Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle in Around the World in 80 Books

Mar 29, 2018 Andrea rated it liked it

Shelves: popular-science, south-america

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. 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 Christianit 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.
...more

7 likes · Like · see review