Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes 1st (first) edition Text Only

by Daniel L. Everett

A riveting account of the astonishing experiences and discoveries made by linguist Daniel Everett while he lived with the Pirahã, a small tribe of Amazonian Indians in central Brazil.Everett, then a Christian missionary, arrived among the Pirahã in 1977—with his wife and three young children—intending to convert them. What he found was a language that defies all existing linguistic theories and reflects a way of life that evades contemporary The Pirahã have no counting system and no fixed terms for color. They have no concept of war or of personal property. They live entirely in the present. Everett became obsessed with their language and its cultural and linguistic implications, and with the remarkable contentment with which they live–so much so that he eventually lost his faith in the God he’d hoped to introduce to them.Over three decades, Everett spent a total of seven years among the Pirahã, and his account of this lasting sojourn is an engrossing exploration of language that questions modern linguistic theory. It is also an anthropological investigation, an adventure story, and a riveting memoir of a life profoundly affected by exposure to a different culture. Written with extraordinary acuity, sensitivity, and openness, it is fascinating from first to last, rich with unparalleled insight into the nature of language, thought, and life itself.

Genres: Nonfiction, Anthropology, Linguistics, Language, Memoir, Travel, Science

Hardcover

First published November 11, 2008

About the author

Daniel L. Everett is dean of arts and sciences at Bentley University. He has held appointments in linguistics and/or anthropology at the University of Campinas, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Manchester, and Illinois State University.

Reviews

[Kinga · Rating 4 out of 5]

You know know that situation when you meet somebody and they really annoy you but later on, much to your surprise, you end being very good friends with them? That's what happened with me and Mr Everett. My initial reaction to him and what I was reading was: Oh geez, what an American! And I apologise to all my American friends, I love you all, but I did mean that pejoratively. One example: Everett was really upset with all the people of Brazil for seemingly not giving a damn about the fact his wife was very sick with malaria, and maybe dying even. It took him YEARS to realise that the reason behind was that poor Brazilian people keep dying of all sorts of diseases and the world doesn't stop turning, so Brazilian people didn't understand why it should stop turning because of an American being sick. It really did take him YEARS to realise that. Let me just say in my finest Americanese - DOH!

This book was all over the place. It went like this: I went to Amazanionan Jungle to talk about God to the Indians. My wife got malaria. The Pirahas don't have numerals. My kids grew up in the jungle and the Pirahas talk about sex a lot. They also don't have recurssion in their language, so clearly Chomsky was wrong. Also, there is no God (sorry if this last bit was a spoiler to some).
But I forgive Everett everything because anyone who says Chomsky is wrong and manages to undermine his whole silly theory is a friend of mine.

The best chapter of the book is when Everett after 20 or 30 years realizes that the Pirahas will never be converted (did I mention he went there as a missonary?) and consequently comes to the conclusion that the Bible is a load of rubbish. Here are a few quotes because to get to that chapter you have to read first a few about recurssion in the language, Chomsky's Universal Grammar theory and general musings about linguistics. I am not sure you have it in you to do that, so here are the best bits. You can thank me later.

"On our furlough, I thought again of the challenge of the missionary: to convince a happy, satisfied people that they are lost and need Jesus as their personal saviour. My evangelism professor at Biola University, Dr. Curtis Mitchell used to say. 'You've gotta get 'em lost before you can get 'em saved.' If people don't perceive a serious lack of some sort in their lives, they are less likely to embrace new beliefs, especially about God and salvation"

So that's how it's done! I see!

"'The women are afraid of Jesus. We do not want him.'
'Why not?' I asked, wondering what triggered this declaration.
'Because last night he came to our village and tried to have sex with our women. He chased them around the village, trying to stick his large penis into them.'
Kaaxaooi proceeded to show me with his two hands held far apart how long Jesus's penis was - a good three feet."

"'The Pirahas know that you left your family and your own land to come here and live with us. We know that you do this to tell us about Jesus. You want us to live like Americans. But the Pirahas do not want to live like Americans. We like to drink. We like more than one woman. We don't want Jesus. But we like you. You can stay with us. But we don't want to hear any more about Jesus. OK?'"

A winner.

[Kim Malcolm · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book but I never really trusted its author, a linguist with an editor who used the phrase "a myriad of" in the first chapter. Everett's descriptions of the Pirahas are oddly incongruent. For example, he characterized them as "peaceful" right before mentioning the rape of a young woman by "most" of the men in the village. While most anthropologists would consider this a significant event, Everett refers to it in parentheses. Everett says the Pirahas are lacking in ritual and then shares a number of stories in which ritual is a central theme. He says they are lacking in religion because they focus on the "immediacy of experience" and yet he describes their myths and superstitions. The structure of the book was also disorienting at times. For example, Everett discusses general theories of language long after describing his conclusions about the specific characteristics of the Pirahas' language. A good academic discourse would start with general theory and proceed to describe how it compared with his own study. And a good storyteller would not assume his readers understand the significance of "recursion" or interrupt a personal anecdote with page after page of technical discourse. I came away fascinated by the Pirahas but wondering whether what I read about them was accurate.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I listened to the audiobook version, which came as “included” with my Audible subscription. The book is narrated by the author, who clearly isn’t a professional narrator, but he would be the only person able to do the job, as the book includes frequent quotations in the Pirahã language, which I doubt anyone else could pronounce. Incidentally in this book he seems to pronounce the name of the language as “pee-da-ha” or something resembling that.

The Pirahã people live along the Maici River in the Brazilian Amazon, and Daniel Everett first visited them as a Christian missionary in 1976. The book is divided into 3 parts. Part 1 is a mixture of anthropology and personal memoir – for example in one chapter Everett relates how his wife and one of his children nearly died of malaria in 1979 – Part 2 is about the Pirahã language, and a short Part 3 relates how living with the Pirahã caused Everett to lose his Christian faith and become an atheist, an ironic outcome for a missionary.

The Pirahã seem to have several unusual aspects to their culture. It is materially very simple, even compared with other Amazonian tribes. The tribe have no creation myths or origin stories about where their people came from. They do not plan more than a day ahead, do not store food and rarely if ever talk about the future or the distant past. They have very simple kinship groups that extend only to children, siblings, parents and grandparents. All this is linked to a facet of Pirahã culture that the author terms “The Immediacy of Experience Principle” (IEP). The Pirahã only concern themselves with directly experienced events, or at least those within living memory. They may believe something that they are told, but only if the person telling the story directly witnessed the event themselves. One of the issues Everett had with talking about Jesus was that the Pirahã could not relate to the idea that he was telling them about events from long before Everett’s own life. They would respond by saying “But how do you know these things happened?” On top of everything else Everett describes them as having a “very conservative” culture, in the sense of being unwilling to consider innovation. He provides some extremely interesting examples.

The core of the book is Everett’s discussion on the Pirahã language, which he says is unrelated to any other (although it was once part of a wider language family, all the others now being extinct) and which he describes as “profoundly unusual”. Pirahã has only 3 vowels and 8 consonants, one of which is a glottal stop, and amongst many other unusual features it does not contain cardinal or ordinal numbers (which Everett suggests is because numbers and counting are generally abstractions outwith the IEP). Most significantly, Pirahã sentences only ever contain one verb and Everett argues the language does not allow for linguistic recursion (the use of sentences within sentences). This is described as a major challenge to Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar, since it is recursion that allows for the formation of an infinite number of sentences. Everett argues that there is a close relationship between culture and grammar.

I have insufficient knowledge of linguistics to come to a view on Everett’s arguments, and the disagreements he has with Chomsky. What I can say is that I personally found this book a fascinating window into the language and wider culture of the Pirahã. Someone like me, who has a Western worldview, finds it hard to imagine living life without say, counting and numbers. Some other aspects of Pirahã culture are even harder to understand. Everett manages to be entirely non-judgemental in his descriptions.

[David Rim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok, I'll say it. It creeps me out when over-educated/churched white people go to live in jungles with non-white/non-educated/underprivileged people to "learn" their way and then promote their way of life as some kind of idyllic vision.

