“The Poetic Ecology of Northern Laos”
Nathan Badenoch
Associate Professor of Japanese and Asian Studies
Program Director of Asian Studies
Villanova University
Speakers of the many languages of northern Laos interact daily, creating complex patterns of multilingualism. But much of this interaction is not simply about the exchange of information. Driving much of these social interactions is linguistic play that produces aesthetic bonds. This talk will introduce the linguistic culture of the Bit and their neighbors in the Lao-China-Vietnam border areas, focusing on how their aesthetically motivated mode of language use constructs a poetic ecology where people, animals, spirits, and the forest itself, coexist.