(~110k words; 2.5 hours) 2008 anthropology/linguistic memoir by Daniel Everett about studying the famous Pirahã people and particularly their language. Some of the material is covered in the widely read New Yorker article or elsewhere: the Pirahã possess an astoundingly crude and simple language, the Blub of natural languages, without recursion. The 18 chapters are organized autobiographically with Everett's research conclusions interspersed mostly chronologically (Everett making no strong topical separations, which may annoy some readers despite being more realistic - one does not live and do science in discrete blocks of time, after all, and Everett neglects neither side of his life). Everett does go into some detail about the linguistic aspects, but not very much (which is good because I've always found linguistics excruciating) and it's very popularized and quick a read.

And a bit formulaic: a naive anthropologist joins a tribe, full of ideology (in Everett's case, Christian missionary zeal), discovers the challenges of aboriginal life, nearly kills himself and his family several times, gradually comes to appreciate and understand the tribe and its ancient wisdom, and returns to tell the tale. Everett's challenges include denying his wife & child were dying of malaria rather than typhoid fevers even as everyone he met insisted it was obviously malaria and mocked him for being a stupid foreigner who brought his family to Brazil, and discovering the fatalistic cruelty & bigotry of poverty - a riverboat captain and his crew taking 2 hours off to play a soccer game, a nurse humiliating him in front of everyone simply because he was Protestant and she was Catholic (after several weeks in an ICU, both wind up surviving), and mistaking the lack of overt coercion in the staunchly egalitarian Pirahã and barely defusing a drunken plot by the Pirahã to massacre them all - as they years later do massacre a group of Apurina they see as interlopers, or Everett's offhanded mention of a village-wide gangrape of one woman. (I am reminded of things Graeber and Scott have written about tribal societies often being organized to suppress the existence of leaders or income inequality.) Pirahã can be ostracized, and when ostracized, may be shot at. Like many groups, they do not tolerate alcohol well at all (Everett describes fleeing the village when they get particularly large quantities of alcohol from traders, and returning to see blood all over; I would have liked some more specifics about those events).

So what does he return with? A sketch of a society which is horribly fascinating. Unlike the controversial Ik, the Pirahã have been documented as existing for centuries in apparently identical to their current form; their language's only relation is extinct, and the Pirahã language is a language isolate, without counting or recursion or color words or comparisons or quantifiers or pluralization or disjunctions, minimal phatic elements, and so few sounds that it can be whistled, hummed, yelled, sung, or spoken, but also evidential grammar which indicates if the speaker is speaking of something from personal knowledge; all current Pirahã speak only small fragments and phrases of Portuguese or other major Brazilian languages (renaming foreigners in Pirahã in order to talk about them), and are despite 8 months of enthusiastic effort (to avoid being constantly cheated by river traders and understand money) are unable to learn to count to ten (making Everett's ability to predict when resupply airplanes come nigh magical to the Pirahã), add any numbers, draw straight lines, or write. No Pirahã is ever mentioned as learning well another language, converting to a religion, leaving the villages for the wider world, or mating with an outsider (nor outsiders ever accepted into the Pirahã). Everett recounts that the Pirahã lusted after fine river canoes, and he arranged for a skilled canoe builder to come and teach them and even bought the necessary tools as a gift to the Pirahã, and they enthusiastically made a canoe; 5 days later, they suddenly refused to make another one, saying "Pirahãs don't make canoes". They seem to need relatively little sleep, mature quickly, never plan ahead or make long-term investments (such as making wicker rather than palm leave baskets) or talk about the distant future/past (and will very rarely talk about anything they learned from someone now dead: "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"), and will casually throw away tools or things they will need soon. They know how to preserve meat, but never both unless intending to trade it; food is eaten whenever it's available, and since they fish at all hours, everyone might wake up at 3AM for fish. Growing and harvesting manioc is universal in the Amazon despite the need to process it to remove cyanide, but Everett says the Pirahã only grow & process manioc under the influence of an earlier missionary. They have no oral tradition but tell short repetitive stories of things that happened to them or someone they knew, no myths or origin stories (when asked: "Well, the Pirahãs say that these things were not made."), no relationships closer than grandparents (about the most distant directly observable given that Everett puts their life expectancy in the 40s, leading to minimal incest taboos, forbidding only full siblings or parents or grandparents). Burials are ad hoc, and bigger men will be buried sitting because, the Pirahã say, you need to dig less. They have difficulty understanding foreigners are like them, and can understand language, in a bizarre echo of the Chinese room:

Then I noticed another bemusing fact. 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. "Say, Dan, could you give me some matches?" Xip06gi asked me one day with others present. "OK, sure." "OK, he is giving us two matches. Now I am going to ask for cloth." Why would they talk about me in front of my face like this, as though I could not understand them? I had just demonstrated that I could understand them by answering the question about the matches. What was I missing?

