Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle (Vintage Departures)

by Daniel L. Everett

they know that danger is all around them in the jungle and that sleeping soundly can leave one defenseless from attack

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.

The Pirahãs have shown me that there is dignity and deep satisfaction in facing life and death without the comfort of heaven or the fear of hell and in sailing toward the great abyss with a smile.

Don had told me that they name all foreigners, since they don’t like to say foreign names. I later learned that the names are based on a similarity that the Pirahãs perceive between the foreigner and some Pirahã.

the Pirahãs change names from time to time, usually when individual Pirahãs trade names with spirits they encounter in the jungle.

One of the things about Pirahã that immediately fascinated me was the lack of what linguists call “phatic” communication—communication that primarily functions to maintain social and interpersonal channels, to recognize or stroke, as some refer to it, one’s interlocutor.

Pirahã sentences are either requests for information (questions), assertions of new information (declarations), or commands, by and large. There are no words for thanks, I’m sorry, and so on.

When a Pirahã arrives in the village, he or she might say, “I have arrived.” But by and large, no one says anything. If you give someone something, they might occasionally say, “That’s right,” or “It is OK,” but they use these to mean something more like “Transaction acknowledged,” rather than “Thank you.” The expression of gratitude can come later, with a reciprocal gift, or some unexpected act of kindness, such as helping you carry something. The same goes when someone has done something offensive or hurtful. They have no words for I’m sorry. They can say, “I was bad,” or some such, but do so rarely. The way to express penitence is not by words but by actions.

I was usually awakened by various women of the village talking in their huts. They would begin speaking loudly to no one in particular about the day’s events. One woman would announce that so-and-so was going hunting or fishing, then say what kind of meat she wanted. Other women would echo her from other huts or shout out their own culinary preferences.

The Pirahãs in the front room were watching. When I killed the spider they asked what it was. “Xóooí” (Tarantula), I replied. “We don’t kill those,” they said. “They eat cockroaches and do no harm.”

Consider the fieldworker’s dilemma: you are in a place where all you ever knew is hidden and muffled, where sights, sounds, and feelings all challenge your accustomed conception of life on earth.

however cheerful one’s immediate successes make one. The most difficult aspect of learning Pirahã is not the language itself, but the fact that the situation in which the learning takes place is “monolingual.”

Finally, the Pirahã language is notoriously difficult because it lacks things that many other languages have, especially in the way that it puts sentences together.

Mark Twain left Ohio in 1857 hoping to depart from New Orleans for the Amazon River, apparently to try to get rich in the coca trade. One wonders what books or stories we have missed because he changed his plans and decided to train as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi.

Why not hate them? Because the frustration will kill you faster than the bug bites.

The likelihood is that we will never know where the Pirahãs or their language came from

Some evidence already exists that the Pirahãs are not originally from the part of the jungle where they currently reside, from the lack of native vocabulary for some species of monkeys found around the Maici.

They knew something was wrong. I later learned that everyone in the village except me and my family knew that Keren and Shannon had malaria.

It didn’t occur to me then, caught up as I was in my own crisis, that the Pirahãs went through what I was now agonizing over on a regular basis. And their lot was worse than mine. Every Pirahã has seen a close family member die.

If your mother dies, if your child dies, if your husband dies—you still have to hunt, fish, and gather food. No one will do this for you.

The Pirahãs have no way of knowing that Westerners expect to live nearly twice as long as they do.

I used to try to convince them that the Pirahãs were just as human as they were. “These people came here before you, from Peru, maybe five hundred years ago.” “What do you mean they came here? I thought they were just creatures of this forest, like the monkeys,” the river men might reply.

The Pirahãs don’t need walls for defense, because the village is the defense—every member of the village will come to the aid of every other member. They don’t need houses to display wealth, because all Pirahãs are equal in wealth. They don’t need houses for privacy, because privacy is not a strong value

Houses don’t need heating or cooling, because the jungle provides a nearly perfect climate for lightly clothed human bodies. Houses are just a place to sleep with moderate protection from the rain and sun.