The writing is not great, so you'll have to enjoy this one on its non-fiction contributions. The general idea, as Everett puts it, is that standard view of linguistics (grammar is divorced somewhat from semantics and is universal in nature) cannot account for the one he's most interested in, called Piraha, spoken by a small number of indigenous Amazonians somewhere in the north-centralish part of Brazil.

I understand the argument that Piraha lacks some features of almost all grammars and therefore the theory of a Universal grammar is incomplete. However, it's very difficult to accept that argument from someone who doesn't even really know if he speaks the language correctly.

Furthermore, the idea of this being the result of a cultural bias (the existential primality principle or whatever he calls it) sure sounds nice, but even if I were to discount Everett's grounding in the western world, would still require a great deal of evidence, such as, perhaps a Piraha native learning English and discussing the theory in detail. The fact is that every phenomena has a multitude of explanations, and it's incredibly problematic that Everett argues from a position of experiential superiority (I lived with them, I know them, I am them, etc.)

I realize that this is wholly unfair to everyone who likes to think they understand a culture because they lived as part of one for awhile. But you don't. And you never will.

Onto the writing, which is workmanlike at best, narrated in a chatty style. One wonders, however, about the parts glossed over, his break with the Church, his divorce, his remarriage at a late age.

However, it is an entertaining and thought-provoking read, and so I guess I'd recommend it, if you don't have this issue.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An enthralling ethnography of Amazonia’s Pirahãs people from author/anthropologist/linguist Daniel Everett.

It is worth noting that Everett first ventured into the Brazilian jungle not as a scientist but as an SIL* missionary. Yes he was already a talented linguist but his priority, at least in the beginning, was the saving of souls rather than the documentation and preservation of a disappearing culture. The Pirahãs, with their empirical approach to to the world, converted the missionary. Hello altruistic reason, goodbye indemonstrable dogma.

Before anyone passes judgment on Everett’s coercive skill set, be aware that Christian missionaries have been trying to convert the Pirahãs in Amazonia for over 200 years without success. As far as anyone knows not a single Pirahãs has ever taken Jesus to heart. They simply are not in the market for a new worldview.

This is one of those rare books that I could not put down. True, the deep dive into analytical linguistics was almost more than my casual interest could bear, but the rest (the immersive day-to-day Pirahãs experience) was inspiring. 5 stars.
________________________________

*SIL missionaries: The Summer Institute for Linguistics (SIL) is an evangelical Christian group that studies lesser known languages for the purpose of translating the Bible. The ultimate goal being proselytization and the conversion of non Christian tribes and communities.

[Jay Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not mind-blowing (I've been around too long to have my mind blown), but undoubtedly mind-expanding. A fascinating account of one evangelical Christian's conversion to agnosticism as a result of years spent studying a remote Amazonian tribe's language and culture. Some very amusing anecdotes combined with some illuminating observations about the role of culture in shaping language, contrary to the prevailing paradigm of linguistics. Well worth a read.

[David Campton · Rating 2 out of 5]

I gave this book a relatively poor rating, not because I am a Christian minister and this book concludes (SPOILER ALERT) with the unsurprising revelation that through his work with the Piraha he had abandoned his Christian faith, but because it was a literary dog's dinner. Wasn't entirely sure what the author was trying to do in this book. Was it an autobiography, linguistic anthropology, critique of Chomsky's theories, or an anti-missionary apologetic? The lack of a clear structure and aim to the book certainly didn't endear the author to me, and, while I come from a "faith-perspective" myself, I found his approach to the Piraha tribe he was working with, and his own inability to reflect on his own thinking and behaviour, deeply frustrating long before he revealed his loss of faith. There was a curious contradiction between his latter description of the Piraha as not needing what he had originally gone to share with them ie. the Bible in their own language and the gospel it speaks of, whilst earlier he had described a people with little fellow-feeling, who(possibly through an enhanced sense of mortality) had an almost callous disregard for the lives of others, be that Dr. Everett's malaria-stricken wife, a member of the tribe giving birth alone on the riverbank, or a woman effectively gang-raped by the males of the tribe. This is, by no means, a tribe of bucolic innocents. I was also struck by the fact that while he identified ties between their language, culture and (lack of) theology (although I would contend that he missed the sense of an existential/experiential spirituality - and because of a lack of a classic Jamesian experiential faith on his own part, he had no point of contact or awareness to draw on), he seemed unable to identify the strong cultural conditioning of his own faith... the Piraha were not interested in his American Jesus, and why should they be? Especially when his actions didn't match his profession - early on in the book, there was he, who professed belief in life after death, frantically trying to save his ill family (and making some dreadful decisions in seeking to do so) while the Piraha, who believed in death as a part of life with nothing afterwards, simply watching on dispassionately. What was particularly distasteful for me as a Christian, was the idea inculcated in Everett and others at college, that you have to get people lost before they can understand their need to be saved... Whilst I understand the sentiment, frankly, I would rather that others sent out with that as their missionary mindset, should rethink not only what, but why they are doing what they are doing. Obviously I would prefer they didn't come to the same conclusion as Dr. Everett... But we need people, in the Amazon and in the post-Christian west, to free the Bible and Gospel from its cultural and linguistic shackles...

[Trang · Rating 4 out of 5]

UPDATE 2/28/2019 -- revised review and rating.
Ughhh I mentioned this book in my thesis proposal today and one of the committee members (linguistics professor) said to not take Everett's claims too seriously. The examples cited in this book were anecdotal, which is not necessarily always a problem. BUT - the issue was Everett has never been open to sharing his data (as he seemed to claim in this book).

#######
I came across this book from a linguistics seminar on language perception and production. This was when, for the first time, my limited understanding (and belief) of Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar (UG) was challenged. UG (Chomsky) or The Language Instinct (Pinker) claims that human's ability to learn languages is innate, because all languages share some underlying common "grammar" whose "parameters" (e.g. word order, number of phonemes) are turned on/off depending on the language environment where the human is born (e.g. a baby born into Japanese environment will have object-initial word order turned on, and the "l/r" distinction turned off). Because of this supposed universality, it was often presumed that culture and grammar don't interact. While it is generally agreed that culture affects certain aspects of language, most notably vocabulary, effects on grammar have largely been dismissed. This book challenges this last point (among others in Chomsky's theory, e.g. recursion in languages) -- Everett argues, through his experience learning Piraha and living among Pirahas, that:

... we cannot study languages effectively apart from their cultural context, especially languages whose cultures differ radically from the culture of the researcher.

The book provides many interesting examples regarding the Piraha language: there are only 11 or so phonemes in Piraha (compared to 44 in English), pitch in Piraha words constitute different communication "channels" (musical speech, hum speech, etc.), and (to me most fascinating) the presence of suffixes for "evidentials":

Perhaps the most interesting suffixes, however (though these are not unique to Pirahã), are what linguists call evidentials, elements that represent the speaker’s evaluation of his or her knowledge of what he or she is saying. There are three of these in Pirahã: hearsay, observation, and deduction. To see what these do, let’s use an English example. If I ask you, “Did Joe go fishing?” you could answer, “Yes, at least I heard that he did,” or “Yes, I know because I saw him leave,” or “Yes, at least I suppose he did because his boat is gone.” The difference between English and Pirahã is that what English does with a sentence, Pirahã does with a verbal suffix.

Isn't this SO COOL?!?

This "evidential" aspect of language is tied to/explained by the fact that Piraha language and culture are constrained by immediate experience -- facts are only considered facts by the Pirahas if there's an eyewitness, which also helps explain why all efforts to convert Pirahas have failed over more than 200 years. The author himself, a missionary, ended up being un-converted.