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.

All of this is part of Everett's case that the Pirahã are, like Luria's peasant, ruled by an "immediacy of experience principle" and this yields an extraordinarily conservative culture on which new ideas and concepts roll off like so much water off a duck's back.

Their supernatural beliefs are particularly fascinating: dreams are simply interpreted literally and discussed as supernatural events that happened, and any random thing can be a 'spirit', with regular theatrical performances of 'spirits' who are obviously tribe men (but when asked, Pirahã deny that there is any connection between particular men and spirits, part of their weak grasp on personal identity (I was particularly amused by the Heraclitean tone of one anecdote: "Pirahãs occasionally talked about me, when I emerged from the river in the evenings after my bath. I heard them ask one another, 'Is this the same one who entered the river or is it kapioxiai [a dangerous spirit]?'"), where names change regularly and are considered new people). Some of the spirit appearances are group hallucinations or consensus, and Everett opens Don't Sleep with the anecdote of being part of a group of Pirahã staring at an empty sand bank where they see the spirit Xigagai saying he will kill anyone going into the forest that day. This example is a bit perplexing: what could possibly be the use of this and why would they either perceive it or go along with it? Similarly, it's hard to see how the spirit outside the village talking all night about how he wanted to have sex with specific women of the village is serving any role, and the tribesman reaction when Everett walks up and asks to record his ranting is hilariously deadpan: "'Sure, go ahead', he answered immediately in his normal voice". Other spirits make more sense:

Pirahãs listen carefully and often follow the exhortations of the kaoaib6gi. A spirit might say something like "Don't want Jesus. He is not Pirahã", or "Don't hunt downriver tomorrow", or things that are commonly shared values, such as "Don't eat snakes." Through spirits, ostracism, food-sharing regulation, and so on, Pirahã society disciplines itself.

The function and etiology of religion like this remains perplexing to me, but as a method of egalitarian coercion, it does at least explain incidents like the Pirahã ordering Everett to stop preaching about Jesus because the spirit of Jesus was causing trouble in another village and trying to rape their women with his three-foot long penis. Everett's deconversion from Christianity is probably the funniest I've read, but also very strange (some illiterate tribesmen should make no impact on your religious beliefs) and well exhibits the concrete and 'hard' tendencies:

...something that I thought would make them understand how important God can be in our lives. So I told the Pirahãs how my stepmother committed suicide and how this led me to Jesus and how my life got better after I stopped drinking and doing drugs and accepted Jesus. I told this as a very serious story. When I concluded, the Pirahãs burst into laughter. This was unexpected, to put it mildly. I was used to reactions like "Praise God!" with my audience genuinely impressed by the great hardships I had been through and how God had pulled me out of them. "Why are you laughing?" I asked. "She killed herself? Ha ha ha. How stupid. Pirahãs don't kill themselves" they answered. They were utterly unimpressed. It was clear to them that the fact that someone I had loved had committed suicide was no reason at all for the Pirahãs to believe in my God. Indeed, it had the opposite effect, highlighting our differences.

Overall, the picture painted is astonishing. How is this possible? How can such people and societies exist? But Everett does not find them pitiful, and is seduced by the Pirahã. Living by the plentiful river, with no native technology more advanced than a bow, the Pirahã have lowered their expectations to the point where the jungle is paradise. If there is no food, then it is an opportunity to "harden" themselves and practice self-reliance. (This is deliberate, as it's unlikely that if it was just the random chance of hunting, they would be so uniformly 100-125 pounds & 5-5.3 feet tall). The climate means they don't need much clothing or shelter, and if it's raining, they can make a primitive hut. If they are hungry, they can go into the jungle and hunt. If there are foreigners, they can beg for food. They amuse themselves by talking and dancing and having sex and hunting and fishing and being self-reliant. They have no worries most of the time, have few duties - even child-rearing is easy, as women give birth with little ceremony and die by themselves, the Pirahã are willing to euthanize inconvenient infants, and much like the child-rearing practices described by Jared Diamond, children are expected to injure themselves and learn - and are happy. Reading about them, they come off as a cross between bonobos and Chimpanzees with wireheading thrown in to boot.

