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

Product Information

The second section is about the Piraha language. Even though the author, Everett, is a linguist and even though he makes reference to linguistic concepts throughout this section, he's writing for a general audience, so anyone should be able to follow this section just fine. His writing style is refreshingly free from jargon and academic buzz words, and his explanatory style is clear and easy to follow. That being said, this section is rich and fascinating for linguists who may have heard of the controversy surrounding recursion in Piraha. At age 18, Everett married the daughter of these missionaries, Keren Graham. He completed a diploma in Foreign Missions from the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago in 1975. Daniel and Keren Everett subsequently enrolled in the Summer Institute of Linguistics (now SIL International), which trains missionaries in field linguistics so that they can translate the Bible into various world languages. As a scientist, objectivity is one of my most deeply held values. If we could just try harder, I once thought, surely we could each see the world as others see it and learn to respect one another's views more readily. But as I learned from the Pirahas, our expectations, our culture, and our experiences can render even perceptions of the environment nearly incommensurable cross-culturally.

But I forgive Everett everything because anyone who says Chomsky is wrong and manages to undermine his whole silly theory is a friend of mine. Everyone continued to look toward the beach. I heard Kristene, my six-year-old daughter, at my side. The women wore the same sleeveless, collarless, midlength dresses they worked and slept in, stained a dark brown from dirt and smoke. The men wore gym shorts or loincloths. None of the men were carrying their bows and arrows. That was a relief. Prepubescent children were naked, their skin leathery from exposure to the elements. The babies' bottoms were calloused from scooting across the ground, a mode of locomotion that for some reason they prefer to crawling. Everyone was streaked from ashes and dust accumulated by sleeping and sitting on the ground near the fire. How's it working out for them? Well they're not exactly growing in size and they basically only survive because the Brazilian government protects their land, but apart from those minor concerns, they are quite happy. So much that, based on the frequency of smiling and laughter among the Piraha, some psychologists believe they are among the happiest people in the world. I realize that this is wholly unfair to everyone who likes to think they understand a culture because they lived as part of one for awhile. But you don't. And you never will.Noam Chomsky, Edward Sapir, Kenneth L. Pike, Franz Boas, William James, John Searle, Clifford Geertz, Marvin Harris I think this is a key and quite fun quote in the book. A theme that runs throughout the book is the idea of the inexplicable ties between language and culture, and that you can’t understand one without the other. Initially, it seems to the reader and to Everett himself that him wanting to eat a salad is completely separate from the fact that he doesn’t quite get the language yet. But as he goes on to discover, speaking the language is living the language. Languages have a vocabulary that goes with their culture, and as an American he doesn’t really “grok” some of the big ideas. As an example, a Piraha wouldn’t have a word for internet or television. These just aren’t things they have. But that means they would miss out on American English if they had no concept of the internet or television. They could parse the sentences but they wouldn’t get the references without them. Similarly, Dan can’t get the references — he’s not part of the in-crowd — if his behavior is so different than the Piraha. And that is why the salad he is eating is symbolic of his poor ability at the language. To speak the language well he must understand the culture and context for the Piraha, and there is no reason they would eat a salad. But I don’t really feel like the book is about how living with the Piraha caused him to abandon his religion. That is a big part of the end, and certainly a consequence of much of the work. But the bulk of the text is devoted to really trying to understand their culture, which he does through the “immediacy of experience” principle. The book provides many interesting examples regarding the Piraha language: there are only 11 or so phonemes in Piraha (compared to 44 in English), pitch in Piraha words constitute different communication "channels" (musical speech, hum speech, etc.), and (to me most fascinating) the presence of suffixes for "evidentials":

Kris stood on her toes and peered across the river. Then at me. Then at the Pirahas. She was as puzzled as I was.

Chapter 2: The Pirahã Language

Caboclo culture has impinged on the Pirahas almost daily for more than two hundred years. It is a macho culture, not unlike the cowboy culture I was raised in. 159 If there is one thing I know with certainty it is that machismo culture favors the men at the expense of women. Therefore, when Everett states this: But violence against anyone, children or adults, is unacceptable to the Pirahas. 104 or, this: The Pirahas seemed peaceful. I felt no aggression toward me or other outsiders, unlike in so many other new cultures I had entered over the years. And I saw no aggression internal to the group. Although, as in all societies there were exceptions to the rule, this is still my impression of the Pirahas after all these years. The peaceful people. 86 his contradictions leave me confused, which casts doubt, for me, on the clarity of his judgments. I need another perspective, preferably female, such as testimony from his wife, or the point of view of a female anthropologist. Is Everett blinded by male privilege? An article, The Origins of Speech, was published in Harper's Magazine, presenting in advance the content of this book.

On one of his research missions in 1993, Everett was the first to document the Oro Win language, one of the few languages in the world to use the rare voiceless dental bilabially trilled affricate (phonetically, [t̪͡ʙ̥]).I was now completely conscious, awakened by the noise and shouts of Pirahas. I sat up and looked around. A crowd was gathering about twenty feet from my bed on the high bank of the Maici, and all were energetically gesticulating and yelling. Everyone was focused on the beach just across the river from my house. I got out of bed to get a better look — and because there was no way to sleep through the noise. Ughhh I mentioned this book in my thesis proposal today and one of the committee members (linguistics professor) said to not take Everett's claims too seriously. The examples cited in this book were anecdotal, which is not necessarily always a problem. BUT - the issue was Everett has never been open to sharing his data (as he seemed to claim in this book).