A thread of excerpts from Daniel Everett's book 'Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes' about his time with the Amazonian Pirahãs.
I don't think there's another people quite as unusual as the Pirahã, and it's not just their famous language:
I don't think there's another people quite as unusual as the Pirahã, and it's not just their famous language:
Everett is confused why the Pirahã are insisting an angry spirit is shouting at them from the beach, clearly there is no one there.
He learns that they don't sleep for more than a few short bursts at a time, believing minimal sleep hardens a person, and keeps them safe from snakes and predators.
He starts to pick up the lingo - there are indeed only 11 or so phonemes. Later he'd learn that each verb has around 65,000 possible forms.
Everett gets his name. The Pirahãs don't like foreign things, including words. They also rename themselves every so often, or the jungle spirits do.
The Pirahã call themselves 'straight heads', while foreigners are 'crooked heads'.
Good luck trying to compare things, or describe colours... or talk about the past
Everett wishes he was amongst more interesting people - where is the culture? Where now the bright feathers and spoked houses? Why do the Pirahã sit around farting and don't even wake up to a horde of cockroaches scuttling over them? Do they care about anything?
They don't even make baskets that last, just temporary crappy things. It's not that they are incapable, they just don't care. Their necklaces for warding off evil spirits are made of beer-can pull tabs wtf??
"Why don't they make more canoes?" thinks Everett. He hires some boat builders to teach them to make their own, they excel at it, but have no interest in making another one. "Pirahã don't make canoes".
Similarly they know how to smoke and salt meat, but they never do it for themselves. Food preservation is pointless, just eat what you have, miss a day if needs be, then find some more food.
In fact why bother even eating regularly? Food will come, today we'll stay home, Americans eat too much.
They are equally relaxed about sex and marriage, with no formalities, frequent affairs and divorces. Sex is fun, fun to talk about, fun to do. Animals are the best role models.
Children are just little adults, and must learn to fend for themselves. Excessive comforting, or even helping a woman in childbirth is anti-Darwinian, anti-Pirahã. You live or die off your own internal resources.
Toddlers smoking fat cigarettes? Why not?
Pirahā childhood is different in every respect - few rules, little discipline, euthanasia for the weak and sick, freedom for the healthy, no coercion but sex play between prepubescents and adults is just fine.
Teaching them to count, or even draw straight lines is almost impossible, Everett discovered. They instinctively reject everything foreign, it is of no use to them.
Pirahã life is concerned only with immediate experience - all else is pointless. They have folklore, no creation myths, religious conversion is a fool's errand. How could you preach about Jesus' life if you never physically met him?
In fact, even believing in continuous identity is suspect. You are not the same person stepping into the river, a new name = a new identity, a culture concerned entirely with the present.
That's about halfway through the book, I'll either add more here or do a second thread later as I read.
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