Departmental News

Posted:  Aug 01, 2023 - 12:00pm

Dr. Catherine Rhodes has been awarded the Snead-Wertheim Endowed Lectureship.  She will present her public talk  Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on Maya Ways of Knowing during the Fall 2023 semester. (More information to come)

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. Since 2021, my broader research has focused on what constitutes ‘Maya’ and ‘Western’ academic ways of knowing and what activities and behaviors are associated with each. Through my Snead-Wertheim Endowed Lectureship, I will contribute to this broader project by asking, in what ways is 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 will incorporate philosophical and pedagogical insights from pre-colonial glyphic writings; colonial-era transliterations of pre-colonial Maya thought; archival holdings in Mérida, Yucatán (dating from the 1500 and 1700s); contemporary texts and undergraduate curricula on Maya philosophy and pedagogy; and a bi-national working group on ‘Maya’-ness, modernity, and pedagogy. Incorporating an historical perspective on Maya philosophy and pedagogy will allow my contemporary research on Maya ways of knowing to respond to the debates about the relationship between ‘Maya’-ness and formal schooling.

Bio sketch

Catherine R. Rhodes is an Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department and affiliated faculty in Latin American and Iberian Studies and Educational Linguistics at the University of New Mexico. She is a semiotic anthropologist whose research focuses on education, language politics, and social identification. She conducts research on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico and has also conducted collaborative research in the U.S. in the (New) Latino Diaspora on the East Coast and on language ideologies in New Mexico.