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

by Daniel L. Everett

The Pirahãs say different things when they leave my hut at night on their way to bed. Sometimes they just say, “I’m going.” But frequently they use an expression that, though surprising at first, has come to be one of my favorite ways of saying good night: “Don’t sleep, there are snakes.” The Pirahãs say this for two reasons. First, they believe that by sleeping less they can “harden themselves,” a value they all share. Second, they know that danger is all around them in the jungle and that sleeping soundly can leave one defenseless from attack by any of the numerous predators around the village. The Pirahãs laugh and talk a good part of the night. They don’t sleep much at one time. Rarely have I heard the village completely quiet at night or noticed someone sleeping for several hours straight. I have learned so much from the Pirahãs over the years. But this is perhaps my favorite lesson. Sure, life is hard and there is plenty of danger. And it might make us lose some sleep from time to time. But enjoy it. Life goes on.

They also like feathers and bright colors on the necklaces to make them visible to spirits so that the spirits are not startled—like wild animals, spirits are more likely to attack when startled.

Clear religious element.

The relative lack of ritual among the Pirahãs is predicted by the immediacy of experience principle. This principle states that formulaic language and actions (rituals) that involve reference to nonwitnessed events are avoided. So a ritual where the principal character could not claim to have seen what he or she was enacting would be prohibited. Beyond this prohibitive feature, however, the idea behind the principle is that the Pirahãs avoid formulaic encodings of values and instead transmit values and information via actions and words that are original in composition with the person acting or speaking, that have been witnessed by this person, or that have been told to this person by a witness. So traditional oral literature and rituals have no place.

A culture without tradition but by and large unchanging.

recursion is not found in the grammar of all languages, but it is found in the thought processes of all humans, then it is part of general human intelligence and not part of a “language instinct” or “universal grammar,” as Noam Chomsky has claimed.

Her cheeks were sunken, her legs and arms were bone-thin, and she was so weak that she could barely move. Since she had no milk her baby was also very ill. Other mothers would not nurse Pokó’s baby since they needed the milk, they said, for their own babies. Pokó died just a couple of days after our return. Since we had no radio, we had no way of calling for help for her. But her baby survived. We asked who would care for Pokó’s daughter.

Use

“The baby will die. There is no mother to nurse her,” we were told. “Keren and I will take care of the baby,” I volunteered. “OK,” the Pirahãs responded, “but the baby will die.” The Pirahãs know death and dying when they see it. I understand this now. But I was committed to helping that baby. Our first problem was to feed the child. We made some diapers for the baby out of old sheets and towels. We tried to give it a bottle (we always kept baby bottles in the village for possible infant sicknesses),

it would not suck. It was almost comatose. I determined not to let this baby die. I thought of a way to get milk into it. We mixed up some powdered milk with sugar and a bit of salt and warmed it. I had a couple of squeeze bottles of Right Guard deodorant (deodorant is commonly sold in plastic squeeze bottles in Brazil). I emptied them and washed them out. I pulled out the plastic tubes from each and washed thos...

If someone’s behavior is abnormal in a way that bothers the majority, he or she will be ostracized by degrees.

Spirits can tell the village what it should not have done or what it should not do. Spirits can single out individuals or simply talk to the group as a whole. Pirahãs listen carefully and often follow the exhortations of the kaoáíbógí. A spirit might say something like “Don’t want Jesus. He is not Pirahã,” or “Don’t hunt downriver tomorrow,” or things that are commonly shared values, such as “Don’t eat snakes.” Through spirits, ostracism, food-sharing regulation, and so on, Pirahã society disciplines itself. It has very little coercion by the standards of many other societies, but it seems to have just enough to control its members’ aberrant behavior.

