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.

One of the things about Pirahã that immediately fascinated me was the lack of what linguists call “phatic” communication

There are no words for thanks, I’m sorry, and so on.

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.

We all perceive the world the way our cultures have taught us. If our culture-constrained perceptions hinder us, however, then for

the particular environment in which they do so, our cultures obscure our perceptions of the world and put us at a disadvantage.

scientific theories can paint themselves into a corner and that scientists will then be trapped unless someone blasts a hole in the building and proclaims freedom to do science outside the confines of the previous approach. This blasting takes place as recalcitrant facts begin to accumulate, facts that a particular theory can only handle with a lot of patchwork and tearing and straining—what Kuhn calls “auxiliary hypotheses.”

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.

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. No fear of death. Their faith was in themselves.

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 give us an opportunity to consider what a life without absolutes, like righteousness or holiness and sin, could be like. And the vision is appealing.

They have no craving for truth as a transcendental reality. Indeed, the concept has no place in their values. Truth to the Pirahãs is catching a fish, rowing a canoe, laughing with your children, loving your brother, dying of malaria.

We need, at a minimum, to identify which languages are endangered around the world, to learn enough about each of them to produce a dictionary, a grammar, and a written form of the language, to train

native speakers of these languages as teachers and linguists, and to secure government support for protecting and respecting these languages and their speakers.

When a language dies without documentation, we lose a piece of the puzzle of the origin of human language. But perhaps more important, humanity loses an example of how to live, of how to survive in the world around us.

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.