DON’T SLEEP, THERE ARE SNAKES: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle
Daniel L. Everett
Pantheon
Linguistics/Anthropology
ISBN: 9780375425028
Daniel L. Everett is a linguist who first visited the Pirahã tribe as a family man and missionary. His experiences over the next 30 years broke up his family, put him at odds with the linguistic establishment, turned him into an atheist --- and have provided us with a fascinating book, which is part Boy Scout adventure, part reality TV, part crisis of faith, part anthropological study, and part linguistic treatise.
The Pirahã (pronounced Pee-da-HAN) are a little known tribe of Amazonian Indians who live on the banks of two rivers in territory that, before Everett encountered them, had never been assigned officially to the tribe but that they defended, occasionally to the death. Largely peaceful, they have intermarried and retained a very primitive lifestyle that they consider to be in every way superior to that of outsiders, including Americans, for thousands of years. They are far less colorful than many Amazonian groups, with no decorative arts or inventions. They purchase some pots and axes and make their own bows and arrows. If a plane comes, boys will make models of the planes but will throw them away days later. They live in the crudest of rudimentary stick and leaf shelters and survive by eating manioc, which simply grows nearby without being cultivated, and by hunting and fishing. They have no special rituals, and apart from the occasional visit from a spirit to frighten or inform them, they have no religion.
When Everett took his family and went to live for shorter and longer periods of time with this strange tribe, he was expected to learn their language, make a translation of the Bible and then convert the natives. What he learned was that the language itself held the key to their culture. And discovering the essence of that culture, he realized that they would never be converted --- not as long as they remained as they are --- and he saw no reason to change them, just as they saw no reason to change themselves.
There is an illustrative story (among many) of Everett being approached by men in the tribe who wanted him to buy them a big canoe from a neighboring tribe. With all the right instincts as a missionary and development agent, he did everything needed to transfer the skill of canoe construction to them. He invited the neighbors to come in and demonstrate, and insisted that the Pirahã men work alongside them. Not long afterwards, the same men came to him for money to buy another big boat. “I told them they could make their own now. They said, ‘Pirahãns don’t make canoes.’”
Everett came to understand that the Pirahãns live entirely in the moment. They have no creation myths, no history past the living generations. Their language, which has only a few words, speaks primarily of immediacies, and is so dependent on tone that it can be hummed or whistled for clarification. All verbs have up to 65,000 combinations but only a handful of tenses. Everett is one of the few outsiders who ever learned to speak it, but he believes that after 30 years, the Pirahã people still do not regard him as a speaker any more than we consider a computer to be an English speaker. The tribe does not theorize or plan. They just exchange chit-chat. Yet the typical Pirahã is happier, Everett believes, “than any Christian or other religious person I have ever known.”
The Pirahãns did not accept Jesus because they had never met Him. Their simple view deeply affected Everett, who had been well trained as a missionary to confront and overcome almost any challenge --- superstition, malaria, filth, alligators. But this startling way of looking at life as entirely evidential shook his faith and eventually caused him to confess that he had lost it. Everett not only shocked his missionary peers and fractured his marriage; he sent ripples through the linguistic establishment with his claims about the construction of the Pirahã language, saying it did not build upon itself and was not recursive, which challenged the theories of the great Noam Chomsky. Chomsky’s linguistic doctrine postulates a universal grammar, ever-increasing, ever able to branch out and express ever more complex concepts. Everett was saying that, perhaps unique in the world, here in the Amazon was a group of people whose language did not grow, whose experience did not expand with increased contact with the outside, and who liked it that way.
As Chair of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Illinois State University, Everett has proven his points and earned his laurels. He still visits with the Pirahã.
--- Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott
Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.
© Copyright 1996-2009, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
