably from the worst conditions of the present” (Hurley 2020, 30). “Instead, apocalyptic ­ present‑ing ‘imagine[s] a present that neither abandons the past nor is determined by it’” (Hurley 2020, 30 in Rhodes 2025, 50). This creates the possibility for stepping outside of a path in which “…pasts are defined by destruction and…futures promise to perpetuate that destruction” (Hurley 2020, 30; see also Kolopenuk 2020; Povinelli 2011; Sam Colop 1996).

Kristina Jacobsen: You have a decades-long relationship learning and speaking Spanish as a second language and have also studied Maya for many years. Can you talk about your felt experience of speaking Spanish, and then of speaking Maya? Do they feel different in your body and in your mouth? How does speaking English, Spanish, and Maya feed into your affective approaches to the research we read about in your book?

Catherine Rhodes: It is in fact my relationship with speaking Spanish that led me to graduate school in linguistic anthropology. Since becoming a Spanish speaker—at age 16—I had a persistent feeling that I was someone else when I spoke English or Spanish. My experience of the world was different and led me to want to understand why. My novice search on this topic eventually led me to the theory of linguistic relativity and to John Lucy’s work and to the field of linguistic anthropology. When I found linguistic anthropology, I felt that I had found something that I had been looking for for a long time. I applied to graduate programs and was fortunate enough to work with John in developing a project that addressed some issues raised under the paradigm of linguistic relativity. John and Suzanne Gaskins were also my first Maya language teachers, and they helped me explore the possibilities of conducting research on the Yucatan Peninsula.

When I arrived in Yucatan, I not only had the opportunity to use Maya in daily life, but I was also immersed in Yucatecan Spanish, so my Spanish-language learning continued. Today, my experience with Spanish is full bilingualism with English; it is difficult for me to disentangle these languages in my lived and academic practice—and in fact I am actively working to further entangle them in my teaching in two new bilingual binational linguistic anthropology courses I am developing (more on that below). There were times when I was conducting active fieldwork that I could do all my daily activities in Maya. Once I was on a bus and some French speakers were on the bus. They got off in a small town where I was making a bus transfer. I approached them to say hi and they stared, befuddled. In my head, I had been speaking to them in French (my third language before Maya), but, apparently, I had been speaking to them in Maya. Maya had boxed French out of the way as my third strongest language, and any time I actually produced French, it was riddled with Maya discourse markers. Unfortunately, I am not able to speak Maya on a daily basis now, so my speaking skills are rusty. What is interesting when I speak Maya or Spanish, however, is how my speaking body is read in the world. In Spanish I am so often heard with my interlocutor’s “eyes”—despite speaking Spanish like a Yucateca, I don’t always look the part, so me and my Spanish are often located elsewhere. (For example, as a tall, blonde woman, I’m often asked if I am Spanish or Argentine even though my accent sounds nothing like an accent from these places.) In Maya, my interlocutors so often forgive or ignore my intermediate skills, given that so few foreigners speak Maya. This has led my language use to be read as more expert than that of speakers who have grown up speaking the language, with the consequences of devaluing their everyday speech and, by extension, this can contribute to devaluing those speakers. So much work is done in these different ideological positionings of the speaking body, which is something I attend to in my work and life.

Kristina Jacobsen: How does this project contribute to taking you where you plan to go next?

Catherine Rhodes: This project takes me to two new projects, both of which I have alluded to above.

The first is a dictionary of the Maya language. Currently there are no dictionaries of Maya. There are many books called “dictionaries,” but they are just glossaries that provide word-for-word equivalents in other languages (for example., Spanish, English, French, and so on). My colleagues and I are applying for funding to create a dictionary in Maya that provides definitions in Maya of the Maya-language terms it contains, and which has a Maya-language meta-structure (that is, terms for organizing the dictionary, for classifying parts of speech, and so on). The dictionary will be freely available on the Internet, and it will include sociodemographic and linguistic ideological data about users and use. It will also include audio recordings of examples of use. We plan to collect data in all three Mexican states on the Yucatan Peninsula—Campeche, Yucatan, and Quintana Roo—and in previously un- or under-documented micro-regions of these three states. Further, we will develop software for collecting the data for the dictionary and then turning those data into the public-facing dictionary. We will then create a public-facing presentation of our data collection, analysis, and dictionary production process and the open-source software we developed for the project and make these freely available on the web. We will also present on this work in a range of contexts throughout the Americas to share the work and make it available to other language communities to support their own work in creating dictionaries in their languages.

The second project is the creation of linguistic anthropology courses and an introductory book in Spanish. Under a Fulbright U.S. Scholar fellowship during the 2024-2025 academic year, I produced the Spanish-language first-edition of Laura Ahearn’s Living Language, which we are now co-authoring,and pilot tested it in the classroom at a university in Yucatan State. Laura and I are co-authoring the forthcoming fourth edition of Living Language in English as well. We will then have the book and my undergraduate course design in both English and Spanish, which I will use to teach the undergraduate course Language and Culture, on an ongoing basis as a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) course between my home university, the University of New Mexico, and collaborative partner in Mexico, the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán (UADY), on an ongoing basis. Students will be able to engage the course in English or Spanish or to translanguage between these languages. They will work together on binational projects that employ core concepts in linguistic anthropology. This is a mission-driven project for me as a UNM faculty member, given that New Mexico has the highest percentage per capita of Spanish-speakers of any U.S. state, that UNM is a Hispanic serving institution, and that Spanish-speaking and Hispanic enrollments are growing in academia in the U.S. For students at the UADY, the course provides then with the opportunity to engage their English-language skills on anthropological theory and projects, and it provides access to training in linguistic anthropology in Spanish. Linguistic anthropology is a U.S. phenomenon that has been increasingly growing beyond the U.S.—as we discussed in 2025 at the Society for Linguistic Anthropology Conference in Chicago and at the American Association of Applied Linguistics meeting in Denver. There is great interest in linguistic anthropology in Latin America and Mexico specifically, but faculty are trained in cultural anthropology or linguistics, given that no programs exist in Spanish for training linguistic anthropologists. This course and the new graduate seminar I am developing under the same format, will provide entry points into the literature and practice of linguistic anthropology for Spanish speakers and contribute to training the next generation of scholars who can build programs in linguistic anthropology and develop this field beyond the United States.