These concepts are important in various ways. Especially interesting is their contribution to our understanding of sickness among the Pirahãs. I learned this early on when Kóhoibiíihíai and I were talking about his daughter, Xíbií. I was trying to explain to him why she had malaria. I was starting to talk about mosquitoes and blood. “No, no,” Kóhoi stopped me in midsentence. “Xíbií is sick because she stepped on a leaf.” “What? I stepped on a leaf. I’m not sick,” I answered, puzzled by his account of Xíbií’s malaria. “A leaf from above,” he said, increasing the enigma for me. “What leaf from above?” “A bloodless one from the upper bigí came to the lower bigí and left a leaf. When the Pirahãs step on leaves from the upper bigí, it makes them sick. They are like our leaves. But they make you sick.” “How do you know it is a leaf from the upper bigí?” I inquired. “Because when you step on it you get sick.”

Internal logic

demonstrated conclusively that the Pirahãs have no numbers at all and no counting in any form.

next noticed, discussing this with Keren and with Steve Sheldon and Arlo Heinrichs, that the Pirahãs had no simple color words, that is, no terms for color that were not composed of other words. I had originally simply accepted Steve Sheldon’s analysis that there were color terms in Pirahã. Sheldon’s list of colors consisted of the terms for black, white, red (also referring to yellow), and green (also referring to blue). However, these were not simple words, as it turned out. They were phrases. More accurate translations of the Pirahãwords showed them to mean: “blood is dirty” for black; “it sees” or “it is transparent” for white; “it is blood” for red; and “it is temporarily being immature” for green. I believe that color terms share at least one property with numbers. Numbers are generalizations that group entities into sets that share general arithmetical properties, rather than object-particular, immediate properties. Likewise, as numerous studies by psychologists, linguists, and philosophers have demonstrated, color terms are unlike other adjectives or other words because they involve special generalizations that put artificial boundaries in the spectrum of visible light.

Talking to people from very different cultures, as this story shows, involves much more than merely getting the word meanings right. One can translate every word well and still have a hard time understanding the story. This is because our stories include unstated assumptions about the world that are made by our culture.

To non-Pirahã ears, the story can seem massively repetitive in many places, as in the number of lines at the beginning that repeat that the panther killed the dog. This repetition has a rhetorical purpose, however. First, it expresses excitement. But it also serves to ensure that the hearer can tell what is going on in spite of the fact that there is a lot of noise in the background, including many other Pirahãs talking simultaneously. And the repetition is also “stylish” for the Pirahãs—they like stories that have lots of repetition. “Killing the Panther” is a typical text in that it is about immediate experience. This is a crucial parameter circumscribing all Pirahã stories. After noticing that Pirahã stories are always about immediate experience, I learned a new word that turned out to be the key to understanding many of the facts that were so puzzling about the Pirahãs.

STORYTELLING AS A REFLECTION OF CULTURE

The word xibipíío seemed to be related to a cultural concept or value that had no clear English equivalent. Of course, any English speaker can say, “John disappeared,” or “Billy appeared just now,” but this is not the same. First, we use different words, hence different concepts, for appearing and disappearing. More important, we English speakers are mainly focused on the identity of the person coming or going, not the fact that he or she has just left or come into our perception. 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. This translation “worked”—it

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 learned that Xisaabi had used musical speech to discuss his dream because it was a new experience and new experiences are often recounted with musical speech, which exploits the inherent tones of all Pirahã words.

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. As

other words, the Pirahãs only make statements that are anchored to the moment when they are speaking, rather than to any other point in time. This doesn’t mean that once someone dies, the Pirahãs who spoke to him will forget everything he reported to them. But they rarely talk about it.

This means that they will use the simple present tense, the past tense, and the future tense, since these are all defined relative to the moment of speech, but no so-called perfect tenses and no sentences that fail to make assertions, such as embedded sentences.

