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

by Daniel L. Everett

I thus learnt my first great lesson in the inquiry into these obscure fields of knowledge, never to accept the disbelief of great men or their accusations of imposture or of imbecility, as of any weight when opposed to the repeated observation of facts by other men, admittedly sane and honest. The whole history of science shows us that whenever the educated and scientific men of any age have denied the facts of other investigators on a priori grounds of absurdity or impossibility, the deniers have always been wrong. —ALFRED WALLACE (1823–1913)

But as I learned from the Pirahãs, our expectations, our culture, and our experiences can render even perceptions of the environment nearly incommensurable cross-culturally.

“The Brazilians give all the Pirahãs Portuguese names because they can’t pronounce the Pirahã names.” He went on, “This is the same reason, I suppose, that the Pirahãs give all outsiders Pirahã names.”

Expressions like hello, goodbye, how are you?, I’m sorry, you’re welcome, and thank you don’t express or elicit new information about the world so much as they maintain goodwill and mutual respect. The Pirahã culture does not require this kind of communication.

Pirahã sentences are either requests for information (questions), assertions of new information (declarations), or commands, by and large.

Social language isn't necessary in a social society. Interesting

language has no comparatives, so I couldn’t find expressions like this is big/that is bigger. I couldn’t find color words—no simple words for red, green, blue, and so on, only descriptive phrases, like that is like blood for red or that is not ripe yet for green. And I couldn’t find stories about the past. When you can’t find something, but you expect it to be there, you can waste months looking for something that doesn’t exist. Many of the things I had been taught to look for in field linguistics I could not find at all. This not only made things hard, but it also was at times downright discouraging.

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. This taught me that Pirahãs don’t import foreign knowledge or adopt foreign work habits easily, if at all, no matter how useful one might think that the knowledge is to them.

Their own practice of eating food when it is available until it is gone now conflicts with the circumstances in which food is always available and never gone.

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

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.

Anyway, I felt the weight of the Bible and so I told Shannon, “OK, no spanking here. Meet me at the end of the airstrip and pick another switch along the way. I will meet you there in five minutes!” As Shannon started out of the house, Pirahãs asked her where she was going. “My dad is going to hit me on the airstrip,” she replied with a mix of irritation and glee, knowing what the effect of her words would be. Pirahã children and adults came running behind me when I left. I was defeated. No more spankings around the Pirahãs.

If a culture of people with no knowledge of modern psychology or science also think it's a bad practice, then that should really give you a hint...

widespread belief is that most American Indians have chiefs or other kinds of indigenous authority figures. This is incorrect.

Western societies prefer that American Indians have leaders that they can do business with. It is nearly impossible, for example, to gain access to Indian lands or even to cede lands to them legally without a representative. 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.

Eventually numerous published experiments were conducted by me and a series of psychologists that demonstrated conclusively that the Pirahãs have no numbers at all and no counting in any form.

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.

Crazy. An alternate technique for programming fictional beliefs into a culture

It would explain the lack of numerals and counting in Pirahã, because these are skills that are mainly applied in generalizations beyond immediate experience.

They don't abstract.

(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.)

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. I was like one of the bright macaws or parrots so abundant along the Maici. My “speaking” was just some cute trick to some of them. It was not really speaking.

Woah. See Blindsight and the Chinese Room principle. Is this not a real life situation mirroring what happened in Blindsight... but amongst the same species!?

Chomsky was one of the first to ask how humans could produce so many sentences, an unbounded number, with only finite brains. There must be some tool available to allow us to make,

Nah combinatorics can make a small finite set produce many things

Second, the grammar could fail to have evolved recursion. There is a growing consensus among linguists that grammars without recursion precede grammars with recursion evolutionarily and that even in grammars with recursion, nonrecursive structures are used in most environments.

doesn’t prepare them well for the demands of urban life. 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.

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. Everyone has responsibility for the community and everyone is cared for by the community.

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.