Overall, I really enjoyed this read -- Everett did a surprisingly good job of giving enough rigorous explanations on the classic linguistic theories he is challenging. What I also like was how Everett depicts Pirahas culture and people in a matter-of-fact and non-judgemental way, especially in aspects that are certainly deemed at least controversial in western cultures. Finally, the last practical message of the book is the importance of preserving endangered languages:

The view of this book is that every language and culture pair shows us something unique about the way that one subset of our species has evolved to deal with the world around it. Each people solves linguistic, psychological, social, and cultural problems in different ways. When a language dies without documentation, we lose a piece of the puzzle of the origin of human language. But perhaps more important, humanity loses an example of how to live, of how to survive in the world around us.

[Frank Stein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another one of the best books I've read all year.

At first I was enjoying the book as a fairly typical, though well-written, anthropology slash adventure story, concerning an idealistic young missionary who goes off into the Amazon to convert an almost untouched tribe of hunter-gatherers. Everett gives a wonderful sense of life among the tribe, and of those great little moments which show exactly how similar and how different we all are: from the time the men killed the anaconda for the sole purpose of leaving it in the river where the women bathed and scaring them, to the time the tribe kills a baby Everett's family was trying to save because its mother had died and it "wanted to die" too. It's a life both uncannily familiar and incomprehensibly different from anything we've experienced.

But Everett soon learns that there is something very distinct about this tribe, even next to the kaleidoscopic variety of other Amazonian tribes. He learns that the tribe has no clear plurals in their language or even any words for numbers (not even the one, two, three). When the tribe eagerly asks him to teach them to count because they are tired of getting screwed by the caboclo river traders, they attempt vainly for 8 months and then claim such a feat is impossible and give up.

This is where the real story begins. Everett came to the tribe as a disciple both of Christ and Noam Chomsky's Universal Grammar, but gradually he realized that this tribe, the Pirahas, didn't have numerous attributes that Chomsky said should be in every grammar, such as conjunctions and recursions. When discussing how this tribe may upend our entire theory of language, it seems like every paragraph he writes sets off new fireworks. He talks about how the Piraha's concern for the immediacy of experience prevents them from generalizing about even such simple things as color, number, or time. But, he knows, if such cultural concerns can influence grammar and language then the whole linguistic system of a-cultural grammar (elaborated by people like Pinker in the Language Instinct and McWhorter in The Tower of Babel) has to be overthrown. A language may tell us much more about a culture than we ever admitted possible. For instance, another language researcher found that tribes with fatalistic heros in their myths tended to use passive voice, while those with more active heros used active voice. Voice wasn't just a way for organizing information in a sentence, a la Chomsky, it was an everyday expression of belief. This is both the more common sense and perhaps more exciting view. There's so much more we can learn from languages that we ever thought possible before.

Everett takes the implications of this beyond simple linguistics to debates over Cartesian rationalism, William James' pragmatism, and Christianity (he becomes an agnostic by the end of his stay). It's a book that masterfully shows how abstract debates about seemingly esoteric subjects have real consequences for our entire conception of ourselves as human beings.

[Ross Blocher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Daniel Everett tells his own story of traveling as a Christian missionary in the late 70s (initially, with his wife and kids) deep into the Amazonian jungle to embed himself with the Pirahã (roughly, "PEE-du-hah"). They are a group of indigenous people who have maintained a language and culture distinct in many, fascinating ways. As a missionary, his intent was to convert, but he had to first convince the Brazilian authorities that he had some other purpose, so he registered as a language student studying the Pirahã language. Of course, he'd have to learn the language anyway, and only a very few previous missionaries had learned to speak with the inhabitants and developed a written system. It was his goal to translate the gospel of Mark, and then to translate the entire New Testament.

There was a problem with that plan, though. The Pirahã had already heard about Jesus, and they simply weren't interested. Baked into their culture is a disregard for second-hand evidence. "So you know this Jesus?" "Well, he died two thousand years ago." "How could you know anything about him, then?" (Not actual quotes from the book.) As Daniel struggles to find some way to get around this hurdle, he identifies many ways in which the Pirahã think differently than speakers of English (or any language, for that matter). Their sense of direction is fluid, organized by orientation to the river rather than cardinal directions on a map. They can refer to "some" or "more", but lack a counting system, or even a way to specify a single object. The language can exist in spoken form, but also be conveyed by whistling or humming. The Pirahã lack one specific technical language feature: recursion (the ability to embed clauses with new information in a sentence, such as I'm doing here). This was something that had been hypothesized by linguist Noam Chomsky, and when Everett publicized this, the finding rocked the world of philology.

As Everett struggles to keep his family disease-free and safe from physical harm, and to learn the language enough to write Mark, he's also becoming more and more fascinated with the scholarly aspects of his work. At the same time, he's learning much from the culture of the Pirahã: they are not envious, or violent, or vengeful. They live contentedly. There are no leaders or hierarchy. Children are not treated with kid gloves. They recognize that people change over time, and give them new names accordingly. They claim regularly to see spirits, but do not have any kind of reigning god figure.

Everett's scholarly pursuit of the Pirahã language, plus his observation of just how well they've come to function without the concept of god, eventually lead him to lose his faith. The process is clearly something difficult and painful for him, but Everett only refers to his loss of faith in brief asides. Never head-on. He also talks about the fact that he and his wife are divorced, but doesn't share the factors that led to that, either. That was a bit of a bummer, because the missionary-losing-his-faith story was the main thing that drew me into the book. There was far more about the language analysis itself, some of which gets extremely technical, albeit still interesting. So be prepared for that, but I think it's all worth it for the profound commentary on human nature, and to get glimpses of how the Pirahã influenced Everett more than he ever influenced them.

[Gwern · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moved to gwern.net.

[Shomeret · Rating 3 out of 5]

Everett's limitations with regard to religion made him unable to understand that the Piraha really did have a religion. They actually spoke to him about their interactions with spirits. The Piraha accept only direct experience as valid. This is why the Bible has no meaning to them, but if Everett had said "I saw Jesus today and this is what he told me," they would have accepted that as legitimate testimony. Direct interaction with the divine is found in all religious traditions. The Piraha approach to religion is akin to that of visionaries, spirit mediums and shamans. This book is badly in need of a cross-cultural approach.

I was interested in the varying meanings for the term "caboclo". I am familiar with the "caboclos" as a type of spirit in the context of Umbanda, an Afro-Brazilian tradition. Learning about the use of "caboclo" outside of religion was valuable to me.

Shomeret

[Richard Reese · Rating 5 out of 5]

One day, listening to the jungle drums on the info-stream, I heard that a study had concluded that the happiest people in the world were the Pirahã (pee-da-HAN) tribe of the Amazon (true). I heard that some guy then went to visit them, to discover the source of their bliss (false). I heard that his name was Daniel L. Everett, and the book was Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes (true). My library had the book, and reading it was a rewarding experience (true).

Everett spent much of 30 years among the Pirahã (1977-2006), arriving long before the happiness study was published. His three children were raised among them, on the banks of the Maici River. The jungle was full of dangerous things. All night long, some natives stayed awake chatting. They rarely slept more than two hours at a time. Sleepers became a playground for dozens of three-inch cockroaches (annoyances), and were often joined by eight-inch roach-eating tarantulas (beloved allies).

Acquiring food required the natives to “work” 15 to 20 hours each week. They hunted, fished, foraged, and grew some manioc. About 70 percent of their diet was fish. They lived beside a major river that had not yet been emptied by commercial fishermen. Villagers who visited cities were shocked to observe how much food the civilized folks consumed — three big meals a day!

The Pirahã were remarkably and genuinely happy. They wore bright smiles, and laughed about everything. Violence was rare, and so were angry outbursts. They were amazingly tolerant and patient. They were less pleasant to be around when traders brought them rum, and every man, woman, and child became blind drunk.

The people lived in a world that was spiritually alive, and they often saw and spoke with spirits that Everett was unable to perceive. Sometimes spirits took the form of jaguars or trees. Sometimes they spoke through a person in a trance. Sometimes they provided the people with guidance or warnings. Sometimes they killed people. Many folks wore necklaces to protect themselves from evil spirits.