This seemed to make sense to me in light of immediacy of experience. The Pirahãs do have myths in the sense that they tell stories that help bind their society together, since they tell stories about witnessed events from their particular vantage point almost every day. Repetitions of the stories recorded in this book, such as the jaguar story, the story of the woman who died in childbirth, and others count as myths in this sense. But the Pirahãs lack folktales. So “everyday stories” and conversations play a vital binding role. They lack any form of fiction. And their myths lack a property common to the myths of most societies, namely, they do not involve events for which there is no living eyewitness. The latter is at once a small and a profound difference. It is a small difference in the sense that the Pirahãs do have stories that bind their culture together, like all other human societies. But it is a profound difference because of the “evidentiary twist” imposed by the Pirahãs on their myths—there must be an eyewitness alive at the time of the telling. I sat with Kóhoi once and he asked me, after hearing about my god, “What else does your god do?” And I answered, “Well, he made the stars, and he made the earth.” Then I asked, “What do the Pirahãs say?” He answered,“Well, the Pirahãs say that these things were not made.” The Pirahãs, I learned, have no concept of a supreme or creator god. They have individual spirits, but they believe that they have seen these spirits, ...

Problematic language in use of "spirits".

Xisaóoxoi’s character talked about how cold and dark it was under the ground where she was buried. She talked about what it felt like to die and about how there were other spirits under the ground. The spirit Xisaóoxoi was “channeling” spoke in a rhythm different from normal Pirahã speech, dividing syllables into groups of two (binary feet) instead of the groups of three (ternary feet) used in everyday talking. I was just thinking how interesting this would be in my eventual analysis of rhythm in Pirahã, when the “woman” rose and left.

It is not that stories are not used to explain the world but that these stories are not preserved and retold.

Within a few minutes Peter and I heard Xisaóoxoi again, but this time speaking in a low, gruff voice. Those in the “audience” started laughing. A well-known comical spirit was about to appear. Suddenly, out of the jungle, Xisaóoxoi emerged, naked, and pounding the ground with a heavy section of the trunk of a small tree. As he pounded, he talked about how he would hurt people who got in his way, how he was not afraid, and other testosterone-inspired bits of braggadocio. I

Characters and tropes appear to be preserved. Is this any less valid than the preservation of plot elements?

Pirahãs see spirits in their mind, literally. They talk to spirits, literally. Whatever anyone else might think of these claims, all Pirahãs will say that they experience spirits. For this reason, Pirahã spirits exemplify the immediacy of experience principle. And the myths of any other culture must also obey this constraint or there is no appropriate way to talk about them in the Pirahã language.

But if all Pirahã myths must exemplify immediacy of experience, then the scriptures of many world religions, such as the Bible, the Koran, the Vedas, and so on, could not be translated or discussed among the Pirahãs, because they involve stories for which there is no living eyewitness. This is the main reason that no missionary for nearly three hundred years has had any impact on the Pirahãs’ religion. The stories of the Abrahamic religions lack living eyewitnesses, at least as I practiced religion when I was religious.

I wonder to what extent a continuous line of spirit shows, told as simulacrum, might create an ancient myth that has continually evolved to live in the present. The immediacy of language would necessarily make the evolution of the spirit shows impossible to study.

These beliefs are an amalgam of Catholic teachings, Tupi and other indigenous folktales and myths, and macumba—an African-Brazilian form of spiritism like voodoo. They believe in the curupira, a jungle elf (some say beautiful woman) who leads people into the center of the jungle because its feet point backward and the lost soul thinks it is leaving the jungle. They believe that the pink Amazonian river dolphin turns into a man at night and seduces young virgins.

And that is all any language needs. In fact, a language could get by with a single phoneme. In such a language words might look like a, aa, aaa, aaaa, and so on. It’s not surprising that there is no language known with only one or two sounds, since the smaller the phonemic inventory, the longer words have to be to provide enough information for speakers to distinguish one word from another (otherwise they would sound too much alike) and the harder it becomes for our brains to tell words apart (words that are too long would require too much memory to distinguish, among other problems). So if there were a human language like the binary language of computers, humans would need computerlike brains to use and recognize the very long words that would be necessary. Imagine trying to tell a word of fifty consecutive a’s apart from a word of fifty-one a’s.

