Returning to the Pirahã - Round two of Everett's book 'Don't Sleep There Are Snakes'
Some curious, interesting and bizarre snapshots of life with the Pirahã. If you want the full story I def recommend you read the book.
Some curious, interesting and bizarre snapshots of life with the Pirahã. If you want the full story I def recommend you read the book.
Part One is here:
The Pirahã know little of the outside world, and what they do know is mediated by the 'caboclos' - part-indigenous Amazonians who speak Portuguese and live in cities. They share with the Pirahã a distaste of obesity and laziness. Self reliance and toughness matter.
The Pirahã language has one of the smallest sets of phonemes in the world, and constricts it further with designated male and female speech.
It makes up for this by tone, accent and volume of specific syllables. This results in a musical quality to the language, and many phrases are whistled, hummed, yelled or sung.
An example - hum speech, used for privacy or secrecy. The Pirahã don't whisper.
Unusually the language doesn't use plurals for its nouns, which makes communication vague to the ear of an outsider.
As we've seen, the Pirahã do not make use of foreign things, including thoughts, skills, religions, beliefs and so on. Their cultural horizon is so conservative and empirical, they could not talk about the possibility of Martians until they had seen them.
That time a Pirahã saw Everett eating a salad and it quickly became existential
That way the Pirahã speak about you as if you don't exist, when you're sat right next to them.
He realised that they don't orient themselves in the same way as Americans, but used the river as a reference point, as they do whenever they go anywhere new.
Among the most controversial revelations of Pirahã is the apparent lack of recursion - no relative clauses, sentences within sentences. This discovery was a major challenge to the academic acceptance of Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar.
What are the limits of a language with no recursion? Theoretically an upper bound on the grammar, although interestingly the Pirahã use recursion within their language, within their stories and tales.
Others have tried, and failed, to coax a creation myth out of the Pirahã.
Pirahã in the city. A brief visit to Pôrto Velho exposed the visitors to the beauty and sex appeal of Brazilian women, but they weren't overly keen on cars - "worse than jaguars"
Ultimately Everett questioned his ability to bring the Gospel to the Pirahã. They laughed at his stories of grace and pain, they told him to stop talking about Jesus.
True to their insistence on observed reality and direct experience, tales of Jesus never impressed them, a mere set of third hand stories.
He did the impossible though and translated the Gospel of Mark into Pirahã, but they were unaffected by it, except for the beheading of the John the Baptist.
The final straw comes as some villagers ask him to stop bringing Jesus around. Apparently he had chased some women around and tried to rape them!
On the one hand was a lone missionary, and on the other a culture which seemed, at its core, incapable and unwilling to accept another worldview. No Pirahã has ever been converted since documented contact in the 18th century. The Pirahã won, and he became an atheist.
The book finishes with his admission that in the battle for worldviews, the Pirahã had the more convincing.
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