The natives spoke to their children like equals; “baby talk” was unknown. Parents were not paranoid protectionists — kids were free to burn themselves in the fire, or cut themselves with sharp knives, in the pursuit of higher learning. There was no spanking, and children were never given orders — nor were adults. Pirahã teens were not confused, insecure, and depressed. They naturally conformed to the ways of the community. They were blessed to live in a stable sustainable society.

The Pirahã language had no numbers, or words to express quantities. They had no use for the knowledge of the whites, because their way of life worked just fine without it. After months of daily classes, none could count to ten, or calculate the sum of one plus one. Consequently, traders delighted in exploiting them, by underpaying them for jungle products.

Indigenous folks who lived with the Brazilians and their money economy were known as caboclos. Life in the culture of materialism infected them with madness. When prospectors found a section of streambed rich with gold, other caboclos did not hesitate to murder them and swipe the treasure. All that mattered was winning, by any means necessary.

They thought that the Pirahãs were lazy and stupid, because they had zero interest in pursuing wealth, or plundering their ecosystem. But the Pirahã had a time-proven way of life that worked very well — wild, free, and happy. They always had everything they needed, and life was more or less grand, hence the smiles and laughter. Might this have been humankind’s “normal” state in the good old days?

The caboclos were more sullen in nature. The demands of the money world were highly corrosive to their traditional culture, to the vitality of their ecosystem, and to their mental health. They were less secure, and had real reasons to worry about tomorrow, because their survival depended on an ever-changing external system that was beyond their control.

Everett was originally enlisted by the Summer Institute of Language to translate the New Testament into Pirahã. He was not supposed to preach or baptize. The SIL had great faith that the sacred words of the scriptures alone were all that was needed to illuminate the wicked souls of the heathens and inspire them to convert to the one true faith.

So, Everett spent much time at his desk, listening to recordings, thinking, taking notes. He was a linguist, not an anthropologist, and he was on a mission from God. “I had gone to the Pirahãs to tell them about Jesus…, to give them an opportunity to choose purpose over pointlessness, to choose life over death, to choose joy and faith over despair and fear, to choose heaven over hell.”

Everett’s heroic efforts were vexed by the fact that no other language on Earth bore the slightest resemblance to Pirahã. Learning it was devilishly difficult. The villagers only spoke their native tongue, so no translators were available to assist him. After years of struggle, he finally succeeded, and translated the Gospel of Mark. He read it to natives, and none saw the light. It had no effect. Only one item in the scriptures captured their complete attention: the decapitation of St. John.

Pirahã culture was focused entirely on the present. Their way of life was the same as it was 1,000 years ago, and would remain the same for the next 1,000 years. So, there was no reason for history, and fear of the future was silly. They lived in the here and now, and believed what they could see. An event was only real if a living person in the community had been an eyewitness to it. Thus, Everett’s stories about an ancient miracle worker named Jesus were purely meaningless.

One day, Everett gathered the folks together and delivered a testimonial. He had once been a hairy hippy, lost and confused, poisoning himself with drugs and booze. Then, his stepmother committed suicide, he saw the light, accepted Jesus, and his life became better. When the story was finished, the Pirahã all burst out laughing. “She killed herself? Ha ha ha. How stupid. Pirahãs don’t kill themselves.”

His perplexing objective was “to convince happy, satisfied people that they are lost and need Jesus as their personal savior.” Missionaries had been trying to convert the Pirahã for nearly 300 years, without saving a single soul. The villagers insisted that they had no desire to live like Americans, and they begged him to stop talking about Jesus.

By the late ‘80s, after ten years of failed efforts, Everett realized that he had become a closet atheist. “I would go so far as to suggest that the Pirahãs are happier, fitter, and better adjusted to their environment than any Christian or other religious person I have ever known.”

He remained in the closet for 20 years, in constant fear of being discovered. Finally, he confessed, and his family broke apart. Today he’s a professor in the US. He helped to create an official reservation for the Pirahã, so that they will forever be safe from greedy materialists (true?).

[Nic · Rating 2 out of 5]

I took issue with a few things. At first, I enjoyed Everett's descriptions of his time spent with the Piraha, a small, surviving band of indigenous Amazonians. There's no doubt that he spent an enormous amount of time studying the Piraha and their language. He shares many details I found interesting such as how they make their bows and arrows, their use of exocentric navigational orientation, and hum speech, to name a few. However, as I continued to read, I couldn't shake the niggling sense that he just wasn't connecting some of his own dots. For example, his insistent and repetitive mention (as if he's trying to convince himself?) that the Piraha have a peaceful and happy existence didn't mesh with some other observations. One night, Everett awakened to the drunken conversation of angry Piraha, who were plotting the murder of him and his family. On page 84 we have this statement. Aggression is observed from time to time, from mild to severe (Keren witnessed a gang rape of a young unmarried girl by most of the village men). But aggression is never condoned and it is very rare. Wait! What?!!! And then, it's dropped. Not one further mention of what his wife Keren saw. To me, that screams severe violence, which he just glossed over. Were the Piraha drunk at the time of the rape? He does make it clear that the Piraha have a drinking problem, to the point of extreme violence. He mentions, at one point, that the Piraha women douse their fires and run into the jungle to hide when their men are drinking. In fact, the village women go so far as to lie to Everett in order to coerce him into limiting the alcohol which outsiders give to the Piraha. Per Everett's testimony, I sense that the women are seriously frightened of their men when their men are drinking. Everett doesn't seem to make this connection. On page 88 Everett emphasizes the willingness of the Piraha to help each other. A Piraha will always defend or take the side of another Piraha over any non-Piraha, no matter how long he or she has known the latter...A father of one family will feed or care for another child, at least temporarily, if that child is abandoned, even for a day. Then, 4 pages later, Everett relays the story of a Piraha woman who is struggling through a breech birth, alone, on the beach. The woman calls out for help, in agony, yet the village completely ignores her. The next morning she is found dead on the beach. So, Piraha will help other Piraha unless they're a woman? On page 169 we have this story of a little boy who is upset that his grandmother will not let him have a Coca-Cola. The little boy was very angry with his grandmother. His dad looked at him and after a moment of silence offered a solution: "Let's go kill her, then," he said, with apparent sincerity. The little boy looked at his father, puzzled. Then he responded emotionally, "no, Dad. We can't kill her. She's my grandma."
"You don't want to kill her?"
"No! That's Grandma!"
"OK, well, then, I have to work." What if he would have said yes?! What then?!
Caboclo culture has impinged on the Pirahas almost daily for more than two hundred years. It is a macho culture, not unlike the cowboy culture I was raised in. 159 If there is one thing I know with certainty it is that machismo culture favors the men at the expense of women. Therefore, when Everett states this:But violence against anyone, children or adults, is unacceptable to the Pirahas. 104 or, this: The Pirahas seemed peaceful. I felt no aggression toward me or other outsiders, unlike in so many other new cultures I had entered over the years. And I saw no aggression internal to the group. Although, as in all societies there were exceptions to the rule, this is still my impression of the Pirahas after all these years. The peaceful people. 86 his contradictions leave me confused, which casts doubt, for me, on the clarity of his judgments. I need another perspective, preferably female, such as testimony from his wife, or the point of view of a female anthropologist. Is Everett blinded by male privilege?

I would have loved to have heard more of his wife Keren's perspective. His family is mentioned briefly, and, in almost every instance, in situations framed where his wife and children are in danger and sitting passively by, while Everett is rescuing them in a rather macho fashion. In the beginning of the book he mentions that his wife grew up in the Amazon, so I'm certain that she is also quite knowledgeable regarding indigenous people of the Amazon. I doubt she is the passive, quiet woman we barely see here. Here's a joke Everett makes about his wife, "Hey, Dan. Where is Keren?" the Pirahas asked.
"The boat she was on sank and sat on the bottom of the Maici. She drowned, I'm afraid." For about half a second the Pirahas all gawked at me. Then they broke out in laughter. 156 Wow! That's the only joke he can think of? I also found a few offhand remarks he made rather sexist and unprofessional.

