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

by Daniel L. Everett

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...