Use in story

My first intense contact with whistle speech came one day when the Pirahãs had given me permission to go hunting with them. After we’d been walking for about an hour, they decided that they weren’t seeing any game because I, with my clunking canteens and machete and congenital clumsiness, was making too much noise. “You stay here and we will be back for you later,” Xaikáibaí said gently but firmly. I watched the men leave me. I was standing by a large tree. I had no idea where I was or when they would come back. The jungle was dark from the shade of the climax forest trees. There were mosquitoes buzzing around me. I took out my machete in case an animal came prowling around. I wondered if the Pirahãs would ever be back to get me. (If they hadn’t returned, my skeleton would likely be there now.) 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. These channels show how culture can influence language. If I didn’t know about the channels of discourse, I would not know

When we learn to convey meaning in another language, our first step, like Robin Williams’s, is not grammar but culture. To appreciate how culture can affect language (even effect it on occasion), think about the process of learning another language.

Language is not only more than the sum of its parts (words and sounds and sentences)—it is by itself insufficient for full communication and understanding without knowledge of an enveloping culture.

The concept of esoteric communication comes from work by Carol Thurston and by George Grace and Alison Wray. Its relevance to the analysis of Pirahã was first suggested in research by Jeanette Sakel and Eugenie Stapert, of the University of Manchester, England. Esoteric communication is communication that is used within, and partially defines, a well-defined group. Esoteric communication facilitates understanding because hearers are likely to anticipate what speakers are going to say in different situations. The language is not limited to old or predictable information, but that is the default.

Only years later did I read the fascinating research coming from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, under the direction of Dr. Stephen C. Levinson. In studies from different cultures and languages, Levinson’s team discovered two broad divisions in the ways cultures and languages give local directions. Many cultures are like American and European cultures and orient themselves in relative terms, dependent on body orientation, such as left and right. This is called by some endocentric orientation. Others, like the Pirahãs, orient themselves to objects external to their body, what some refer to as exocentric orientation.

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.

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. If

This is not happening simply because gender-neutral language is more polite than gender-specific language. The pressure to change English in this way arose because people believe that the way we talk, whether offense is consciously intended or whether or not politeness is at stake, affects the way we think about others.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis fails to offer any unified account of the range of unusual facts about Pirahã culture and language, such as the absence of color words, quantifiers, or numerals, the simple kinship system, and so on.

Theories affect our perceptions. They are part of the cultural information that constrains the way we see the world around us.

Go here for lesson

About two hundred yards upriver I saw a log floating in the fast cur rent. It was twisted. When I first began to travel the Amazon system, I expected to see new things in this new world, so I mistook every log in the river for a snake, because the water makes wood seem to undulate. This log seemed to undulate as well, though by now I

knew enough not to mistake it for a snake. And I also knew that snakes were not as big as logs. This one, as I watched it more closely, was perhaps forty feet long and three feet thick. I shifted to look at two macaws flying and squawking overhead. Then I looked back at the log. It was closer to us now. Strange, I thought, the log is floating toward the bank, perpendicular to the current. Then as it got closer, I saw that it really was undulating. Suddenly it came straight toward my end of the boat. This was no log. This was the largest anaconda I had ever seen. Its head

was larger than mine. Its body was much thicker than mine and over thirty feet long. It opened its mouth wide and swam toward me. I swerved sharply, throwing my family to the side hard, and I managed to hit the snake with the propeller of my 15-horsepower outboard motor as it dove under the boat. Thud. A solid hit. I thought I had hit it in the head, but I wasn’t sure. The snake disappeared. Then a second later the entire snake’s body stood up out of the water, towerin...

of the snake’s whitish underbelly as it fell backward with a loud, large splash into the Madeira River. I didn’t know anacondas could to that, I thought. That damned thing could have jumped in the boat with us! I was just staring. Shann...