At one point, when his wife is sick with malaria, and they are living in the city while she recuperates, he brings two Pirahas to the city so that he can continue to study their language. If he is sincere in his desire to preserve this indigenous culture, is he wise to uproot two of its members and expose them to this foreign city, just so that he can continue to study their language? Is this ethical? Passersby stared at these barefoot, bare-chested Indians. The Pirahas stared back. Xipoogi and Xahoabisi thought the clean, nice-smelling, and colorfully dressed Brazilian women were gorgeous. They wondered if these women might have sex with them. I replied that I seriously doubted it because they didn't know the Pirahas. 250

Two stars for lack of clarity and a rather unprofessional attitude.

[Elizabeth · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought this would have been better with less atheist proselytizing. Most of the study seems to have been conducted on male pirahã even though he alludes to the fact women speak differently. This seems to lead to the presentation of the male variant as standard. He also romanticizes the tribe to fit what he wants to see, painting them in as evidence driven atheists, which just misses the mark to me, based on his description of their spiritualism, and peaceful while glossing over incidents of gang rape and murder.

I solidly recommend the book based on part 1, which read as a nice white guy in the Amazon foibles take, but part 2 was too academic for me, and part 3 was pandering. Author should stick to linguistics and ditch the self-indulgent philosophical musings.

[Paul Ataua · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finally got around to this after years of telling myself I ought to read it. I mean this is about the tribe that seems to have a language that doesn’t exhibit Chomsky’s deep structures, and that threw the linguistics community into disarray. I was, however, fairly disappointed on the whole. I am not criticizing the work he has done or the conclusions he has come to professionally, but just felt this book was too shallow a document to satisfy my thirst for deeper knowledge of the Pirahã culture or language.

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Everett travels to the Amazon as a missionary, intent on learning the language of the Piraha ethnic group, translating the Bible into their language and converting them to Christianity. Instead he discovers they have an amazingly unusual, possibly unique language which only communicates about experiences that are either firsthand to the speaker or that he/she has heard firsthand from someone trusted. Everett realizes that these people have a peaceful happy culture and they don't need Christianity, loses his own faith, eventually divorces his wife and somehow in the midst of all this graduates Phd. in linguistics with multiple publications.
At least, that's how he tells it in this book. Dear Reader, I, for one, am a skeptic about several of his claims. First, Everett's faith never seems to be pivotal to his experience to begin with. Second, only by taking a thoroughly male participant observer perspective on the culture and language is he able to maintain his romantic view of the peaceful and harmonious, nearly Edenic nature of their life. A gang rape reported to him by his wife in which "nearly all the men in the village" take part is brushed off as an odd and possibly even non existent episode. The frequent incidents in which the men become violent and aggressive after obtaining alcohol from traders and the women and children flee the village to spend the night hiding in the forest is reported more as it inconveniences Everett and his family. He never discusses nor seems concerned about the possible traumatic effects such fear and threat of violence might evoke in the women and children. He reports that women are not allowed to speak about certain matters but never explores how such linguistic prohibitions might reflect sex roles in the culture. He claims the people have no cosmology or formal religious structure but describes men entering the village who act and are treated as if they are possessed by spirits and he describes being unable to see a spirit which all other members of the village point out standing across the river.
The linguistic observations interested me as did the stories about the family trying to integrate and live in a completely new culture. But, I think Everett is omitting a lot of material that does not fit the neat narrative he is trying to construct to "sell" his linguistic theories to a popular audience and while he claims to have lost his faith fairly early on in the experience, he conveniently "fears" to reveal this until his academic reputation is well enough established that he can dispense with financial support of missionary organizations. A great story with a very "naive" narrator, imo.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

2017 Reading Challenge category: 7. A book with an animal on the cover or in the title

Daniel Everett is a former missionary and current linguist who has spent a bunch of time with a native group called the Pirahã in Brazil. My opinion of this book jumped around a lot over time. Everett is clearly a gifted linguist, but aside from that, this was clearly a book written by someone who had the foresight to say yes to an interesting experience as opposed to someone who is an inherently interesting writer. At times, the book seems maybe to be a memoir, an argument for anthropologically centered linguistics, a discussion of Chomsky, a discussion of the loss of the author's faith, and a loosely related collection of anecdotes, and even though all of these are interesting in their own ways, it presented a problem for me that the author never chose a focus.

[Jeremy Keeshin · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Daniel Everett, a linguist and missionary, tells his story about going to live and study among the Piraha in the Amazon. It’s a great story and lots of fun to read. I’d say it’s especially fun considering the latter part of it is almost like a casual linguistics textbook but still very fascinating.

The book is part biography, part linguistics research, but also jumps into philosophy and trying to reconcile conflicting ideas on cultural values.

Everett starts off as an avid missionary, determined to go to live with the Piraha in the Amazon jungle and learn their language and translate the bible and try to convert them (as missionaries do). It was an especially tough task as no one had really been able to learn their language so far. Though he faces a bunch of hurdles, he is eventually able to learn the language and live among the people. However, he hits a wall when trying to convince them to convert, and he goes into the irreconcilable differences between cultures. Eventually he leaves his religion as well, and his life with the Piraha seems to have a lot to do with it.

But I don’t really feel like the book is about how living with the Piraha caused him to abandon his religion. That is a big part of the end, and certainly a consequence of much of the work. But the bulk of the text is devoted to really trying to understand their culture, which he does through the “immediacy of experience” principle.

The main idea is that the Piraha only talk about something that they have experienced first hand, or that someone else they know experienced first hand. They don’t write things down, and they don’t have a “creation myth” like many other cultures. They also have been stalwart in rejecting these new ideas. Much of the book chronicles how the Piraha are pretty happy with how things are going for them.

They have very different, and definitely tougher lives than living in the US. They live to a much younger age, have a real danger posed from jungle animals, and die of diseases that have routine cures in the US. However, despite all this, Everett ultimately concludes that they are “better fit” for their environment than many people living in more industrialized countries.

It is certainly easy to list of the things they don’t have: they don’t have advanced tools, they don’t have many material possessions, they don’t have the internet, they don’t have big houses, and the list goes on. However, I was very interested in what they do have — or things they don’t have that seems to be a positive.

Many of the outsiders (there haven’t been that many, though…) who have visited the Piraha have concluded that they are the happiest people on Earth. They don’t have depression. They don’t seem to have a lot of things that other people might think are required for a society or language.

When Everett translates many of the lines from Piraha to English, they are terse and simple. But they are also shed light into the very different ways there are of viewing the world.

Certainly an easy view to take of the Pirahas based on their language and culture is that it is more primitive: most of them couldn’t really learn to count, and they don’t have ways to talk about abstract ideas. However, Everett makes a convincing argument that what may be more important is the way that your skills, language, and culture are appropriate for your particular environment.

For example, he tells a story of taking a few Piraha to a Brazilian city, and they are quite confused. They don’t know how to cross the street and are pretty freaked out by cars. They are walking in a single-file line even when it is not necessary, because that is how you would walk in the jungle. They ask immediately, “which way is the river?” because they normally use the river to tell directionality rather than the relative left/right. From this short story it seems the Piraha cannot really handle city life.

But much of Everett’s story shows the converse is also true. Everett, an American linguistics and anthropology researcher is not very fit to live in the jungle. He actions often cause mocking from other Piraha, whether it is at the poor way that he hunts or carries objects or speaks their language or identifies an animal threat. He tells story of his stupidity to identify a massive anaconda, a caiman, and to identify malaria when he thought it was something else. He had many near-death experiences for himself and his family since he was not quite primed for jungle living.

