Judy Pine

Welcome

Qhawl qai le?

The Lahu are Burmo-Tibetan minority that resides within North Eastern Burma, Northern Thailand, and South West China. Lahu live in rural agricultural villages, small cities and modern metropolises throughout Southeast Asia and southwest China. Lahu people today use a wide variety of shared media, including cassette tapes, CDs and VCDs, radio programs, and movies to share their language. Dr. Judy Pine studies how different Lahu language media help create the common sense of what it means to be Lahu and how these different styles of media get dispersed over these geographically diverse boundaries and how they help shape the distinct relationships Lahu have with particular nation-states and religions.

 

Favorite Quote

• "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there." ~ Sufi Poet Rumi

Affiliations

Visit SfAA Community Network	Society for Linguistic Anthropology

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“It is our task to discover among all the varieties of human behavior those that are common to all humanity. By a study of the universality and variety of cultures anthropology may help us to shape the future course of mankind.”~ Franz Boas (1940)

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About me

I first encountered linguistic anthropology as an undergraduate at Kansas State University, where I took the introductory course and was immediately hooked.  I was fortunate to have Prof. Harriet J. Ottenheimer as one of my instructors, whose textbook I currently use to teach ANTH 247 - Intro to Linguistic Anthropology.

I grew up in a fairly small town in Kansas. Seattle is the largest city I have lived in for any extended period of time.  In the summer of 2010, I lived in the city of Kunming, Yunnan, PRC for a few weeks, spurring yet another recalibration of my idea of “big city”.  The city of Kunming, in 2009, had an estimated population of 6,800,000.  Washington State reported an estimated population of 6,668,200 in the same year. This is a marvelous benefit of fieldwork, the opportunity to build new frames of reference and reconfigure past ones. 

My research has taken me to less densely populated areas.  My primary research site is a small village , about 200 people, most ethnic Lahu and all are speakers of the Lahu language.  Lahu “languaging” and language use by Lahu speakers is the focus of my on-going research.  I am particularly interested in literacies and in Lahu language media, and I believe I may have one of the largest collections of Lahu language music videos in the US.

Follow Judythelinguist on twitter.