So to ask again: how is this possible? Proximately, it's because Everett and FUNAI and others succeeded in getting a reservation created just for the Pirahã. With less pressure from more successful groups, they can continue to exist. But that doesn't answer how the Pirahã could ever come to exist. Everett does not speculate about this. A true anthropologist, everything is due to chance, environment, or culture, all of which ultimately spring from nothingness. (Where does culture come from? An anthropologist might give the Pirahã answer about where the world came from...)

I might believe in culture as an explanation, with the Pirahã being just the most extremely conservative surviving culture, if the claims were not so extreme. But can that really be the case?

Can we really appeal to culture as the explanation for why not a single Pirahã is literate, or can count, or has left the tribe to earn money, or brought a non-Pirahã woman in as wife, or total cultural stasis for at least 300 years, and all of the other singularities Everett claims? Is this the case for any other tribe ever, even the ones considered by their neighbors as the most primitive and least intelligent, like the Pygmies, or cases of cultural regression like the Tasmanians? Have the Amish ever succeeded in having an attrition rate <5%, and that with a relative level of wealth to the surrounding America far closer than the Pirahã relative to Brazilian? Why are all the other groups like the Warlpiri of Australia able to borrow numbers when numeral systems become useful, except the Pirahã? The Pirahã have been trading with Brazilians for at least two centuries, and have not taken any steps toward it. The endogamy and linguistic isolation is surprising; they seem more endogamous than the Bushmen, whose lineage may have diverged scores of thousands of years ago, or the castes of India. They have, for all anyone knows, been separate for thousands of years (the population history of the Americas is, likely in part because of well-founded fears that it will undermine rhetoric about being descendants of the first settlers rather than just the second-to-last wave, still obscure but the latest work is consistent with colonization/replacements yielding tribes with little genetic flow between groups & high geographic structure). This alone, along with their small population (both present and presumably founding), could yield major genetic drift on many traits.

On the other hand, gene-environment co-evolution would make tremendous sense; over millennia of reproductive isolation and specialization to their ecological niche, Pirahã have reached a local optimum where abstraction and planning are unnecessary and only lead to trouble and the potential for inequality, and either punishment or simply lack of additional fitness for such cognitive traits, which was continuously reinforced by natural & sexual selection over hundreds of generations (evolution does not stop at the neck), leading to a population many SDs from surrounding populations. ("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." Indeed.) This would be similar to Harpending & Cochran 2015's model of the Amish. This parsimoniously explains the observations without the need for backflips in interpretation of many anecdotes. For example, if the Pirahã culture is so extraordinarily conservative, why did they eagerly learn to make canoes that they prize highly, saying that Pirahã canoes are bad, and only 5 days later decide it was a bad idea? But Everett gives us a valuable clue in a different anecdote:

...I was surprised that the Pirahãs did not seem tired at all, however. In the village the Pirahã men avoided carrying heavy things. When I asked them for help in carrying boxes or barrels and such, they were always reluctant to respond. When they did help, they could barely lift things that I could carry with ease. I had just assumed that they were weak and lacked endurance. But I was wrong. They didn't normally carry foreign objects and they didn't like to display their ignorance of how to handle them.

Like anyone else, they are embarrassed by what they don't know - or have forgotten - and when asked, will make up excuses or dodge it some other way. Similarly, the failure to teach counting does not require some sort of subtle Pirahã ploy where they pretend to be interested and to learn how to count for very practical reasons and then sabotage it to comply with the dictates of Pirahã culture; it was simply that difficult, and any teacher will be familiar with students on whom instructions are writ on water. Supposedly a school was opened in 2012, so it would be interesting to hear whether a Potemkin school (recent events doubtless having reminded everyone that the Brazilian government has its fair share of problems with corruption & incompetence), what fraction ever enroll, how much attrition there is, and what performance levels any are able to reach.

Doubtless Everett would vociferously object that such speculation is wrong, but he would in order to protect research access to the Pirahã (the Brazilian government being as much a villain as hero in these sorts of things, engaging in such senseless practices as outlawing two-way radios for foreigners) and to avoid becoming a second Napoleon Chagnon, and probably commits the same fallacy that Diamond memorably does at the beginning of Guns, Germs, and Steel in arguing that the Pirahã were so much better than him at using the jungle they must be at least as intelligent as anyone else (ignoring that they have had lifetimes to learn that, and underperform everywhere else). If nothing else, the genetics of the Pirahã would be fascinating for pinning down when they diverged from other groups and how much genetic drift & directional selection has happened since.

Let us hope that future researchers will not bow to the local politics and continue studying only the safe, softball questions like the Pirahã syntax.