“Why are you eating leaves?” he asked. “Don’t you have any meat?”
My Piraha friend looked at me, then at the leaves, then back at me. “Pirahas don’t eat leaves,” he informed me. “This is why you don’t speak our language well. We Pirahas speak our language well and we don’t eat leaves.” (209)
I think this is a key and quite fun quote in the book. A theme that runs throughout the book is the idea of the inexplicable ties between language and culture, and that you can’t understand one without the other. Initially, it seems to the reader and to Everett himself that him wanting to eat a salad is completely separate from the fact that he doesn’t quite get the language yet. But as he goes on to discover, speaking the language is living the language. Languages have a vocabulary that goes with their culture, and as an American he doesn’t really “grok” some of the big ideas. As an example, a Piraha wouldn’t have a word for internet or television. These just aren’t things they have. But that means they would miss out on American English if they had no concept of the internet or television. They could parse the sentences but they wouldn’t get the references without them. Similarly, Dan can’t get the references — he’s not part of the in-crowd — if his behavior is so different than the Piraha. And that is why the salad he is eating is symbolic of his poor ability at the language. To speak the language well he must understand the culture and context for the Piraha, and there is no reason they would eat a salad.

In the book Everett also explains that the Piraha speak on several different language channels, which is pretty different than English. There is the normal speech, the hum speech, the whistle speech, the yell speech, and the musical speech. The channels all serve different purposes. That seems pretty unique.

He also spends quite a lot of time near the end talking about the lack of recursion in the Piraha language. Recursion is when something is self-referential. In many languages, including English, it is the idea that you can have sentences within sentences or phrases within phrases to build up arbitrarily large sentences. Piraha doesn’t have this. Chomsky seems to posit that the inclusion of recursion is a must-have for a language and something that separates human languages from other forms of communication. Piraha has recursive ideas that flow through stories, but not through sentences. Most of transcribed stories read in a very terse and repetitive way when translated. I found them pretty hard to understand.

The title of the book is Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, and this references some popular and useful advice dispensed to Everett while living in the Piraha. “Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes” means a few things: It means it first in the literal way, that you should be careful of sleeping too soundly because there are dangerous animals like snakes. It also seems to be used in the metaphorical way to mean something closer to “good night.” Seems like a fun way to say good night.

Overall, I’d recommend the book. My main takeaways were about several core ideas: the immediacy of experience principle, how the culture and language are connected, and that there’s not necessarily a “right” way of doing things, just one we are more used to.

I think if you put the pieces together about the immediacy of experience principle, the fact that they don’t have words for abstraction or numbers or ways to write and talk about things that happened in the past, you get a culture very focused on living in the present. This seems to be deeply connected to the happiness of the Piraha people and seems to be a good lesson to takeaway. It is true that they don’t have most of the luxuries of 21st century American life, but they do have other things. They seem to very very friendly, very peaceful, very happy, they dance, smile and laugh a lot, and like the way they do things. You know, there are a lot of people in the US and elsewhere who want those things too.

[Marcus · Rating 5 out of 5]

As anyone who has had a conversation with me over the last week can attest to, I think this book, and especially the parts about the culture of the Piraha tribe in the Amazon rainforest is fascinating. The Piraha have frequent contact with neighboring tribes and Brazilians, traders, anthropologists, linguists on a regular basis, yet they are isolationists and somehow seem to avoid being contaminated by any hint of consumerism, ambition or outside culture in any sense. They are content with their way of life and actively resist any attempt to change it.

The defining value of their culture is that the Piraha rarely, if ever speak of, think about, or make plans beyond a couple days out, and they don't reference the past outside of the living memory of their tribe, usually preferring to speak of much more immediate events. They have embraced the idea of mindfulness and living in the moment without the need for gurus, meditation or any type of conscious effort, other than their active distaste for outside culture.

How's it working out for them? Well they're not exactly growing in size and they basically only survive because the Brazilian government protects their land, but apart from those minor concerns, they are quite happy. So much that, based on the frequency of smiling and laughter among the Piraha, some psychologists believe they are among the happiest people in the world.

The Piraha's focus on the present has other interesting effects on their culture and language. They don't have a counting system, they don't have creation myths since they aren't interested in stories of things that happened more than two eyewitnesses removed from themselves, they maintain only a bare minimum of physical possessions and they seem to eschew the idea of accumulating even items such as tools and food they'll inevitably need to use later.

Another of their unusual traits is that, because of their focus on immediacy, the Piraha do not use recursion in their sentences. To me this observation is compelling, but hardly the most gripping aspect of their culture. For linguists like Everett, this disputed fact could cause the next Kuhn-eque scientific revolution in the field of linguistics. Noam Chomsky and his adherents especially have a lot at stake since Chomsky's entire theory of human language rests on the idea of recursion.

I'm not going to comment on the linguistic debate other than to say that the more controversial and polemical it is, the more entertaining it is. At the time this book was written, it was at the conflict level of reality TV. Everett repeatedly takes stabs at Chomsky and Steven Pinker and their theories and calls them out on their attempts to rebuff him. Everett is calling for a full rewrite of the rules of linguistics and in doing so, threatening a lot of careers and legacies. At the center of this massive wrangle is a small group of people for whom the 'crooked heads,' as they call foreigners, and their petty bickering are the furthest thing possible from their world of enjoying themselves and whatever they happen to be doing at any given time.

The writing is decent, but stylistically it sometimes feels too casual, and the organization could stand a bit of improvement (much like this review!) but Don't Sleep, There are Snakes sure is a fun and profound read.

[akacya ❦]

2025 reads: 8/300

this book details the author’s time with the pirahã people, including aspects of their unique language. when everett first arrived, his goal as a christian missionary was to translate the new testament into the pirahã language and convert them to christianity. what he found instead was a language that defied many of the “rules” of language we thought were universal. this book was recommended to me by a friend, and i’m so grateful for that because it would not have been on my radar otherwise. i have an interest in linguistics, and this taught me so much about the field. i recommend it to anyone else with a similar interest!

[Clarissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book seems like three separate books rolled into one. I'm not sure that they all belonged in one volume. And parts of all three are mixed together with no discernible method of ordering them.

The first of the three books is a collection of stories from the author's experiences living with the Pirahas, an Amazonian tribe still largely untouched by the modern world. Most of these stories were good; some were boring. If he had stopped here, I would have given him 4 or 5 stars. This was the book I thought I was getting.

The second of the three books is a highly technical, scholarly paper on linguistics. I admit I got lost in his descriptions of the correlation between grammar and culture. I was bored by the long arguments with (what is apparently) commonly held beliefs among scholars about language, syntax and grammar. Perhaps if I were a linguist, I would have enjoyed it more. This belonged (and probably is already) in something with a title like Journal of Linguistic Research.

The third section is about the author's loss of faith and "deconversion" (the author's term) from Christianity. He places most of the blame for his loss of faith on his development of an understanding for the Piraha society which apparently has no need or desire for God or Christianity. If they don't need it, he seems to say, then Christianity can't be a universal truth. I, for one, don't know why he had to go to the jungles of Brazil to find people who think they don't need a Savior.

[Irene · Rating 5 out of 5]

The fact that Everett went there to convert the Pirahã to Christianity but ended up losing his own faith was an impressive plot twist. The Pirahã have managed, through sheer force of being content with their own lives, to reject Western culture and capitalism. You can't sell any Abrahamic religion without the guilt, the shame, the insecurities, and the economic system, so they are immune. I'm sure the fact that they won't believe second hand stories also helps, but the Pirahã plainly don't have any use for Western religion or technology.

The Pirahã see the world in a very different way, and their language reflects it. Some concepts are fundamental to the way a society functions, and numbers is definitely one you need if you expect to have an Economy. Their idea of a family unit is nowhere near as rigid as Westerners are used to, and neither is their relationship to sexuality or child rearing. They can often come across as extremely callous, and that's because they are. Because living in the jungle is hard, and there are, indeed, snakes, and malaria, and dying in childbirth is a common occurrence. Their life expectancy is not very long compared to the average Westerner. And while they seem fascinated by how long Westerners live, they also have made absolutely no attempt to find out how that's accomplished, because they're happy as they are. I don't think many people living with a smartphone in their pocket would, given the choice, give up their lives, move to the jungle and spend all day hunting, gathering and making sure they're not killed by a wild animal. But then again, the Pirahã don't even have a concept of worry. They don't have anxiety or the expectation to keep up with the Kardashians. We keep being told that the happiest people in the world live in Finland, Denmark and other rich nordic countries. I have my doubts.

