The abundance of scholarly and popular accounts of ‘the Maya’ tends to obscure the complex and contested sociocultural underpinnings of Maya identity. While the term maaya, used by Yucatec Maya speakers to refer to their language, may have had limited regional use in the Late Postclassic Yucatán, its broader application as a unified ethnonym across culturally and linguistically diverse populations is largely a colonial and academic construction (Restall & Gabbert Reference Restall, Gabbert, Beyyette and LeCount2017). The historical motivations and timing of a ‘Maya ethnogenesis’ (Restall Reference Restall2004) remain topics of scholarly debate, especially in relation to language, identity, and political mobilization (e.g. Warren Reference Warren1998). Moreover, Castillo Cocom, Rodriguez, & Ashenbrener (2017) argue that the academic framing of ethnogenesis imposes epistemic control over Maya identity formation. In response, they propose an ‘ethnoexodus’, a departure from the externally imposed notions of Maya culture and identity as constructed through the disciplinary lenses of linguistics, history, archaeology, and anthropology.
Catherine R. Rhodes takes the critique advanced by Castillo Cocom and colleagues (Reference Castillo Cocom, Rodriguez, Ashenbrener, Bethany and Lisa2017) as her point of departure in Undoing modernity, which offers a theorized ethnographic account of how [Yucatec] Maya-speaking students and faculty in the Maya Linguistics and Culture program at Yáax Xook University (both names are pseudonyms) variously replicate, redefine, and reject externally imposed constructions of identity. While Castillo Cocom and his co-authors advocate ‘ethnoexodus’, Rhodes’ interlocutors remain within what Castillo Cocom terms the ethnos quincunx, the matrix of ‘Westernizing’ academic disciplines that shape Maya identity formation (Castillo Cocom et al. Reference Castillo Cocom, Rodriguez, Ashenbrener, Bethany and Lisa2017:53–54). But rather than passively accepting hegemonic conceptual frameworks, Yáax Xook University students and faculty actively rework and resignify them, using Maya language and educational practice to ‘shift the logics through which representations of ‘Maya’ are made’ (30). For Rhodes, this process exemplifies what she terms demodernity: an active undoing of modernity’s logics, enacted through mundane ‘vernacular’ practices that disrupt and reimagine epistemological and ontological schemas from within institutional structures and on her interlocutors’ own terms.
Rhodes explicates her theory of demodernity in chapter 1. Drawing on various scholars (e.g. Latour Reference Latour and Porter1993, Bruyneel Reference Bruyneel2007), she identifies key characteristics of modern logic that ‘demodern thinking and praxis’ rejects: temporal rupture (e.g. the pre-modern/modern divide), dichotomous thinking (e.g. ‘Maya’ vs. non-‘Maya’), and the concept of authenticity. Rhodes argues that scholarly and popular discourses are guided by modern (and colonial) logics that locate authentic Maya-ness in the past. Consequently, linguistics students and faculty at Yáax Xook University, who variously identify as ‘Maya’—including some who reject the label—navigate the ideological tensions that arise as their engagement with a modern academic discipline intersects with prevailing ideas about identity and authenticity.
