On Friday, April 26 at 2 pm in Hibben 105, Dr. Catherine Rhodes will present the annual Snead Wertheim Endowed Lectureship with her talk Maya Ways of Knowing: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.

Abstract

Debates circulate on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico about the relationship between ‘Maya’-ness and formal schooling: Some people believe that schooling is a Western project that can ‘de-Mayanize’ students, whereas others believe that schooling can be ‘Mayanized’. Both perspectives depend upon ideas about the relationships between language, schooling, and thought. In this talk, I ask, how are Maya thought and pedagogy today similar to or different from Maya thought and pedagogy during the pre-colonial and colonial periods? What implications do these similarities or differences hold for contemporary understandings of Maya-ness and for contemporary Maya schooling projects? To answer these questions, I incorporate philosophical and pedagogical insights from pre-colonial glyphic writings; colonial-era transliterations of pre-colonial Maya texts; colonial era archival holdings in Mérida, Yucatán (dating from the 1500 and 1700s); and contemporary texts and undergraduate curricula on Maya philosophy and pedagogy. Bringing historical perspectives on Maya philosophy and pedagogy into conversation with contemporary research on Maya ways of knowing provides a framework for responding to the debates about the relationship between ‘Maya’-ness and formal schooling.

Catherine R. Rhodes is an Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department and affiliated faculty in Latin American and Iberian Studies; Educational Linguistics; and Organization, Information and Learning Sciences at the University of New Mexico. She is a semiotic anthropologist who researches education, language politics, and social identification. She conducts research on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico and has contributed to collaborative research in the U.S. in the (New) Latino Diaspora on the East Coast and on language ideologies in New Mexico. She founded and directs the Maya (Yucatec) language program at UNM.

The Snead Wertheim Endowed Lectureship was established in 1987 by James and Georgia Snead and Jerry and Mary Carole Wertheim, all UNM Alumni. The lectureship rotates annually between the UNM Department of Anthropology and the UNM Department of History and is awarded to a full-time, tenure-track faculty member for one academic year.