Perhaps their most outstanding tools are their large, powerful bows (over two yards in length) and arrows (two to three yards long).

Using the same skills they already demonstrated in making these disposable baskets, they could make longer-lasting baskets, simply by selecting more durable material (such as wicker). But they don’t, I concluded, because they don’t want them.

Pirahã adornment has an immediate function and involves little planning or concern for classical aesthetic values such as symmetry. Clearly, they could make lasting ornamentation but they choose not to.

After about five days of intense effort, they made a beautiful dugout canoe and showed it off proudly to me. I bought the tools for them to make more. Then a few days after Simprício left, the Pirahãs asked me for another canoe. I told them that they could make their own now. They said, “Pirahãs don’t make canoes” and walked away. No Pirahã has ever made another xagaoa to my knowledge.

Pirahãs have the knowledge to preserve meat—when they are about to embark for a place where they expect to encounter Brazilians, they salt meat (if they have salt) or smoke it, to preserve it. But among themselves they never preserve meat. I haven’t seen another Amazonian group that doesn’t salt or smoke meat routinely.

One reason I find Pirahã views of food interesting is that the subject seems less important in some sense to them than it is in my own culture.

Pirahãs in the city for the first time are always surprised by Western eating habits, especially the custom of eating three meals a day.

Often after a visit to the city of three to six weeks, a Pirahã will return as much as thirty pounds overweight to the village, rolls of fat on their belly and thighs. But within a month or less, they’re back to normal weight.

Pirahãs eat fish, bananas, wild game, grubs, Brazil nuts, electric eels, otters, caimans, insects, rats—any sort of protein, oil, starch, sugar, or other foodstuff they can hunt, fish, or gather from their environment—though they avoid reptiles and amphibians, for the most part.

If someone catches fish at 3 a.m., then that is when it will be eaten. Everyone will get up to eat as soon as it is brought in.

A pattern was emerging: they had no method for food preservation, neglected tools, and made only disposable baskets. This seemed to indicate that lack of concern for the future was a cultural value. It certainly wasn’t laziness, because the Pirahãs work very hard.

necessary for minimal function. Pirahãs take naps (fifteen minutes to two hours at the extremes) during the day and night. There is loud talking in the village all night long.

Sex is not limited to spouses, though that is the norm for married men and women. Unmarried Pirahãs have sex as they wish. To have sex with someone else’s spouse is frowned upon and can be risky, but it happens.

First marriages are recognized simply by cohabitation. If they do not choose to remain together, then the cuckolded spouses may or may not choose to allow them back. Whatever happens, there is no further mention of it or complaint about it, at least not openly, once the couple has returned.

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.

baíxi—parent, grandparent, or someone to whom you wish to express submission temporarily or permanently.

There is one more term, piihí, which has a wider range of meanings, including “child with at least one deceased parent,” “stepchild,” and “favorite child.”

Anthropologists have long believed that the more complex the kinship system, the more likely it is that there will be kinship-based restrictions on whom to marry, which relative to live close to or with, and so on.

The effect of the apparently universal incest taboo prohibits only a small number of sexual couplings among the Pirahãs, such as full sibling with full sibling and grandparent or parent with child.

The Pirahãs all seem to be intimate friends, no matter what village they come from.

Given the lack of stigma attached to and the relative frequency of divorce, promiscuousness associated with dancing and singing, and post- and prepubescent sexual experimentation, it isn’t far off the mark to conjecture that many Pirahãs have had sex with a high percentage of the other Pirahãs.

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.

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.

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.

This central device of placing thoughts inside other thoughts mirrors one that many linguists consider to be part of grammar—recursion. And yet the Pirahã text groupings are not part of grammar, even though they are found in all Pirahã stories.

If 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.