Subsequent chapters ground Rhodes’ theoretical intervention ethnographically in the lived realities of linguistic practice, institutional negotiation, and social personhood. Over the course of the book, Rhodes assembles two main types of data that exemplify and compellingly support her claims: (i) interview transcripts accompanied by English glosses, and (ii) ethnographic descriptions of scholarly/pedagogical materials, events, and practices. Her descriptions represent a range of relevant scenes of practice, from a collaborative project between her colleagues on the Yucatán Peninsula and scholars from Guatemala and the United States to transliterate the Popol Vuh into contemporary K’iche’ (43–48), to classroom discussions in a ‘Morphology and Syntax I’ course (147–49). Chapter 2 examines how Yáax Xook University students and faculty respond to entrenched, essentialist constructions of ‘Maya’ identity that circulate through both academic disciplines and popular imaginaries. Rather than exiting these structures, as Castillo Cocom and colleagues (Reference Castillo Cocom, Rodriguez, Ashenbrener, Bethany and Lisa2017) have proposed, Rhodes’ interlocutors remain within them, reconfiguring ‘Maya’-ness through their critical engagement as linguists. Chapter 3 examines how dominant language ideologies in Yucatán continue to link Maya speech with Maya personhood and privilege ‘pure’ Maya language (jach maaya) over the everyday ‘vernacular’ register (xe’ek’ maaya), reinforcing modern conceptions of authenticity and marginalizing alternative articulations of ‘Maya’-ness. Rhodes shows how her interlocutors challenge these ideologies by embracing heteroglossic practice and revaluing ‘vernacular’ Maya, enacting a ‘demodern praxis’ that refuses to anchor legitimacy in the past. Chapter 4 explores how efforts to conduct linguistics in [Yucatec] Maya transform both the discipline and the language itself, sometimes reproducing modernist ideals of authenticity but also fostering demodern alternatives grounded in ‘vernacular’ linguistic innovation. Chapter 5 turns to the emergence of a new social persona—that of the ‘Maya linguist’—and the tensions that arise as students, faculty, and administrators navigate the perceived incompatibility between being ‘Maya’ and being a linguist. Some seek to reconcile the two, while others reject the label ‘Maya’, opting instead for the máasewáal ‘Indian peasant’ category in hopes of redefining and expanding its meaning. (The latter finding is especially intriguing given the negative social valence of the term máasewáal in Yucatán.) Rhodes argues that these strategies reflect a demodern logic that refuses imposed binaries and reconfigures social personhood through local, ‘vernacular praxis’.
Rhodes’ formulation of demodernity is ambitious and intellectually provocative. Her insistence on undoing rather than opposing or supplementing modernity is an important intervention, particularly within linguistic and anthropological scholarship that often remains entangled with modernist assumptions, even in its critiques. In my view, the most compelling contribution lies less in the critique of modernity’s epistemological and ontological assumptions than in Rhodes’ demonstration that meaningful alternatives emerge through the everyday practices of students and faculty as they navigate dominant institutions like the university and negotiate new ways of knowing and being. Rhodes’ interlocutors, Maya students and linguists, are not engaged in a political project of ‘Indigenous cosmopolitanism’ or resistance as framed by human rights discourses or pan-Maya activism. Instead, their work reveals a quiet but significant ideological shift, one that valorizes the present, the mundane, and the joy found in intellectual pursuit; Rhodes writes, ‘my research participants… do linguistics because they love doing linguistics and they love what they learn in the process. They enjoy the puzzle, and the process is what it’s all about’ (37).
Rhodes’ theorization of demodernity is productive and thought-provoking, though certain aspects of how the concept is theorized and deployed in the book raise questions that merit further consideration. While Rhodes acknowledges the modernity of the discipline of linguistics, her account underplays the hold that modern thinking has on her interlocutors even as they engage in demodern thinking and practice. For example, individualism—another hallmark of modernity—is evident in the students’ pursuit of their passion for linguistics. Additionally, Rhodes’ call for a ‘new (onto)logical project’ (35) risks becoming abstract or idealist if not grounded more explicitly in the material and political conditions that shape the lives of her interlocutors. While she cites situated practices as the basis for demodernity, the theoretical language occasionally drifts toward a conceptual register that may be difficult to reconcile with the grounded, often contradictory experiences of Maya-speaking subjects navigating state-sponsored educational institutions in Mexico. And while Rhodes distances herself from ‘Indigenous cosmopolitanism’, ‘alternatives to modernity’, and other approaches (5–15), the differences between her approach and those she critiques are at times more rhetorical than substantive. Many of the frameworks she critiques also theorize from lived experience and call for relational, non-binary thinking. Dismissal of these alternatives risks flattening a field rich with adjacent insights and may overstate the novelty of demodernity.
Ultimately, Rhodes’ Undoing modernity provides a theoretically and ethnographically rich analysis of a community of discursive practice that is central to the institutionalization of Maya language in Yucatán—as the first institution wherein Maya language is used as a medium of higher education (19)—and yet marginal to dominant ideologies held by Maya language standardizers and everyday speakers alike. This book is not only essential reading for Mayanists and scholars of Indigenous languages and politics; it also offers a nuanced exploration of how alternatives to dominant epistemologies and social imaginaries emerge through the lived, everyday contexts of language use, making it a rich resource for linguistic anthropologists, sociolinguists, education researchers, and scholars of postcolonial studies.
