Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes
Okay, let’s go! Starting off in San Francisco, you take flight AA 1442 to Dallas/Fort Worth, then AA 1261 to Miami, then Gol G3 1478 on a red-eye flight to Brasilia. After a 14-hour layover in this Jerusalem of evenly-spaced rectangular grids, G3 1478 will carry you to Porto Velho; a city of 500.000 people, outposted fairly deep in the Amazon rainforest. Layovers and all, the first 7300 miles of this journey have taken you 33 hours.
You’ve only got 150 miles left to go, but those are going to be a bit of a chore. You could charter yourself a seaplane, but at this point you’re tired of flying. The small town of Humaitá is a 2 ½ hour drive away; you can hire a small boat there. For most of the next 24 hours, you’ll be going downriver on the Rio Madeira. Near the tiny settlement of Auxiliadora, it’s joined by the Rio dos Marmelos - now it’s just a few more hours upriver, going back south, until you finally arrive at the mouth of the river Maici. Here, along the river banks, lives a people called the Pirahã by outsiders, and they have no idea that their language is so strange and unusual it has made careers, broke families apart and ignited a decades-long conflict in the field of linguistics. And if they did, they would find it very funny.
In 1978, Daniel Everett, trained linguist and missionary, came with his family to the river Maici. For the past 200 years of trade relations and missionary work, despite many, many attempts, no outsider had managed to acquire more than a basic knowledge of Pirahã, no Pirahã had learned more than a few words of any other language, and not a single Pirahã had converted to Christianity.
In Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Everett describes how he spent his entire professional life trying to figure out what was going on.
How do you learn a language if there’s not a single bilingual speaker in the world? You point at things and write down everything you hear as accurately as you can.
Everett figures out very quickly why no outsider speaks Pirahã – even the basic building blocks of the language are a nightmare. Phonemes are the fundamental sounds of a language that differentiate one word from another. Most variants of English give you in the neighborhood of 20 vowels and 20 consonants to work with. Pirahã has very, very few phonemes: Three vowels and eight consonants. All the different words sound the same. Once he’s gotten used to that, he noticed that his interview partners keep varying the pronunciation apparently at random. The same words sound all different.
Here’s a very nice example, and if you strain your ears, you might even be able to relate a few words to their transcription!
Pirahã, as it turns out, is an intensely tonal language. So intensely tonal, in fact, that stuff like consonants and vowels seem more like an afterthought and all the meaning you need can be conveyed just via pitch – in the book, Everett at one point uses musical notation. Pirahã speech can be hummed, whistled, yelled, sung. Outsiders aren’t exactly fans. “It sounds like they are crying all the time,” says one official of Brazil’s Indian Protection Service. The river traders just call them “little animals”.
In 1984, Everett writes a paper about the sound structure of Pirahã.
The difference between “unusual” and “unique” is immense. If you find something “unusual”, that’s very nice and interesting. If you find something “unique”, it’s probably in conflict with the scientific consensus, the theory de jour, and people will be very mad at you. He starts getting hate mail and fan mail. In the end, Peter Ladefoged, probably the world’s leading expert on phonetics, tells him: “I’m skeptical of the claims you have made about Pirahã’s sound system.” He says as they meet in the arrivals area at Porto Velho airport, and Ladefoged's baggage includes all manner of high-tech microphones. The scientific process works; the theory of sound structures in human speech has to be rebuilt.
Everett begins to embark on his real heresy. He’s been around the Pirahãs for many years now, on and off, and he’s really starting to get the hang of the language. He’s also gotten familiar with the culture, and he noticed how different they are, both language- and culture-wise, from the other tribes in the area, often Christianized and adopting Western habits.
Everett structures his stories about Pirahã life and his discussions of linguistics in a very clever way. Here’s an example: On multiple occasions, he accompanies them on hunting or foraging trips into the jungle and invariably gets lost; his companions find their way around with ease. Later, he talks about his frustrations trying to find out the terms for “left” and “right” – as usual, the answers he gets are contradictory and apparently random. The puzzle clicks into place when he eventually figures out that Pirahãs orient themselves not relative to their own body, but relative to the river Maici. The directions aren’t “left” and “right” and “forwards” and “back”: They are “upriver”, “downriver”, “into the jungle” and “to the river”. How clever is that? When you’re in the jungle, knowing where the river is is a question of life and death. If you have to express directions in absolute terms all the time, you learn orienteering from the moment you start talking, with the river as your fixed point of reference.