I had already read Everett's How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention, and in this book he reiterates his arguments against Chomsky's idea of recursion being intrinsic to language and grammar having a genetic component. I still agree with Everett.

What Everett has accomplished in this book is an amazing feat of anthropology. While the rest of the world is slowly being assimilated into a unified, amorphous culture, the Pirahã are going to continue to do their thing.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most interesting books I've read in recent memory. The author (a former-Christian-missionary-turned-linguist) gives an account of his time spent among the Piraha people of the Amazon and what he learned about their culture and language during his years trying to convert them to Christianity and translate the Bible into their language, Piraha.

The first section of the book describes the daily trials of living in the Amazon, how the Pirahas live, what they do, and how they interact with each other. This section reads like an adventure/travel memoir, with descriptions of several harrowing events and bizarre customs (from a Westerner's point of view). This section kept me up until 3 am because it was so hard to put down.

The second section is about the Piraha language. Even though the author, Everett, is a linguist and even though he makes reference to linguistic concepts throughout this section, he's writing for a general audience, so anyone should be able to follow this section just fine. His writing style is refreshingly free from jargon and academic buzz words, and his explanatory style is clear and easy to follow. That being said, this section is rich and fascinating for linguists who may have heard of the controversy surrounding recursion in Piraha.

The third section, which unfortunately only makes up a small fraction of the book, is about Everett's re-evaluation, and ultimately rejection, of his faith in god and other supernatural ideas. Part of the impetus for this rejection was his observation that no one had been successful in converting the Pirahas for over two centuries, despite a slew of missionaries and despite Everett's own painstaking work in translating the New Testament into Piraha and having many discussions with the Pirahas about Jesus. Even though the Pirahas understood the message Everett was selling, none of them ever expressed the slightest interest in Christianity. Everett's theory is that someone has to feel like they are missing something in their life before they see a need for a belief system and the "redemption" it promises (in other words, you have to feel a need to be "saved" before you will agree to be "saved"). The Pirahas don't have this gap in their lives. They are a happy, productive, well-balanced people who live a life free from anxiety, depression, obsession with sin and punishment, and other Western constructs that one could argue have done more harm than good in our society. The Piraha world view isn't compatible with the need for "saving," because they do not have a "fall from grace" mentality -- they accept who they are and manage to live content lives despite their shortcomings. Everett emphasizes that this is not because they are primitive or simple-minded; on the contrary, his personal impression was that Pirahas live much more responsibly and healthily than many Christian Westerners do, and he maintains that they have a wisdom that we lack, akin to a Zen-like state of acceptance and recognition that the current moment is all we have. Everett comes to respect this world view so much that he begins to analyze exactly why he felt he needed Christianity in the first place, and he eventually reaches the conclusion that any kind of subjective belief system that makes judgmental and far-reaching claims about the universe without any evidence to back it up is unnecessary and often harmful.

I would have liked to have read more about this part of the author's life, but I can understand why he didn't want the whole book to be about his loss of faith -- because this book is really about the Pirahas, not him. And even though this section may be the most striking to many readers, it really does only make up 5-10% of the book's content. And I should also stress that this section is not an angry rant against faith -- quite the opposite. He writes very calmly, pensively, and reasonably on these issues, and with the same perceptiveness and insight with which he approached the rest of the book.

This book is controversial and interesting in several ways, whether you're a linguist or not, religious or not. You'll certainly find food for thought here, no matter where you're coming from.

[Gabriel Lando · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been thinking about the Pirahã language for quite a while. This book, written by the only non-Pirahã person in the world that is fluent in the language, is invaluable: The discovery that Pirahã uses exocentric communication, has basically no consonant value, has such a richness of registers and has the inclusion of proximity degree within its agglutinative verbs... All so well described. It's amazing to read this man's 30 year journey into this completely new, untranslatable universe, and the final remark that the language appears to be an evidence against Chomsky's (precarious) "hypothesis". The book is fascinating.

However, there are conflicts. As pointed by other reviewers, classifying a people as "peaceful" does not usually allow them to gang-rape women and kill old people and babies by starvation and abandonment. This is rather inconsistent. I understand, however, that these practices are common among many Indians in Brazil, the US and Mexico, but "peaceful" and "harmless" are not good classifiers. The author seems to be willing to protect the Pirahã people from any kind of criticism - which is OK, I think, but quite artificial.

Also, some points in the book annoy me (that's why the 4-star rating). First, the principle of immediacy of experience seems unscientific, impossible to test and simply bullshit. I think creating useless hypotheses might be common for people that work with non-mathematical, anthropological linguistics, but it's far cry from the hard science I'm used to read and make. It's just un-falsifiable and, thus, useless. Secondly, the author seems to have a hard time differentiating between objective reality and abstract, human ideas. A rock is not a human idea. A rock or a bird exist whether of not you are alive or dead. The book is absolutely infested with non-scientific views about "everything being in your head", which demonstrates a lack of epistemological knowledge on behalf of the author and sound like science denial for me. Physics and linguistics are, for instance, not equivalent: German dies without humans, but electrons don't. I have had a hard time trying to explain this to many people, so I understand the confusion.

Regarding the claim that Pirahã is non-recursive, I find an absolute lack of respect that linguists all around the world ague against Everett without even speaking Pirahã themselves. This last study that showed that Pirahã lacked an indication of recursivity, but also lacked any evidence of non-recursivity, is ridiculous. Linguistics needs to be done in a more mathematical way in order to avoid such biased opinions being published. I will only accept criticism to Everett's work on this topic by someone who is also fluent in Pirahã, otherwise it's just empty words. Chomsky's "hypothesis" (not even hypothesis, since it's untestable) has been put to the test against other languages, such as Warlpiri, and has failed - everybody knows that. The hypothesis itself is absolutely ridiculous. It's time people move on instead of redefining what recursive means!

Last note: 80% of this book concerns grammar. If you just want to read a story about a man who lived with the Amazonian Pirahã, forget it: you'll hate it. Also, the part about the author losing his faith is only 15 pages long and it's probably the worst chapter in the whole book. This book is REALLY about language, so if you find this boring, don't read it.

[Jafar · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an eye-opener this book is for us civilized folks whose only imaginable way of life is the Western bourgeois life. Daniel Everett lived on and off for seven years among a small tribe in the Brazilian Amazon named Pirahã. His goal was to convert them into Christianity. Instead, what he found in the jungle and what he learned from the the Piraha ended up challenging everything he believed in.

The first section of the book, which is about the way the Pirahã live their lives, is absolutely amazing. As I was reading that section, I kept thinking to myself about all the things that they do much better than us civilized types. The second section is about the Pirahã language. Here, Everett turns more academic. He seems to have a beef with Noam Chomsky. He spends too much time expounding his claim that the Pirahã language doesn't have recursion. Apparently, that's a big deal in linguistics.

Everett wanted to live among the Piraha so that he can translate the Bible into their language. The conceit is too familiar and I've seen it in Muslims too. How could anyone hear the Bible (or the Quran) and not convert to Christianity (or Islam)? – the thinking goes. The Pirahã's primitive insistence on first-hand experience and not believing in any just-so stories became a factor in Everett losing his religion. He sees the futility of his endeavor:

On our furlough, I thought again on the challenges of the missionary: to convince a happy, satisfied people that they are lost and need Jesus as their personal savior. My evangelism professor at Biola University, Dr. Curtis Mitchell, used to say, "You've gotta get 'em lost before you get 'em saved." If people don't perceive a serious lack of some sort in their lives, they are less likely to embrace new beliefs, especially about God and salvation.

