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

by Daniel L. Everett

Parents treat their children with much affection, talk to them respectfully and frequently, and rarely discipline them.

Pirahã parenting involves no violence, at least in principle. But my model of parenting did. It is worth contrasting the two here because ultimately I have come to believe that the Pirahãs have a healthier attitude in many ways than I did at the time.

I did not see Pirahã teenagers moping, sleeping in late, refusing to accept responsibility for their own actions, or trying out what they considered to be radically new approaches to life. They in fact are highly productive and conformist members of their community in the Pirahã sense of productivity

If one considers cultural evolution to be a good thing, then this may not be something to emulate, since cultural evolution likely requires conflict, angst, and challenge. But if your life is unthreatened (so far as you know) and everyone in your society is satisfied, why would you desire change? How could things be improved? Especially if the outsiders you came into contact with seemed more irritable and less satisfied with life than you.

It is interesting to me that in spite of a strong sense of community, there is almost no community-approved coercion of village members.

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.

The woman can express her anger tangibly and the husband can show her he is sorry by letting her bang away on his head at will for a day. It is important to note that this involves no shouting or overt anger. The giggling, smirking, and laughter are all necessary components of the process, since anger is the cardinal sin among the Pirahãs.

Mothers wean their children when a new child is born—usually when the previous offspring is three or four years old. Weaning is traumatic for the child for at least three reasons: loss of adult attention, hunger, and work. Everyone must work; everyone must contribute to the life of the village. The child recently stopped from nursing will have to enter this adult world of work.

The weaned child is no longer the baby, no longer treated as special compared to other children. Instead of sleeping next to Mom, the child stays with its siblings a few significant feet away from the parents on the sleeping platform. Newly weaned toddlers experience hunger, like all Pirahãs except nursing babies.

Children’s lives are not unpleasant. They play with toys if they have them and they especially like dolls and soccer balls (though no one in the village knows how to play soccer—they just like the balls).

As I saw them in the jungle, I came to realize that the village was just their drawing room, a place to relax. And you can’t understand people just watching them at leisure. The jungle and the river are the Pirahãs’ office, their workshop, their atelier, and their playground.

A widespread belief is that most American Indians have chiefs or other kinds of indigenous authority figures. This is incorrect. Many American Indian societies are by tradition egalitarian. The day-to-day lives of people in such societies, many more than is usually realized, are free of the influence of any leaders.

What has often happened, as in the Xingu region of Brazssil and elsewhere in the Americas, is that chiefs have been invented and vested with, in many cases, the artificial power to be the legal representatives of “their” people, in order to facilitate economic access to Indian possessions.

There is no “official” coercion in Pirahã society—no police, courts, or chiefs. But it exists nonetheless. The principal forms I have observed are ostracism and spirits.

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.

It turns out that for the Pirahãs the universe is like a layer cake, each layer marked by a boundary called bigí. There are worlds above the sky and worlds beneath the ground.

Originally, I believed that xoí simply meant “jungle,” because that is its most common use. Then I realized that it in fact labels the entire space between bigís. That is, it can refer to “biosphere” or “jungle,” somewhat like our word earth, which can refer either to our planet or to just the soil on the planet’s surface.

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

I believe that one crucial factor is that they ultimately do not value Portuguese (or American) knowledge. In fact, they actively oppose some aspects of it coming into their lives. They ask questions about outside cultures largely for the entertainment value of the answers.

No numbers, no counting, and no color terms.

Pirahã also lacks another category of words that many linguists believe to be universal, namely, quantifiers like all, each, every, and so on.

The subjects of their stories were also revealing—the people do not talk about unexperienced events, such as long past or far future events, or fictional topics.

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.

Whoa! It doesn’t mean “just now,” I realized one afternoon. It is used to describe the situation in which an entity comes into sight or goes out of sight!

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.

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.

Declarative Pirahã utterances contain only assertions related directly to the moment of speech, either experienced by the speaker or witnessed by someone alive during the lifetime of the speaker.

