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

by Daniel L. Everett

As a scientist, objectivity is one of my most deeply held values. If we could just try harder, I once thought, surely we could each see the world as others see it and learn to respect one another’s views more readily. But as I learned from the Pirahãs, our expectations, our culture, and our experiences can render even perceptions of the environment nearly incommensurable cross- culturally.

:)

These flies, mutucas, suck your blood and leave you with intense itching at the point of their bite, along with respectable welts if your skin is very sensitive, as mine is. You must not hate the mutucas, though, nor even the various types of horseflies that bite and welt the tender skin of your inner thigh, your outer ear, your cheeks, and your ass. You must not hate them even when you notice their deviousness—always flying to shaded parts of the body—exactly those parts you are not paying any attention to. Why not hate them? Because the frustration will kill you faster than the bug bites.

What does this mean?

How do they confirm death though?

Children are just human beings in Pirahã society, as worthy of respect as any fully grown human adult. They are not seen as in need of coddling or special protections. They are treated fairly and allowance is made for their size and relative physical weakness, but by and large they are not considered qualitatively different from adults. This can lead to scenes that to Western eyes can seem strange or even harsh. Since I find myself predisposed to agree with much of the Pirahãs’ view of parenting, I often don’t even notice child-rearing behavior that other outsiders find shocking.

As an example, I recall how a colleague of mine was surprised by the adult treatment of Pirahã children. Peter Gordon, a psychologist at Columbia University, and I were in a Pirahã village together in 1990 interviewing a man about the spirit world. While we were talking we had set up a video camera to record our interactions with the people. That evening as we watched bits of the video, we noticed that a toddler about two years old was sitting in the hut behind the man we were interviewing. The child was playing with a sharp kitchen knife, about nine inches in length. He was swinging the knife blade around him, often coming close to his eyes, his chest, his arm, and other body parts one would not like to slice off or perforate. What really got our attention, though, was that when he dropped the knife, his mother—talking to someone else—reached backward nonchalantly without interrupting her conversation, picked up the knife, and handed it back to the toddler. No one told him not to cut himself or hurt himself with the knife. And he didn’t. But I have seen other Pirahã children cut themselves severely with knives. Many times Keren or I had to put sulfa powder on cuts to reduce the chances of infection. Any baby who cuts, burns, or otherwise hurts itself gets scolded (and cared for too). And a mother will often answer a baby’s cry of pain in such circumstances with a growl of disgust, a low guttural “Ummm!” She might pick it up by an arm and angrily (but not violently) set it...

But there is more to it than wanting children to become autonomous adults. The Pirahãs have an undercurrent of Darwinism running through their parenting philosophy. This style of parenting has the result of producing very tough and resilient adults who do not believe that anyone owes them anything. Citizens of the Pirahã nation know that each day’s survival depends on their individual skills and hardiness. When a Pirahã woman gives birth, she may lie down in the shade near her field or wherever she happens to be and go into labor, very often by herself. In the dry season, when there are beaches along the Maici, the most common form of childbirth is for the woman to go alone, occasionally with a female relative, into the river up to her waist, then squat down and give birth, so that the baby is born directly into the river. This is cleaner and healthier, in their opinion, for the baby and the mother. Occasionally, women’s mothers or sisters accompany them. But if a woman has no female relatives in her village, she may be forced to give birth alone. Steve Sheldon told me about a woman giving birth alone on a beach. Something went wrong. A breech birth. The woman was in agony. “Hel...

The Pirahãs know death and dying when they see it. I understand this now.

The fact that Kóhoi, a strong man and a fearless hunter, would lie like that all day and allow his wife to whack him at will (three hours later I revisited them and they were in the same position) was clearly partly voluntary penance. But it was partly a culturally prescribed remedy. I have since seen other men endure the same treatment.

Why can't this be considered a ritual?

Eventually, I realized that this term referred to what I call experiential liminality, the act of just entering or leaving perception, that is, a being on the boundaries of experience. A flickering flame is a flame that repeatedly comes and goes out of experience or perception.

The word xibipíío therefore reinforced and gave a positive face to the pervasive Pirahã value I had been working on independently. That value seemed to be to limit most talk to what you had seen or heard from an eyewitness.

And the Pirahãs can traverse a bigí in their dreams. To the Pirahãs, dreams are a continuation of real and immediate experience. Perhaps these other beings travel in their dreams too.

I came eventually to understand that xaipípai is dreaming, but with a twist: it is classified as a real experience. You are an eyewitness to your dreams. 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.

Dreams do not violate xibipíío, as I was beginning to refer to the cultural value of talking mainly about immediately experienced subjects. In fact, they confirm it. By treating dreaming and being awake as conforming to immediacy of experience, the Pirahãs could deal with problems and issues that to us would involve an explicitly fictitious or religious world of beliefs and spirits in terms of their direct and immediate experience. If I dream about a spirit that can solve my problems and my dreaming is no different from my conscious observations, then this spirit is within the bounds of my immediate experience, my xibipíío.

In the meantime, I remembered other facts that seemed to support the value of immediate experience. For example, I 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.