The chapter about how the Pirahã reacted to Everett's missionary efforts is hilarious. When he gave them tapes of the Bible to listen to on a wind-up recorder, they kept rewinding the tape and listening to the part where John was getting beheaded. They thought it was hilarious. When Everett decides to give them a personal "testimony" and tells them about how Jesus helped him cope with the suicide of his mother-in-law, the Pirahã burst laughing at the stupidity of someone committing suicide. And my favorite:

The morning after one evening's "show" an older Pirahã man, Kaaxaóoi, came to work with me on the language. As we were working, he startled me by suddenly saying, "The women are afraid of Jesus. We do not want him."
"Why not?" I asked, wondering what had triggered his declaration.
"Because last night he came to our village and tried to have sex with our women. He chased them around the village, trying to stick his large penis into them."
Kaaxaóoi proceeded to show me with his two hands held far apart how long Jesus's penis was – a good three feet.

[Sineala · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was doing undergraduate and graduate work in linguistics, I always felt deeply weird about the Summer Institute of Linguistics. We owe a lot of language documentation to them -- because in a lot of cases, especially these days, they're the ones out there actually doing the fieldwork -- and, back before Unicode was a thing, the SIL's International Phonetic Alphabet fonts were the only game in town. So if you were into phonetics or phonology, which I was, you basically had to accept that here you were, being helped out by missionaries.

Somehow I actually missed hearing about Pirahã in school, but I was curious when it started to turn up in pop-linguistics articles as "a language with no numbers," and when I saw that Everett had written a book, I decided I should probably read it eventually, and, well, this turns out to be the story of a linguist/missionary who goes to the Amazon, documents a language, and manages to lose both his faith in God and also any belief in Chomsky's Universal Grammar, although it's not clear how much of that he had to start with.

They've got evidentiality (apparently, not that this was spelled out well) and a consonant inventory that rivals Hawaiian in brevity. Things Pirahã lacks: colors, numbers, quantifiers, coordination and recursion. If you are any kind of linguist, the last item on that list should set off alarm bells, but he swears it's true, which is, you know, a big problem if you believe in UG. (One of the chapters is devoted to a takedown of UG, yes.) I just... wow. No recursion. What the hell.

The book itself is a little weirdly organized for a pop-linguistics book, and it bounces back and forth between his spiritual journey (the Pirahã don't care about Jesus because Everett never met him personally, basically, and then Everett appears to start to lose faith himself) and his discussion of life and language-learning. I think it has almost too much data for pop-linguistics, because if you're not a linguist surely you're not going to care, say, about the absence of quantifiers. But then if you are a linguist there's not enough data, really, because he pretty much only gives glosses at sentence level, and he mentions that he got famous with a squib in LI (which was apparently interesting enough that he got Peter Ladefoged himself to come meet the Pirahã and do some phonetics) but I am very confused about which part of this was supposed to be wildly interesting, and I do actually know something about phonetics. So, uh, bad explaining there. But I have read linguistics articles that are a lot worse, so on the scale of linguistics, this guy is actually a reasonably competent writer, although this does not match mainstream standards in any way.

Overall, it's a little disjointed but I'm glad I finally got a chance to read it.

[عبد الله القصير · Rating 4 out of 5]

لا تنم فهناك ثعابين من حولك، قصة منصر أمريكي عاش ودرس لغة البيراها ، أحد القبائل الأمازونية ، لأكثر من ثلاثين سنة تعلم فيها لغة هذه القبيلة الغريبة والتي لا تنتمي حسب كلامه إلى أي مجموعة لغوية أخرى في العالم. هذه القبيلة طورت لغة وثقافة لا تحتوي على كلمات تدل على أرقام أو ألوان كواحد واثنين وثلاثة أو أخضر وأحمر وأسود أو غيرها، ولكن يستعملون جمل مركبة للدلالة على هذه المعاني. الغريب حقا أنهم لم يستعملوا الأرقام ولم يطوروا كلمات دقيقة لتعريف الكميات فهم على كلام المؤلف لا يقولون سمكة وسمكتين أو ثلاث سمكات مثلا، ولكن يقولون سمكة ومجموعة من السمكات أو شخص ومجموعة من الأشخاص. يقول المؤلف أنه حاول هو وزوجته وبناته تعليم البيراها العد من واحد إلى تسعة لمدة ستة شهور ولكن بلا نتيجة، لم يستطيعوا تعلم الأرقام ولم يستطيعوا معرفة الحاجة لها! أيضا هذه القبيلة لا تستخدم الاتجاهات مثل اليمين أو الشمال في تحديد الاتجاهات ولكن يستخدمون معرفات طبيعية خارجية كالشجر والنهر وغيرها، لذا يقول أنهم عندما يذهبون معه لقرى غير قراهم أول ما يسألونه هو أين هم النهر، لكي يستطيعوا معرفة موضعهم في هذا المكان.
الكتاب ملئ بقصص ممتعه للمؤلف مع هذه القبيلة، عددهم أقل من ألف نسمة ولا يملكون أي معرفة دينية و لاعندهم أي عبادات ولكنهم يؤمنون بأرواح تسكن الغابة قد تضرهم أو تنفعهم.
المؤلف يقول أنه جاء لهذه القبيلة أساسا لمتعلم لغتهم لكي يستطيع ترجمة الإنجيل لهذه اللغة لكي يستطيعون قراءته لعلهم يتنصرون، ولكنهم لم يهتموا كثيرا بما يقوله لهم المنصر ولا بالإنجيل لينتهي الحال بالمؤلف نفسه إلى الإلحاد!

[Rebecca Adelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was by far my most fascinating read this year. I really loved it. Not sure if I recommend it though.

Let me explain.

This book is the story of Daniel Everett’s life among the Piraha people in the Amazon and his linguistic discoveries there. I listened to the audiobook, read by the author, which greatly heightened my intrigue because they were copious amounts of Piraha and Portuguese thrown in. I enjoyed this immensely — there’s nothing like hearing languages to make you realize how different they are.

Speaking of which, the Piraha language is a class all its own. There are only eleven phonemes (sounds). There are no numbers, no color words not derived from nature, and no way to talk about events that do not have a personal eyewitness. Sixteen suffixes create a ton of possible verb conjugations, but there are no plurals for nouns. There appears to be no clauses added into sentences. This defies most previous theories of language structure. I find this incredibly fascinating, but linguistics is a very niche interest — so strike one against recommending it.

Strike two: the flow of the book wasn’t super smooth. He’d tell the story of how his wife nearly died, go in detail about Piraha phonetics, question whether languages even need grammar, and discuss recursion, without too much connection. The book was interesting, but I finished the book and wasn’t sure whether it was an autobiography, linguistic essay, or memoir.

The last question was his worldview. When Everett moved to the Amazon, he was a missionary with SIL; but after thirty years of working with the Piraha, their disinterest in Jesus and complete dismissal of the Gospel caused him to question his own faith. He ended up abandoning Christianity completely and is now an atheist. He didn’t talk aggressively against Christianity, but his comments about faith and religion in general were warped, and his belief in evolution came through several times. His language use also displayed his turn against goodness and truth — there were some swear words and a lot of general unnecessary crudeness.

I also am not versed enough in linguistics to know whether all his claims and theories are actually possible, but they were super fun to think about.

Three strikes usually equals out, but this one’s in for me. However, read this book at your own risk. You may find it incredibly boring.

[Tetiana Dzhyhar · Rating 5 out of 5]

хороша реальна іcторія, коли замість добровільно примусового нав'язування свого релігійного досвіду чувак отримав інсайт, що не все так однозначно, і повернув своє життя на 180 градусів.
окрім оцього моменту нам згодилось би звернути увагу на багато інших з життя піраха, вони абсолютно унікальні в своїх способах світосприйняття та існування, вау.
що приємно - книга не зійшла на пси до кінця як це часто буває з нонфікшеном, коли все найцікавіше приберегли на початок, щоб заінтригувати читача, а потім дві третіх книги складається з наповнення заради наповнення. тут не так! навіть лінгвістичні подробиці, від яких я абсолютно далека, виявились пізнавальними та не нудними.