Robin Shoaps

I have very wide-ranging research interests. In my published and in-progress work I attempt to bring ethnography, semiotics and analysis of communication to bear on questions surrounding religion, meta-ethics, moral authority, personhood and subjectivity. I've addressed questions such as: How are semiosis and linguistic resources shaped by the inherently moral aspects of social life? What are the loci of moral authority that can be appealed to in different cultural contexts and how are they encoded linguistically? How do people use language to position themselves as moral actors? How do linguistic resources come to evoke and construct morally weighted social categories? 

I have pursued aspects of these issues 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. My central ethnographic focus, however, is among highland Maya groups in Guatemala.

I am currently engaged in fieldwork and research on a new topic, a comparative project on the history and contours of Pentecostalism in two highland
communities.

During the course of my current project I've become more aware of the legal, human rights, environmental and health impacts of the mining industry. This topic hits close to home, so to speak, as one of my field sites is about to be directly impacted. This has given birth to a new interest in environmental anthropology and environmental justice. I welcome any correspondence about this issue.
Phone: 907-474-6884