About

Lise Dobrin is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Chicago, obtained in 1999. Her research focuses on language sound and word structure, with particular expertise in the Arapesh languages of Papua New Guinea, Melanesian culture, the history of anthropology, linguistic field methods, and ethnography of language shift, documentation, and description. Dobrin's work on the Arapesh languages began with her dissertation and has included extensive fieldwork and documentation efforts. She has studied the systematic exploitation of sounds in Arapesh noun classification and developed theoretical insights into the interaction of phonology and syntax. Recognizing the endangered status of Arapesh, she has engaged in language documentation and description, creating digital archives and developing tools for linguistic preservation. Her projects include the Arapesh Grammar and Digital Language Archive, which incorporates audio, transcribed texts, and a transcript player, as well as efforts to preserve historical texts and produce digital editions of culturally significant works. Her scholarly contributions extend to addressing issues of language endangerment, cultural change, and the social and ethical dimensions of linguistic research. She has contributed to discussions on responsible research practices, ethics in fieldwork, and the intercultural dynamics of cross-cultural field encounters. Dobrin has also revisited the work of earlier researchers on Arapesh language and culture, exploring how interpretive differences shape knowledge creation. Her work emphasizes the importance of ethnographic sensibility in linguistics and the social processes involved in language and cultural change.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Philosophy
• History
• Anthropology
• Law
• Ethnology
• Art history
• Media studies
• Epistemology
• Aesthetics
• Theology
• Art
• Genealogy

Selected publications

• What Arapesh Dogs Mean

  2025-12-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In the Coastal Arapesh villages of northern Papua New Guinea, humans frequently express disappointment in their dogs, noting that the animals are lazy, not good hunters, or otherwise should be better helpmeets. However, in Arapesh narratives both traditional and emergent, dogs frequently appear as superbly helpful to their human owners. The narratives also reveal the semiotic source of the high expectations placed on dogs: although they cannot use human speech, they often communicate using bodily signs and movements that signal a desire to help and connect. This mode of communication aligns dogs with the exciting category of newly encountered foreigners who may become “friends”, trading partners, and even eventually kin, despite the absence of a shared language. The many Arapesh narratives that dramatize human–dog communication allow us to appreciate just how radically “other” socially distant human others can be. For Arapesh, establishing relations with people who speak a foreign language is not so very different from succeeding in communication with members of another species.

  PublisherDOI

• Training for ethical linguistics: a model for building “responsible conduct of research” into department culture

  Linguistics · 2025-02-25 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract What aspects of a linguist’s work should be covered in training for ethical linguistics? Are they specific to the study of language? Specific to the treatment of research subjects? Specific to the practice of research? Having a clear answer is a necessary first step in planning an effective ethics education program. Related questions are which institution(s) should take responsibility for it and what settings will be most conducive to ethical learning. Should training take place in the classroom, the research lab, the department, professional society meetings? Inspired by the “Responsible Conduct of Research” U.S. regulatory framework, this article presents an approach to department-level ethics education that moves beyond individual compliance and instead has as its goal the cultivation of a next generation of linguists who are able to identify and respond to the ethical issues that arise in all aspects of the work that they do.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Jeffrey Shandler, Yiddish: Biography of a language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xi, 246. Hb. $25.

  Language in Society · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Media studies
  • Art

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Dying to be counted: the commodification of endangered languages in documentary linguistics

  2022-06-03 · 64 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The main way in which linguists have responded to the problem of language endangerment has been through a renewed commitment to the task of language documentation. But much of the critical discussion that has been generated by the issue of language endangerment has taken place outside mainstream linguistics, in the related but distinct field of linguistic anthropology. There the focus has been on analyzing the essentially moral discourse that frames language endangerment as a problem worthy of attention and action. But there are also areas within documentary linguistics which could benefit from a more critical approach. In particular, we argue that the discourse of documentary methods is characterised by an embrace of technology as an unquestioned goal, one that in some cases hinders rather than facilitates our thinking about the problems we are trying to solve. In this paper we try to understand, and hence begin to challenge, the social forces that lead documentary linguists to frame their work in the highly patterned ways that they do, even when these are in tension with their larger goals.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A ‘Nation of Villages’ and a Village ‘Nation State’: The Arapesh Model for Bernard Narokobi's Melanesian Way

  Journal of Pacific History · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  Published writings by the Papua New Guinean politician and intellectual Bernard Narokobi present modern Papua New Guinea as a projection of village-based social relations; as he writes in Foundations for Nationhood, ‘We are a nation of villages’. This article explores Narokobi's idea of Papua New Guinea as a village writ large, showing how this conceptualization drew upon his experience of a particular historical and cultural place, the Arapesh village of Wautogik in the mountains of East Sepik Province, where he spent his childhood and returned regularly throughout his life, and which he described as a nation unto itself in an unpublished manuscript that he composed in his later years. Beyond finding reflection in his writings, which often build upon Arapesh concepts and motifs, Narokobi's valorization of Wautogik as a worthy model led him to reciprocally invest, in a deeply principled way, in the village's continued vitality and integrity as a social entity.

