Don't Sleep There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle

by Daniel L. Everett

The jungle and the river are the Pirahãs’ office, their workshop, their atelier, and their

was soaking in perspiration and had already drained one of my canteens. The Pirahãs’ bodies were completely dry. They had drunk nothing at all.

First, we tend to project the values and mechanisms of our own societies and ways of doing things onto other societies. Since it is difficult for us to imagine our own society without leaders of one sort or another, especially people with the power to enforce societal rules, perhaps

it is also difficult for us to imagine that there are old and well-functioning societies without such rules. Second, the views of many Westerners are heavily influenced by Hollywood and other fictional depictions of these societies. Movies rarely portray Indian societies without the dynamic personalities of chiefs.

Such a different culture.

One reason for the idea that all tribes have chiefs is the universal fact that societies entail control—and centralized control is easier for most people to understand than the kind of diffuse control and power that is found in many American

Indian communities. Émile Durkheim, the French pioneer of sociology straddling the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wrote convincingly that coercion is fundamental to the constitution

The principal forms I have observed are ostracism and spirits. If someone’s behavior

but I do know that he was the first, but not the last, Pirahã I saw who had been ostracized.

We send our children to their rooms for bad behaviour.

is to exclude someone from food sharing for a while.

Eventually numerous published experiments were conducted by me and a series of psychologists that demonstrated conclusively that the Pirahãs have no numbers at all and no counting in any form.

No need for them.

Not one Pirahã learned to count to ten in eight months. None learned to add 3 + 1 or even 1 + 1 (if regularly writing or saying the numeral 2 in answer to the latter is evidence of learning). Only occasionally

In classes, we were never able to train a Pirahã to draw a straight line without serious “coaching,” and they were never able to repeat the feat in subsequent trials without more

no simple color words, that is, no terms for color that were not composed of other words. I had originally simply

Then I found out that Pirahã also lacks another category of words that many linguists believe to be universal,

namely, quantifiers like all, each, every, and so on.

gauge single-shot shotgun that I had bought him the year before. He turned and fired with this pathetically small weapon and some of the buckshot went into the panther’s eye. The panther fell to the side and started to get up. Since the shotgun didn’t eject shells automatically, Kaaboogí quickly knocked the spent shell out

This is because our stories include unstated assumptions about the world that are made by our culture.

Dreams are not fiction to the Pirahãs. You see one way awake and

another way while asleep, but both ways of seeing are real experiences. I also

recalled that the Pirahãs don’t store food, they don’t plan more than one day at a time, they don’t talk

about the distant future or the distant past—they seem to focus on now, on their immediate experience.

No one had ever collected or heard of a creation myth, a traditional story, a fictional tale, or in fact any narrative that went beyond the immediate experience of the speaker or someone who had seen the event and reported it to the speaker.

there must be an eyewitness alive at the time of the telling.

This is the main reason that no missionary for nearly three hundred years has had any impact on the Pirahãs’ religion.

So maybe he should have given up trying to convert them.

While the Pirahãs are very tolerant and peaceful to one another, they can be violent in keeping others out of their land.

Apurinãs had believed that a lifetime among another people could overcome the differences in culture and society that separated them from this other people. They learned the deadly lesson that these barriers are nearly impossible to overcome, in spite of appearances over time—just as residents of the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda,

Ostracization is an extreme form of punishment in the Amazon, where social cooperation is necessary for protection, for help in hunting and gathering food, and so on.

Looking back now, I wonder if we were aware of the possible impact of all those goods on the Pirahãs.

we also were able to stop at small settlements along the way and get to know the Brazilians who lived near the Pirahãs. Many of these people went regularly to the Pirahãs to trade with them. As I got to know these people, I learned one thing that disturbed me: many of them were interested in the

Pirahãs’ land. Often they asked why the Pirahãs should be given this prime hunting and fishing ground. “Mas, Seu Daniel, porque aqueles bichinhos têm direito à toda aquela terra bonita e os civilizados não?” (But, Mr. Daniel, why do those little creatures have rights to all the beautiful land but civilized people do not?) This kind of talk

worried me because I could easily imagine some of these folks moving onto the Pirahãs’ land and trying to take bits or even large sections away from them. I knew I should help the Pirahãs get a legally recog...

The Pirahãs now had an officially identified reservation. The long bureaucratic process of getting a reservation approved for them could

He did a good thing.

For example, Americans and caboclos see the human body differently. Caboclos are more uniformly judgmental about laziness and being overweight than Americans. In general, caboclos believe that working hard is a sign of health, good character,

and stewardship of God’s blessings. If you are healthy enough to work, God must be watching out for you. Fat means corruption to most caboclos. Overweight people are lazy idlers who take more than they need for themselves. Hence, even among fairly well-off caboclos (and there are a few), there is a strong work ethic. It is common

That is a code of the Amazon. You help the person in need today, because you may be the person in need tomorrow. I

people in the Western economy, they want to get ahead. They feel their poverty desperately. The Pirahãs, on the other hand, though they have less materially than the caboclos, do not have a concept of “poor” and they are satisfied with their material lives. Caboclo interest in money was never more evident to me than during

Not all people are interested in acquiring material possessions even in our society.

Hum speech is used to disguise either what one is saying or one’s identity. It does this because even for a native Pirahã who is not paying close attention, it is hard to follow. And hum speech is conducted at very low volume. So

Yell speech is commonly used on rainy days when the rain and thunder are loud. It is used to communicate with Pirahã at long distances.

heard the men whistling to one another. They were

This would turn my explanation on its head and would mean that it is the language that affects the culture, rather

than the culture that affects language in this case. But

Also, they seem to use fewer prosodic channels (so they do

not have channels such as hum speech and yell speech alongside whistle speech) than Pirahã and use them less frequently.

We must understand a word’s cultural relevance and use. We must understand its sound structure. And we must understand

how the word is used in context, in specific sentences and stories. Most linguists agree on these three levels of understanding the word.

has taught us that not only can the meaning of individual words be the result of culture, such as the closely related wo...

Yes. Lost in translation.

the very sounds of the words, whether they are whistled, hummed, and so on, can themselves be determined by culture—and this latter lesson, which is abundantly illustrated in other languages, has ...

culture and experience restrict our “universe of discourse,” the things that we talk about.

By and large, Pirahãs do not import foreign thoughts, philosophies, or technology.

Rather, their language and grammar perfectly fit their esoteric culture. And if this is on the right track, we have begun to see the need for a novel and fresh approach to the understanding of human grammar.