And the river is pretty much a fixed point of reference. From a certain perspective, Pirahã society looks a bit like what happens when you just keep asking “Do you really need…?”
Permanent housing? What for? The temperature is perfect to walk around half-naked all year round and nothing you could feasibly build is going to keep all the critters out. So, we’re doing rain shelters in the rainy season and sun shelters to keep the smaller kids in the shade and that’s it. There might be tarantulas and cockroaches crawling all over you when you’re asleep, so what? Also, do you really need 8 hours of sleep? Harden yourself! We’re going to take naps and get a few hours in at various times of day: “Don’t sleep, there are snakes.”
The baskets they make fall apart after a few uses. It would be easy to switch to a stronger material like wicker, but why? You just need the basket when you go foraging, they’re perfectly fit for purpose. Just make a new one. Storing and preserving food? The Pirahãs never do that for themselves, only to trade. Year-round, you can just get fish from the river or hunt or forage for a few hours in the jungle and you’re set. If you really don’t feel like fishing or hunting, you can just talk and laugh and play pranks and not eat for a day or two, what’s the big deal if you’re feeling hungry? Harden yourself.
Sure, they will happily trade for shotguns and keep asking Everett for medicine, but every man knows how to craft powerful bows. Even alcohol, that perennial bane of indigenous peoples – well, they’re more than happy to get blackout drunk, but they’re not going to specifically start looking for it. They don’t want to depend on anything from the outside world. Everybody pulls their own weight and that’s how things are supposed to be.
Everett respects and admires the Pirahãs enough to resist all notions of the “noble savage”. His descriptions of the self-sufficient contentment of the Pirahãs are often followed by episodes of (often alcohol-fueled) violence, and he illustrates the consequences of the pull-your-own-weight-by-your-bootstraps mentality very, very clearly:
“The woman was in agony. ‘Help me, please! The baby will not come,’ she cried out. The Pirahãs sat passively, some looking tense, some talking normally. ‘I’m dying! This hurts. The baby will not come!’ she screamed. No one answered. It was late afternoon. Steve started towards her. ‘No! She doesn’t want you. She wants her parents,’ he was told, the implication clearly being that he was not to go to her. But her parents were not around and no one else was coming to her aid. The evening came and her cries came regularly, but ever more weakly. Finally, they stopped. In the morning Steve learned that she and the baby had died on the beach, unassisted.”
This is what an average life expectancy of 45 years looks like in practice.
It’s pretty obvious that culture and vocabulary influence each other. For instance, a complete gibberish phrase like “I updated my priors” would only make sense if you worked for the Vatican, maintaining the personnel database of various monastic orders. Possible interactions between culture and grammar however, the underlying structures of language, the rules that determine how content is carried - that’s a lot more contentious.
Back in the 70s, the ever ongoing nature-vs-nurture-debate had, in the field of linguistics, swung all the way to “nature”, and Noam Chomsky’s theories of grammar had revolutionized the field.
To keep it short, Universal Grammar basically places human language development on the same innate level as something like walking. Not only will every healthy human being learn to walk on two legs, but apart from some minor differences, everybody has essentially the same gait, constrained by rules of biomechanics: Knees only bend a certain way.
Human language, according to UG, is pretty much the same: Every healthy human being is going to learn a language, and apart from some minor differences, everybody uses essentially the same fundamental set of rules to construct their grammar. Like eventually learning how to walk on two legs, this is a deep, fundamental, biological component of the human being - and like the fact that knees only bend a certain way, certain grammatical structures are invariable constraints that all humans share.
The Pirahãs have never heard of the grand theories about how human beings are supposed to function. They merrily ignore everything you might have foolishly thought of as universal human experiences. There are no color terms in the language; “like blood” or “not yet ripe” is the closest you can get. Everett had assumed they’d count “One, two, few, many” like many hunter-gatherers; he has to revise his assumptions. They don’t count at all! If you want to denote a quantity of things, you get “bigness” and “smallness” to work with. Harden yourself.