Occasionally they will talk to me about things that they have heard that were witnessed by someone now dead, but this is rare, and generally only the most experienced language teachers will do this, those who have developed an ability to abstract from the subjective use of their language and who are able to comment on it from an objective perspective—something rare among speakers of any language in the world.

The kinship terms do not extend beyond the lifetime of any given speaker in their scope and are thus in principle witnessable—a grandparent can be seen in the normal Pirahã lifespan of forty-five years, but not a great-grandparent.

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 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, and they believe they see them regularly.

You can tell xíbiisi generally by the color of their skin—their blood makes their skin dark. Those without blood, all spirits, are generally light-skinned and blond.

After I had worked with them for over twenty-five years, one night a group of Pirahã men, sipping coffee with me in the evening, asked out of the blue, “Hey Dan, do Americans die?”

What does it mean to say that I am the same person I was when I was a toddler? None of my cells are the same. Few if any of my thoughts are. To the Pirahãs, people are not the same in each phase of their lives.

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.

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.

Interestingly, the caboclos themselves call Indians caboclos. Caboclos rarely refer to themselves seriously as caboclos. They refer to themselves as ribeirinhos (people who live at the river’s edge) or, more commonly and simply, Brazilians.

But you would never ask a caboclo, “Are there Indians around here who still speak their language?” If you wanted to find this out, the best way to ask, at least in certain regions of the Amazon, would be: “Tem caboclos por aqui que sabem cortar a giria?” (Are there caboclos here who know how to “cut” the slang?) The reason for this otherwise strange circumlocution is easy enough to discover if you talk to a caboclo long enough: they do not think of the Indians’ speech as a real language, nor do they believe that the various Indian languages are in fact all that different from one another.

Many times I have been asked, “O que é você?” (What are you?) or “What are you doing in Brazil?” or “What are you trying to steal from our country?”

discovered that Pirahã makes such extensive use of tone, accent, and the weight of its syllables that the language can be whistled, hummed, yelled, or sung.

The word for friend is bagiái, with a single high tone on the last a: “ba-gi-Ai.” But the word for enemy has two high tones, one on each a: “bA-gi-Ai.” That little difference is what separates friend from enemy in the Pirahã language.

Hymes.There are five such channels in Pirahã, each having a unique cultural function. These are whistle speech, hum speech, musical speech, yell speech, and normal speech—that is, speech using consonants and vowels.

Like all true communication channels, hum speech can “say” anything that can be said with consonants and vowels. But also like the other channels, it has a specific set of functions. Hum speech is used to disguise either what one is saying or one’s identity.

(The Pirahãs don’t whisper, they hum instead. I wondered about this for a while until German linguist Manfred Krifka reminded me of the obvious reason for it. In whispering, the vocal cords are unable to produce different tones, so Pirahã speech would be rendered unintelligible.)

Yell speech is the use of the vowel a or, occasionally, the original vowels of the words being spoken and one of the two consonants k or x (glottal stop), to yell the musical form of the speech, that is, its tone, syllables, and stress. 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.

They refer to musical speech as “jaw going” or “jaw leaving.” It is produced by exaggerating the relative pitch differences between high tone and low tone and changing the rhythm of words and phrases to produce something like a melody.

Whistle speech, which the Pirahãs refer to as talking with a “sour mouth” or a “puckered mouth”—the same description they use of the mouth when sucking a lemon—is used only by men. For some reason, this restriction to men is true of most other languages with whistle speech. It is used to communicate while hunting and in aggressive play between boys.

Pirahã may have so few sounds because it doesn’t need any more. The importance it places on these different channels makes consonants and vowels less important for the Pirahãs than they are for English, French, Navajo, Hausa, Vietnamese, and other languages.

By and large, Pirahãs do not import foreign thoughts, philosophies, or technology. They do enjoy using labor-saving devices, such as mechanized manioc grinders and small outboard motors for their canoes, but they see these things as elements “gathered” from outsiders, with outsiders responsible for the fuel, care, and replacement required.