Visiting Faculty Fellow, 2009-10 | Department of Anthropology

Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Chicago

Professor Shoaps’ research brings ethnography, semiotics and analysis of language use to bear on questions surrounding religion, moral authority, personhood and subjectivity. Her work addresses questions such as: How are semiosis and linguistic resources shaped by the inherently moral aspects of social life? How do people ground ritual and everyday talk in loci of moral authority and what are the loci of moral authority that can be appealed to in different cultural contexts? How do people use language to position themselves as moral actors? How do linguistic resources come to evoke and construct morally weighted social categories? How do ritual and other types of speech events implicitly articulate ideals of moral personhood and how do people use everyday talk to position themselves with respect to these ideals?

Shoaps has pursued aspects of these questions in a variety of sites, including the rhetorical strategies deployed in American conservative talk radio, the linguistic construction of sincerity in Pentecostal prayer in the U.S., and the prophetic-apostolic movement in Anglophone Pentecostalism. Her central ethnographic focus, however, is among the Sakapultek Maya in highland Guatemala. She is using her time at the Centre to complete a book manuscript, Wedding Morality and Everyday Talk, which analyzes ritual, everyday talk and kinship as sites for the negotiation of moral personhood among traditionalist Sakapultek Catholics. In it, she argues that only through analysis of language use can we understand how people learn to become actors in a social world, a world that is a moral terrain in which actors stake claims to, or avoid, responsibility, perform their authority, take stances, or position themselves with respect to other social categories and moral persons.

Shoaps’s research has been published in such journals as American Ethnologist, the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and Text, as well as in edited volumes.

Shoaps received her undergraduate degree in Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Chicago and her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2004. At Chicago she is affiliated with the Center for Latin American Studies, for which she has taught spoken Kéiche Maya. Before moving to Chicago, she held an appointment in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and was a visiting fellow with the Center for Language, Interaction, and Culture at the University of California, Los Angeles.