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May 10 - May 22, 2020
To talk about things that have no place in their own culture, such as other gods, Western ideas of germs, and so on, would require the Pirahãs to adopt a change in life and thought. So they avoid such talk.
the Pirahãs’ discourse is more esoteric than exoteric, more directed to topics that do not challenge Pirahãs’ views. Of course, all peoples are like this to some degree. It is the extent to which this is enforced among the Pirahãs that makes them stand out from, say, Western societies, in which discussion of new ideas and foreign ways is also not generally highly valued.
in esoteric societies of intimates like the Pirahãs’ society, displacement can be rare or nonexistent. There is none or nearly none in Pirahã. The story and the context communicate the sorts of things that displacement handles in English.
Maybe we don’t need much grammar after all in an esoteric culture. If this were true, then we would have a way of better understanding the relative simplicity of Pirahã grammar.
The Pirahãs would converse with me and then turn to one another, in my presence, to talk about me, as though I was not even there.
Their language, in their view, emerges from their lives as Pirahãs and from their relationships to other Pirahãs. If I could utter appropriate responses to their questions, this was no more evidence that I spoke their language than a recorded message is to me evidence that my telephone is a native speaker of English.
Both modern linguistics and the bulk of the philosophy of language have chosen to separate language from culture in their quests to understand human communication.
Many linguists and philosophers since the 1950s have characterized language almost exclusively in terms of mathematical logic. It is almost as if the fact that language has meaning and is spoken by human beings is irrelevant to the enterprise of understanding it.
If you want to tell the Pirahãs something, they are going to want to know how you came by your knowledge. And especially they will want to know if you have direct evidence for your assertion.
Talk of the spiritual for the Pirahãs is not talk of fiction but talk of real events. For the principle of immediacy of experience to have an explanatory role in Pirahã spiritual life, the only crucial condition is that they believe that they see the spirits that they talk about.
“Mão esquerda.” He answered, “The hand is upriver.” What on earth is going on? I thought, completely frustrated. So now he is making fun of me? I pointed to his right hand. “The hand is downriver.”
I noticed that directions were given either in terms of the river (upriver, downriver, to the river) or the jungle (into the jungle). The Pirahãs knew where the river was (I couldn’t tell—I was thoroughly disoriented). They all seemed to orient themselves to their geography rather than to their bodies, as we do when we use left hand and right hand for directions.
The discovery of the Pirahãs’ use of the river in giving directions did explain, however, why when the Pirahãs visited towns with me, one of their first questions was “Where is the river?”
The first question, then, is whether there are phrases within phrases in Pirahã. The answer is that there are not, following the standard argumentation used in theoretical linguistics to establish this: it lacks the pitch marking, words, or sentence size of a language with recursion.
Most interesting, perhaps, for illustrating my point against recursion, is a sentence like the following, because there is no obvious way to make it longer in Pirahã: Xahoapióxio xigihí toioxaagá hi kabatií xogií xi mahaháíhiigí xiboítopí piohoaó, hoíhio (Another day an old man slowly butchered big tapirs by the side of the water, two of them). Anything else added to this, like the word brown in big brown tapirs, would render the sentence ungrammatical.
What I discovered is that no more than one possessor can occur in a given phrase (dog is the possessor of tail, for example). If there were no recursion in the language, this would make sense. You can get one possessor without recursion by simply having a cultural or linguistic understanding shared by speakers that when two nouns are next to each other, the first one is interpreted as the possessor. But if you have two possessors in the clause, one of them has to be in a phrase that is within another phrase.
Pirahã lacks disjunction because it, like coordination, requires putting phrases inside of other phrases—recursion. The Pirahãs would say, for example, rather than “Either Bob or Bill will come,” something like “Bob will come. Bill will come. Hmm. I don’t know.”
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.
there really doesn’t seem to be much need for grammar proper to be part of the human genome, as it were.
Surprisingly, human discourses have never been the subject of Chomskyan research. But as we just saw, this is a massive oversight, since recursion can be found outside the grammar, tremendously reducing the importance of the grammar in understanding the nature of language and communication. Discourses are purposely ignored by Chomsky as social or at least nonlinguistic constructs.
The Pirahãs and pragmatism share the idea that the test of knowledge is not whether it is true but whether it is useful. They want to know what they need to know in order to act. And the knowledge to act is based mainly on cultural conceptions of useful actions, of which theories are a part.
The Pirahãs are unable to perceive some things that even children from Western culture perceive well. For one thing, Pirahãs cannot make out two-dimensional objects, as in drawings and photographs, very well. They often hold pictures sideways or upside down, and ask me what it is that they are supposed to be seeing. They are getting better nowadays, as they have been exposed to many photos, but still this is not easy for them.
I did find curious the Pirahãs’ insistence on walking single file through town, just as they did through the jungle. As we strolled down the city’s sidewalks, Xipoógi walked behind me, with Xahoábisi behind him. I slowed down to let them catch up. They slowed down too. I slowed down more. Ditto. I stopped. They stopped. They simply would not walk beside me, not even when I asked them to.
Linguistics has changed over the decades. It was at one time more like the “field sciences,” those branches of inquiry such as geology, anthropology, and biology, wherein learning entails leaving the laboratory for the rough world of fieldwork. Of course, many linguists continue to do field research on languages around the world. But the explosive growth of linguistics after the advent of Chomsky in the 1950s has altered the ethos of the discipline in profound ways. Chomsky’s attraction for many linguists, including me, is the elegance of his theory, not field research.
But since Chomsky himself did no field research and apparently had learned more interesting things about language than any fieldworker, many students and incoming professors working under the influence of Chomsky’s assumptions understandably believed that the best way to do research might be to work deductively rather than inductively—from the institution rather than from the village, starting with an elegant theory and predetermining where facts best fit.
there is no verb in any language we know of that requires more than three nouns to complete its meaning (some theories say no more than four nouns).
Their own beliefs were not in the fantastic and miraculous but in spirits that were in fact creatures of their environment, creatures that did normal kinds of things (whether or not I thought they were real). There was no sense of sin among the Pirahãs, no need to “fix” mankind or even themselves. There was acceptance for things the way they are, by and large.
The fact, for example, that no Amazonian group that I have worked with has “motherese,” or baby talk—that is, a special, watered-down way of talking to little children—is interesting. The Pirahãs’ lack of baby talk seems to be based on the belief of Pirahã adults that all members of the society are equal and thus that children should not be treated any differently from adults, by and large.
The Pirahãs show no evidence of depression, chronic fatigue, extreme anxiety, panic attacks, or other psychological ailments common in many industrialized societies. But this psychological well-being is not due, as some might think, to a lack of pressure. It is ethnocentric to suppose that only industrialized societies can produce psychological pressure, or that psychological difficulties are found only in such societies.
