Don't Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle

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The Pirahas 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. Here, in fact, is a book about the relationship between language and culture; embedded within it comes the story of a missionary who went to convert the natives and ended up losing his faith. He shares many details I found interesting such as how they make their bows and arrows, their use of exocentric navigational orientation, and hum speech, to name a few.

It is the immediacy of experience principle, central to Piraha culture, which is the downfall of Everett’s missionary work among the people. One part of the Piraha language that fascinates me the most is how they don’t have no past tense and have no concept of the distance future or ancient past.That this plan may not succeed is indicated in the prologue, where he is woken by Pirahas anxious about the presence of an evil spirit on the beach. It will take him some time to come to terms with the fact that “two cultures … could see reality so differently. But I don’t really feel like the book is about how living with the Piraha caused him to abandon his religion. As I continued to read more of the book as well as had the opportunity to listen to an interview done with Daniel Everett these strange concepts began to make more sense to me.

The fact is that every phenomena has a multitude of explanations, and it's incredibly problematic that Everett argues from a position of experiential superiority (I lived with them, I know them, I am them, etc. That said, there are others who defend Whorf and argue that he had real insights and was essentially correct in his theories, even if the Hopi example wasn’t his best. My main takeaways were about several core ideas: the immediacy of experience principle, how the culture and language are connected, and that there’s not necessarily a “right” way of doing things, just one we are more used to. The Piraha don’t have words for numbers or colors because in their culture there is no use for them. While most anthropologists would consider this a significant event, Everett refers to it in parentheses.Noam Chomsky and his adherents especially have a lot at stake since Chomsky's entire theory of human language rests on the idea of recursion. Children were usually laughing, chasing one another, or noisily crying to nurse, the sounds reverberating through the village. Everett’s heroic efforts were vexed by the fact that no other language on Earth bore the slightest resemblance to Pirahã. Though this was a culturally shocking experience, I can at least understand their culture and respect that their “immediacy of experience” does not mean that they are cruel when it comes to death, but rather they think and talk in the present so it only made sense to them not to let the baby suffer any further.

It's very much a book for anyone who has ever struggled to learn a language (particularly a minority language), as Everett labours with translating the Bible into Piraha – until he realises it is futile. While reading this book for class I as well as my classmates were amazed at how different their language was to ours. Interesting stuff — but I wonder if the Pirahas are really doing without superstition, when they’re worried about the presence of evil spirits. Pirahã has only 3 vowels and 8 consonants, one of which is a glottal stop, and amongst many other unusual features it does not contain cardinal or ordinal numbers (which Everett suggests is because numbers and counting are generally abstractions outwith the IEP).They can refer to "some" or "more", but lack a counting system, or even a way to specify a single object. They don’t preserve food, even though they know how to (and decline to use other knowledge learned from outside cultures, such as how to build a dugout canoe). This is described as a major challenge to Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar, since it is recursion that allows for the formation of an infinite number of sentences. Maybe it’s just that, for them, there’s no distinction between a superstition and a rationally justified belief, because they’re not in the business of justifying their beliefs at all.

When the tribe eagerly asks him to teach them to count because they are tired of getting screwed by the caboclo river traders, they attempt vainly for 8 months and then claim such a feat is impossible and give up. On page 169 we have this story of a little boy who is upset that his grandmother will not let him have a Coca-Cola.Everett gives the example that the Pirahas view dreams as indistinguishable from waking life, because both are things they see and therefore are to be treated in the same way. They thought that the Pirahãs were lazy and stupid, because they had zero interest in pursuing wealth, or plundering their ecosystem. In many languages, including English, it is the idea that you can have sentences within sentences or phrases within phrases to build up arbitrarily large sentences.