The newest definition of recursion to emerge from Chomsky’s school makes recursion a form of compositionality. Simply put, it says that you can put parts together to make something new and you can do that endlessly. Under this novel notion of recursion, which is not accepted by any mathematical linguists or computer scientists that I know of, if I can put words together to form a sentence, that is recursion, and

if I can put sentences together to form a story, that is recursion.

An important inference from the presence of recursion is this: if a language has recursion then there should be no longest sentence in the language. For example, in English any sentence that someone utters can be made longer. The cat that ate the rat is well can be extended to The cat that ate the rat that ate the cheese is well, and so on.

Sentence structure

Like most linguists today, I once believed that culture and language were largely independent. But if I am correct that culture can exercise major effects on grammar, then the theory I committed most of my research career to—the theory that grammar is part of the human genome and that the variations in the grammars of the world’s languages are largely insignificant—is dead wrong. There does not have to be a specific genetic capacity for grammar; the biological basis of grammar could also be the basis of gourmet cooking, of mathematical reasoning, and of medical advances. In other words, it could just be human reasoning.

Part of the reason this student had chosen to do his graduate research on the Pirahãs was that he had heard of my claim that the Pirahãs have no creation myths, that is, no stories about their past—where they come from, how the world was created, and so on. “OK, let’s hear it,” I replied, keenly curious. So we put on the tape. It began with the anthropology student’s voice, speaking with a Pirahã man near the tape recorder, in Portuguese. The student did not know more than a few Pirahã words, so was obliged to conduct his interview in Portuguese, even though few Pirahãs spoke more than a few words of Portuguese. Student: “Who made the world?” Pirahã man: “The world . . .” (repeating only the last two words of the question). Student: “How was the world made?” Pirahã man: “World made . . .” Student: “What was first? First?” Longish silence. Pirahã voice in the background, quickly repeated by man next to mic: “Bananas!” Student: “Then what? Second?” Pirahã voice in the background: “Papaya . . .” Pirahã man next to mic: “Papaya”—then loudly, switching gears: “Hey, Dan! Are you hearing me? I want matches! I want cloth. My baby is sick. He needs medicine.” The Pirahãs proceeded to talk to me on the tape about the village, who was there, what they wanted, when was I coming back, and so on. The student had thought that this part of the tape, which was clearly fluent and animated, was their creation myth.

At one level universal grammar seems to be almost a necessary concept—after all, neither plants, rocks, nor dogs talk—only humans do. We all agree there is something about human biology that underlies language. In this sense, Chomsky is trivially right. But the real question is how specific this endowment is to language (as opposed to, say, the proposal that our capacity for language just follows from general cognitive properties) and how much whatever this biological endowment is determines the final form of the grammar of any specific human language. And a related question, one that might initially seem tangential, is how we as scientists come by the knowledge to test our hypotheses.

If this theory is inadequate, though, what are we left with? We are left with a theory in which grammar—the mechanics of language—is much less important than the culture-based meanings and constraints on talking of each specific culture in the world. And if this is correct, it has profound implications for the methodology of linguistics research. It means, again, that we cannot study languages effectively apart from their cultural context, especially languages whose cultures differ radically from the culture of the researcher.

You want us to live like Americans. But the Pirahãs 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?”

Lol

“Why are you laughing?” I asked. “She killed herself? Ha ha ha. How stupid. Pirahãs don’t kill themselves,” they answered.

Interesting point about mental health

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 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.” Kaaxaóoi proceeded to show me with his two hands held far apart how long Jesus’s penis was—a good three feet. I didn’t know what to say to this. I had no idea whether a Pirahã male had pretended to be Jesus and pretended to have a long penis, faking it in some way, or what else could be behind this report. Clearly Kaaxaóoi wasn’t making this up. He was reporting it as a fact that he was concerned about. Later,