Kristina Wirtz

Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Ph.D. 2003 University of Pennsylvania

Contact
Moore 1016
(269) 387-0408
Email Website

Research interests: Language and culture, religion, ritual, semiotics, discourse analysis, race and nation, language ideologies, historical consciousness, religious community

Regional focus: Cuba, Caribbean, Latin America, African diaspora

Selected publications: Wirtz, K. (in press) Speaking a Sacred World: Ritual, Discourse, and Community in Cuban Santería. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

Wirtz, K. (2005) “’Where Obscurity is a Virtue’: The Mystique of Unintelligibility in Santería ritual.” Language & Communication 25: 351-375.

Wirtz, K. (2004) Santería in Cuban national consciousness: A religious case of the ‘doble moral’. Journal of Latin American Anthropology 9:409-438, 2004.

A closer look: Kristina Wirtz is a linguistic and cultural anthropologist who works on Santería in contemporary Cuba. Her research and teaching interests encompass religion, discourse, ritual performance, and negotiations over identity and community (racial, religious, and national). Dr. Wirtz is especially intrigued by Santería’s esoteric ritual register, Lucumí, as an emblem of religiosity and of different strains of historical consciousness in Cuba and the African diaspora. Current projects include editing a journal special issue on the topic of ritual unintelligibility, writing about the commercialization of Afro-Cuban religion in Socialist Cuba, and researching the competing language ideologies that have shaped “racialized” ways of speaking in Cuba, including ritual registers like Lucumí and marginalized sociolects like "bozal."