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

by Daniel L. Everett

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.

I was going to the Pirahãs as a missionary. My income and expenses were to be paid by evangelical churches in the United States so that I could “change the Pirahãs’ hearts” and persuade them to worship the god I believed in, to accept the morality and the culture that goes along with believing in the Christian god. Even though I didn’t even know the Pirahãs, I thought I could and should change them. This is the nexus of most missionary work.

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

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.

The expression of gratitude can come later, with a reciprocal gift, or some unexpected act of kindness,

The way to express penitence is not by words but by actions.

When the plane was about five minutes away, the Pirahãs started shouting and running to the airstrip. I heard it a couple of minutes later

The Amazon is two thousand miles from the major population areas of southeastern Brazil, where over 60 percent of Brazilians live.

Einstein proposed that the distance between two points following the course of an old river is roughly the distance of a straight line between those points times pi.

the coordinates of the village where I lived. They are: S 7°21.642′ by W 62°16.313′.

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.

Pirahãs don’t talk baby talk to their children. 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.

This style of parenting has the result of producing very tough and resilient adults who do not believe that anyone owes them anything. Citizens of the Pirahã nation know that each day’s survival depends on their individual skills and hardiness.

because of my immaturity and Christian parenting framework, I thought that corporeal punishment was appropriate and useful, following the biblical injunction that to spare the rod was to spoil the child.

what are you going to do to him for shooting your dog?” “I will do nothing. I won’t hurt my brother. He acted like a child. He did a bad thing. But he is drunk and his head is not working well. He should not have hurt my dog. It is like my child.” Even when provoked, as Kaaboogí was now, the Pirahãs were able to respond with patience, love, and understanding, in ways rarely matched in any other culture I have encountered.

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.

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.

Pirahãs have no numbers at all and no counting in any form.

“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.

they don’t codify their color experiences with single words that are inflexibly used to generalize color experiences. They use phrases.

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

Pirahãs only make statements that are anchored to the moment when they are speaking, rather than to any other point in time.

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.”

They have individual spirits, but they believe that they have seen these spirits, and they believe they see them regularly.

They’ll call a jaguar a spirit, or a tree a spirit, depending on the kinds of properties that it has. Spirit doesn’t really mean for them what it means for us, and everything they say they have to evaluate empirically.

only Rotokas (New Guinea) and Hawaiian vie with Pirahã for smallness of phonemic inventory—both have eleven phonemes, the same number as Pirahã men.

To see just a glimpse of complexity in English’s use of pitch and stress, consider one of my favorite examples, known among linguists as “stress clash override.” When uttered alone, the word thirteen has higher pitch on the last syllable—“thirTEEN.” And the word women has higher pitch on the first syllable, “Women.” But put the two words together and what do you get? You don’t get “thirTEEN Women,” you get “THIRteen Women.” Why?Because English, like several other languages, doesn’t like two high-pitched, or accented, syllables next to each other. It prefers to have an alternating pattern—ACCENTED nonaccented ACCENTED nonaccented, and so on.

And no English-speaking child ever had to be taught this pattern of accents! They just do it.

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.

the most important visitor I ever hosted in Brazil, Professor Peter Ladefoged of the University of California at Los Angeles.

It is Peter’s voice that emerges from the gramophones in Henry Higgins’s (Rex Harrison’s) office and Peter’s handwriting in the little notebooks that Higgins keeps and shows in an early scene in front of London’s Covent Gardens to Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn).

perception is learned. We perceive the world, both as theoreticians and as citizens of the universe, according to our experiences and expectations, not always, perhaps even never, according to how the world actually is.

Instead of this quasi-religious and somewhat mystical dualism that underlies much of the work of Descartes and, on some readings, Chomsky’s work, I would propose a more concrete understanding of language. Language is a by-product of general properties of human cognition, rather than a special universal grammar, in conjunction with the constraints on communication that are common to evolved primates (such as the need for words to appear out of the mouth in a certain order, the need for units like words for things and events, and so on), and the overarching constraints of specific human cultures on the languages that evolve from them.

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.

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.

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. This also means that linguistics is not so much a part of psychology, as most contemporary linguists believe, as part of anthropology, as Sapir believed (in fact, this could mean that psychology itself is part of anthropology, as Sapir also believed).

The Pirahã men then asked, “Hey Dan, what does Jesus look like? Is he dark like us or light like you?” I said, “Well, I have never actually seen him. He lived a long time ago. But I do have his words.” “Well, Dan, how do you have his words if you have never heard him or seen him?” They then made it clear that if I had not actually seen this guy (and not in any metaphorical sense, but literally), they weren’t interested in any stories I had to tell about him. Period. This is because, as I now knew, the Pirahãs believe only what they see. Sometimes they also believe in things that someone else has told them, so long as that person has personally witnessed what he or she is reporting.

My evangelism professor at Biola University, Dr. Curtis Mitchell, used to say, “You’ve gotta get ’em lost before you can get ’em saved.” If people don’t perceive a serious lack of some sort in their lives, they are less likely to embrace new beliefs, especially about God and salvation.

Creation myths are no match for this demand for evidence.

I began to seriously question the nature of faith, the act of believing in something unseen. Religious books like the Bible and the Koran glorified this kind of faith in the nonobjective and counterintuitive—life after death, virgin birth, angels, miracles, and so on. The Pirahãs’ values of immediacy of experience and demand for evidence made all of this seem deeply dubious.

I came to admit to myself alone that I no longer believed in any article of faith or in anything supernatural. I was a closet atheist. And I was not proud of it. I was terrified that someone I loved might find out. I knew that eventually I must tell them. But in the meantime, I feared the consequences.

I have given up what I could not keep, my faith, to gain what I cannot lose, freedom from what Thomas Jefferson called “tyranny of the mind”—following outside authorities rather than one’s own reason.

as the American pragmatist philosopher and psychologist William James reminded us, we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously. We are no more nor less than evolved primates. It is rather ridiculous to think that the universe is a virgin saving herself for us. We are all too often the three blind men describing an elephant; or the man who looks on the wrong side of the road for his keys, simply because the light is better there. The Pirahãs are firmly committed to the pragmatic concept of utility. They don’t believe in a heaven above us, or a hell below us, or that any abstract cause is worth dying for.

they live most of their lives outside these concerns because they have independently discovered the usefulness of living one day at a time. The Pirahãs simply make the immediate their focus of concentration, and thereby, at a single stroke, they eliminate huge sources of worry, fear, and despair that plague so many of us in Western societies.

Let’s ask ourselves if it is more sophisticated to look at the universe with worry, concern, and a belief that we can understand it all, or to enjoy life as it comes, recognizing the likely futility of looking for truth or God?

I have never heard a Pirahã say that he or she is worried. In fact, so far as I can tell, the Pirahãs have no word for worry in their language.

The Pirahãs are an unusually happy and contented people. I would go so far as to suggest that the Pirahãs are happier, fitter, and better adjusted to their environment than any Christian or other religious person I have ever known.