Research Interests:

Niku T'arhechu T'arhesi is a four-field trained linguistic anthropologist whose research addresses three interlinked questions: i) What is language? ii) What are the evolutionary and cultural evolutionary processes that account for linguistic diversity? iii) What are the similarities and differences between human language and animal communication systems?  He has addressed aspects of those questions through ethnographic research of Spatial Language use by the P'urhepecha of Michoacan, Mexico.

In addition, he is committed to shedding light on the lifeways and histories of Amerindigenous populations from prehistoric to present times: Principally, across Mesoamerica; Secondarily, across i) the Andes, ii) the Amazon, and iii) North and South America. Through these efforts, he attempts to contribute to two principal stakeholders: the Academic community and Amerindigenous communities. For the former, his research helps to advance theory, method, and knowledge. For the latter, his research intends to provide applied pedagogy grounded in research on endangered languages, language documentation, and language revitalization.

Grassroots Projects: 

An example of the latter is to be found in one of Niku T'arhechu's personal projects. A P'urhepecha Amerindigenous person himself, he collaborates with his fellow P'urhepecha to revalorize and revitalize their ancestral language. They are currently developing P'urhepecha multimedia pedagogical materials (e.g., dictionaries, grammars, situational utterances) and producing P'urhepecha language voice dubs for popular animated cartoons. In the near future, they plan on producing P'urhepecha language animations that focus on Amerindigenous cultural histories as they relate to contemporary life

 Dissertation

"Endangered Words and Invulnerable Worlds: Spatial Language, Social Space, and Social Relations in Cheran, Michoacan Mexico"

Many of the world's 6,909 languages are becoming endangered at an alarming rate. Some endangered language stakeholders have confronted this problem by studying the cultural consequences of language loss. To that end, research on spatial language use proves fruitful. While some research suggests spatial language encodes uniform concepts, recent research indicates that language-dependent concepts underpin cultural behavior. This dissertation examines spatial language use among speakers of the critically endangered Cheran dialect of P’urhepecha (ISO 639: pua), a Mesoamerican language isolate of Michoacán, Mexico.  Based on analyses of 32 months of cumulative ethnographic fieldwork, the dissertation argues P'urhepecha spatial language produces a part-to-whole pattern that underlines social relations. In particular, a subset of locative suffixes produces a part-to-whole pattern that P’urhepecha speakers reproduce in strategies for locating and orientating entities and while engaging in daily speech activities. The part-to-whole pattern consists of an entity comprising a greater union. This covert part-to-whole pattern underlines overt views of sociocentrism and the ways folks organize themselves across ritual activities.

This research was graciously supported by the Firebird foundation's Fellowship for the Documentation of Oral Literature and Traditional Ecological Knowledge, the Tinker Field Research Grant, and the Rackham Graduate Student Research Grant.