  PublisherDOI

• Missionization and Language

  The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology · 2020-11-17 · 1 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding

  The history of Christian missionization is in many ways a history of Europeans' engagement with diverse languages and their speakers, which have been transformed as missionaries have interpreted and reshaped local speech practices and attempted to reduce speech to writing. The missionizing endeavor that proceeded alongside – and indeed enabled – Europe's maritime expansion brought non‐European peoples everywhere into contact with European languages and language ideologies, leaving an indelible mark on the world's linguistic landscape. The missionaries' linguistic interpretations naturalized social hierarchies and reshaped languages on a European nationalist model that takes there to be an essential isomorphism between social groups (nation‐states) and languages. In addition to spreading literacy and producing wordlists, grammars, and prayer books, missionaries have translated the Bible into Indigenous languages. The most dynamic and influential language‐focused mission operating today is SIL (the abbreviation stands for “Summer Institute of Linguistics”), whose overarching goal is to ensure that a version of the Christian Bible exists in all vernaculars.

  PublisherDOI

• The Legacy of Bernard Narokobi and the Melanesian Way

  Journal of Pacific History · 2020 · 36 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  This special issue on the life and legacy of Bernard Narokobi documents and contextualizes Narokobi's life and thought. A central figure in Papua New Guinea's transition from Australian territory to independent nation, Narokobi was a jurist, philosopher, and poet who is best remembered for making ‘the Melanesian Way’ an important theme – if not the guiding ideological principle – in the discourse of independence in Papua New Guinea. In looking closely at Narokobi's biography, the collection also contributes to a growing body of work on political life writing in the Pacific. The collection speaks to Narokobi's role as a theorist of Oceanic modernity more broadly, one who deserves a place alongside two other important philosophers of Pacific independence, Epeli Hau‘ofa and Jean-Marie Tjibaou, as one of the main visionaries of Pacific decolonization and Oceanic modernity of the post-war period.

  PublisherDOI

• AAA Resources on Ethics and Professional Responsibility

  Anthropology News · 2018-09-01

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Why cultural meanings matter in endangered language research

  ScholarSpace (University of Hawaii at Manoa) · 2018-12-01 · 16 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In this paper we illustrate why it is important for linguists engaged in endangered language documentation to develop an analytical understanding of the cultural meanings that language, language loss, and language documentation have for the communities they work with. Acknowledging the centrality of cultural meanings has implications for the kinds of questions linguists ask about the languages they are studying. For example: How is age interpreted? What reactions are provoked by accented speech or multilingualism? Is language shift experienced as a painful loss, or a source of newfound freedom, or both? It affects the standards we set for what counts as a satisfying explanation for language endangerment, with prediction necessarily limited in sociogeographic scope. It has implications for the research methods employed, calling for serious engagement with the particular histories and interpretive practices of local linguistic communities. Analyzing cultural meanings can help us see how language use and changes in language use are experienced and therefore acted on by people whose communicative behavior we are concerned with. It can help us interpret why language shift is taking place in a particular community, guide the practices of language documentation and preservation that linguists engage in with that community, and contribute to effective revitalization.

  Publisher

• <i>The Legacy of Dell Hymes: Ethnopoetics, Narrative Inequality, and Voice</i>. Paul V. Kroskrity and Anthony K. Webster, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015, 300 pp. $30.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-253-01941-7.

  Journal of Anthropological Research · 2017-08-24

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ira Bashkow

  University of Virginia

  3 shared

• Peter K. Austin

  3 shared

• Rosa M. Rodríguez

  2 shared

• Saul Schwartz

  Carleton University

  2 shared

• Chad T. Morris

  Roanoke College

  1 shared

• Lynn Stover Nichols

  University of Alabama at Birmingham

  1 shared

• Lisa McNair

  Virginia Tech

  1 shared

• Jeff Good

  1 shared

Labs

• Lise Dobrin's LabPI

Education

• PhD, Linguistics

  University of Chicago