In an English sentence like When you arrived, I had already eaten, the verb arrived is situated relative to the moment of speech—it precedes it. This type of tense is fully compatible with the immediacy of experience principle. But the verb had eaten is not defined relative to the moment of speech, but relative to arrived. It precedes an event that is itself located in time relative to the moment of speech. We could just as easily have said When you arrive tomorrow, I will have eaten, in which case eaten is still before your arrival, though you will arrive after the moment of speech, that is, after the time that we are talking. Therefore, by the immediacy of experience principle, the Pirahãs do not have tenses like this, the perfect tenses of our grammar school days.

As I started our motor and pointed the boat downriver, I began to think again, as I often did, about the character of these caboclos. I had learned from hardship that wherever you see a house along the Amazon or its tributaries, you had a haven. That family, one you had never met in your life, would come to your aid in time of need. They would let you stay with them. They would feed you. If need be they would paddle you out to the nearest help. They would give you their last possessions. That is a code of the Amazon. You help the person in need today, because you may be the person in need tomorrow. I have never witnessed a clearer example of the golden rule.

falsetto.

As I tried to make the best of my solitary confinement, I heard the men whistling to one another. They were saying, “I’ll go over there; you go that way,” and other such hunting talk. But clearly they were communicating. It was fascinating because it sounded so different from anything I had heard before. The whistles carried long and clear in the jungle. I could immediately see the importance and usefulness of this channel, which I guessed would also be much less likely to scare away game than the lower frequencies of the men’s normal voices.

This challenges modern theories of language because these don’t expect culture to enter into the sound structure.

They took it good-naturedly and sat still for all of these experiments, surprisingly enough. Once again, science was indebted to them.

The Pirahãs could no more tell me that than the average English speaker could tell me what to means in I want to go. Why isn’t it just I want go? Linguists have to figure this kind of thing out for themselves.

There are three of these in Pirahã: hearsay, observation, and deduction.

We often think that our values and ways of talking about our values are completely “natural,” but they are not. They are partially an accident of our birth into a particular culture and society.

“Where is the river?” They needed to know how to orient themselves in the world!

According to Sapir, our language affects how we perceive things.

Sapir even goes so far as to claim that our view of the world is constructed by our languages, and that there is no “real world” that we can actually perceive without the filter of language telling us what we are seeing and what it means.

The Sapir-Whorf view implies a symbiosis between language and thought. In the extreme version of this view (linguistic determinism), which virtually no one accepts, thought cannot escape the bounds of language. Speaking a particular language can give our thinking an immutable advantage or disadvantage, depending on the task and language involved.

A more widely accepted version is that while we can think “out of the language box,” we normally do not because we don’t even perceive how language affects the way we think.

Some linguists or cognitive scientists might even leap to the conclusion that an absence of a recursion could render a language deficient in some way. But this would not be correct.

Our attempts to study other human beings can be as culturally influenced as my attempt to get the Pirahãs to walk side by side with me in the city.

Had I taken the time to read about the Pirahãs before visiting them the first time, I would have learned that missionaries had been trying to convert them for over two hundred years. From the first record of contact with the Pirahãs and the Muras, a closely related people, in the eighteenth century, they had developed a reputation for “recalcitrance”—no Pirahãs are known to have “converted” at any period of their history.

Another edge to the Pirahãs’ challenge was my growing respect for them. There was so much about them that I admired. They were a sovereign people. And they were in effect telling me to peddle my goods elsewhere. They were telling me that my message had no purchase among them.

So, sometime in the late 1980s, I came to admit to myself alone that I no longer believed in any article of faith or in anything supernatural. I was a closet atheist.

It must be something like coming out as gay to unsuspecting close friends and family.

They give us an opportunity to consider what a life without absolutes, like righteousness or holiness and sin, could be like.

But they live most of their lives outside these concerns because they have independently discovered the usefulness of living one day at a time. The Pirahãs simply make the immediate their focus of concentration, and thereby, at a single stroke, they eliminate huge sources of worry, fear, and despair that plague so many of us in Western societies.

But there is an interesting alternative way to think about things. Perhaps it is the presence of these concerns that makes a culture more primitive, and their absence that renders a culture more sophisticated. If that is true, the Pirahãs are a very sophisticated people. Does this sound far-fetched? Let’s ask ourselves if it is more sophisticated to look at the universe with worry, concern, and a belief that we can understand it all, or to enjoy life as it comes, recognizing the likely futility of looking for truth or God?

Today, there are about 6,500 languages and half of those are under threat of extinction within 50 to 100 years. This is a social, cultural and scientific disaster because languages express the unique knowledge, history and worldview of their communities; and each language is a specially evolved variation of the human capacity for communication.

What is the loss to those of us who don’t speak the language that has disappeared? Is there really any loss to us? Clearly there is. The number of languages actually spoken in the world at a given moment of human history is but a small fragment of the perhaps infinitely large total number of possible human languages. A language is a repository of specialized cultural experiences. When a language is lost, we lose the knowledge of that language’s words and grammar.

When a language dies without documentation, we lose a piece of the puzzle of the origin of human language.

Many others, if not all, that I have studied are often sullen and withdrawn, torn between the desire to maintain their cultural autonomy and to acquire the goods of the outside world. The Pirahãs have no such conflicts.