Paul Friedrich, American anthropologist and linguist, Died at 88

  Reseacher, Writer

Paul William Friedrich was born on October 22, 1927, and died on August 11, 2016.

He was an American anthropologist, linguist, poet and Professor of Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Paul studied at Harvard with Roman Jakobson and received his PhD from Yale under the supervision of Sidney Mintz.

Friedrich main focus was in Slavic languages and literature, and in the ethnographic and linguistic study of the Purépecha people of Western Mexico, as well as in the role of poetics and aesthetics in creating linguistic and discursive patterns.

His most notable works were Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village (1970; 1977), The Princes of Naranja: An Essay in Anthrohistorical Method (1987), both ethnographic works describing local politics in a small community in the Mexican state of Michoacan.

As a professional linguistics, his works The Tarascan Suffixes of Locative Space: Meaning and Morphotactics [1971] and A Phonology of Tarascan [1973] were among the most detailed as well as earliest modern linguistic of the Purépecha language.

During 2005, his former students honored him with a festschrift titled Language, Culture and the Individual: A Tribute to Paul Friedrich.

During 2007 Yale University awarded Friedrich with the Wilbur Cross Medal.

As a prolific poet, Paul Friedrich also published seven collections of poems, some of them focusing on the haiku form.

Paul Friedrich passed away at 88 years old.