93 f MORAL IRONY AND MORAL PERSONHOOD index "shared community values" as it criticizes stances of unspecified social actors. 5 I In indexing, rather than predicating on or directly stating, "shared values," moral f f Moral Irony and Moral Personhood in Sakapultek Discourse and Culture Robin Shoaps In this chapter I aim to demonstrate the necessity of ethnographic research for the study of resources for indirect stancetaking and how they are deployed in naturally occurring speech situations through an account of a family of modal constructions in Sakapultek, a Mayan language spoken in highland Guatemala. I The constructions in question share many characteristics with constructions that have been analyzed as ironic in English, and I dub them "moral irony," due both to their similarities to irony in other languages and to their primary interactional function. Moral irony construc- tions, always morphologically marked, translate most closely to "as if p" in English; however, in Sakapultek p is best understood not as an imagined utterance but rather a stance. For example, in Sakapultek people might say "as if being a witch doesn't matter" when they mean to warn their addressee that her activities might arouse sus- picion in the village that she is studying witchcraft or hiring a witch. 2 Thus they bear a surface resemblance to ironic constructions in English, although their morphologi- cally marked modal nature makes more explicit some of the indexical properties that characterize irony generally. Using ethnographically situated discourse data from a range of naturally occur- ring Sakapultek speech events-from casual conversation to ritual advice-I out- line and present an analysis of the morphosyntactic and semiotic characteristics of Sakapultek moral irony in order to demonstrate how it provides a vital resource in Sakapultek for indirect stancetaking and what this reveals about Sakapultek moral personhood. 3 I analyze moral irony as a stancetaking strategy that acts to indirectly 92 irony (like all irony) requires interlocutors to collude in evaluation by the fact that they retrieve-or coconstruct-what these values might be. It is the interpretive work required for processing indirect stancetaking that contributes to its social power vis- a-vis direct assessments. Indirect stances invoke an authority-{)f "shared cultural values"-that lies beyond a speaker and an addressee (as opposed to direct stances, for which the speaker is primarily held accountable). Furthermore, moral irony expressions do not only indirectly presuppose moral norms; due to their indexical value they also entail them, and thus are resources not only for the reproduction of moral norms, but for their generation and contestation as well. In contradistinction to direct stancetaking strategies, for which a speaker is held responsible, the complic- ity of the interlocutor in determining the meaning of moral irony (and other indirect stancetaking strategies) is what allows for these forms to be used to challenge moral norms without recourse to personal authority. By locating moral authority "in tradi- tion" (even if this "tradition" is only being presupposed as shared), speakers can challenge norms without necessarily having the elevated social status or power that are required as "backing" for reformulating moral norms propositionally. My semiotic functional analysis draws upon Goffman's (1981) model of pro- duction formats to argue that Sakapultek moral irony is semiotically much more complex than most treatments of irony and sarcasm in English would lead us to believe, and that ironic meaning is not best analyzed in terms of a hearer's retrieval of speaker intentions. In other words, through such stancetaking resources as those discussed in this paper, I argue that social actors not only evaluate other actors and events (thereby negotiating the moral code), but also position themselves as moral authorities (see Johnstone and Coupland and Coupland this volume). In doing so, they can be said to be negotiating moral personhood, an ethnographically situated concept that encompasses morally evaluated notions or models about the relation- ship between the individual and the social order, as well as conventional subject positionings. The concept of personhood originated with Mauss's classic 1938 djscussion of the person as an object of anthropological inquiry-a historically and culturally situ- ated category (see also Taylor 1989). As Agha explains, models or "ontologies" of personhood are "schemes ... grounded· in cultural frameworks of person-reckoning having a particular history" (2007: 241). I also draw from Watanabe's (1992) coinage of "moral personhood" in his work among the Mam in Guatemala, as this colloca- tion highlights how models of personhood always implicitly characterize "moral" concepts, such as agency, authority, and responsibility along axes of evaluation. Approaches to Irony and the Interpretation of Indirection Irony has received much attention in pragmatics largely because of its indirect nature.' It is considered indirect in that there is said to be a mismatch between utter- ance and "meaning" (a distinction captured in Grice's 1989 definition of nonnatural