There are no creation myths - or any other myths. No folk tales, no fiction. There’s no gods. There’s spirits in the forest. Sometimes, only the Pirahãs can see them. Sometimes, the spirits will speak through an individual. The spirits seem not entirely otherworldly. They can give advice or threaten, help or hinder, give suggestions or advice, but also:
“This kaoáíbógí also likes sex, and he frequently talks about his desire to copulate with village women, with considerable detail provided.”
(My copy of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is staring at me as I write this, somehow looking smug.)
The Pirahãs don’t do art or decorations of any kind. They wear a few stones for spirit-related purposes, but apparently with no regards to aesthetics. They do bury their dead, but there’s no rituals connected to their funerals. They grieve, they move on.
Their relationship to knowledge and truth can be described as Holmesian - from the early stories:
“[On Dr. Watson finding out that Holmes neither knows nor cares about the Copernican model] "But the Solar System!" I protested.
"What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."”
That’s a Pirahã attitude.
Proponents of Universal Grammar see recursion, the “infinite use of finite means”, as the one non-negotiable difference between human speech and mere animal communication, and it has to be on the level of grammar - clauses, phrases, words. Every human language needs to be able to generate sentences of arbitrary length (e.g. “the cat ate the rat that ate a rat that ate a rat” etc.).
Neither Everett nor I are sure why that’s so important, but here is the absolute focal point of all controversy about his research. Because he finds no instances of recursion. No relative clauses, nothing so much as a second verb in a phrase.
Going back to our previous example, this is not like claiming that Pirahãs walk backwards - it’s akin to claiming that their knee joints are reversed. Everett thought he had made it when he got to work from an office across the hall from Chomsky’s himself. Now his reputation evaporates. He misanalyzed the data. He must be mistaken. His claims are impossible. He’s a liar, a charlatan. Some of Chomsky’s followers redefine “recursion” to the point of meaninglessness. Angry papers are still written today, invariably by people who don’t speak a word of Pirahã. In the meanwhile, Universal Grammar, once thought to be the basis for a Grand Unified Theory of Language, has not exactly lived up to its promise; theoretical linguistics are as splintered and contentious as ever.
Everett talks about a lot of his views in opposition to Chomsky and Chomsky-ish theorizing, still not quite able to let go of the most powerful of intellectual father figures, but he forges on. The unusual qualities of Pirahã culture and the unusual qualities of their language have to be related, and he thinks he’s found the key. He calls it “immediacy of experience principle” and formulates it such:
“Declarative Pirahã utterances contain only assertions related directly to the moment of speech, either experienced by the speaker or witnessed by someone alive during the lifetime of the speaker.”
This rule is grammatical as much as it is cultural: We don’t talk abstractions. Their unique lack of creation myths follows naturally. Nobody you know saw the world being made, so it’s not relevant. Everything that is not clearly referenced to the here and now goes out the window - and with it colors and counting. With it, worries about the future, notions of the divine or ideas of the afterlife. And do you really need…?
It is a compelling argument: Your language will be able to express everything that’s relevant to your culture. If you don’t need abstraction because there’s nothing to count and nothing to plan for, nothing abstract you need to talk about, your language won’t have many ways to communicate abstract concepts.
Everett leaves the inevitable failure of his missionary work, his faith and his family to the very last. It’s a good move: After 260 pages of demonstrating, again and again, the hard-nosed pragmatism of their language and culture, their absolute disinterest in anything abstract, conceptual, intangible – you know what’s going to happen.
He tells the Pirahãs of his personal journey to God. His alcoholism, his drug addiction, the suicide of his stepmother. The Pirahãs find this immensely funny:
“She killed herself? *laughter* How stupid. Pirahãs don’t kill themselves!”
The Gospel of Mark is dutifully translated and checked for accuracy with the help of some Pirahãs. Everett decides to record it so the Pirahãs can play it at their leisure. This doesn’t work – they treat the Gospel of Mark as entertainment. He tries again. The next recording is made by a native speaker to eliminate any possibility of mispronouncing the word of God. The Pirahãs seem to take it more seriously this time around – until word spreads that Piihoatai, the voice actor, wasn’t actually talking about something he had witnessed himself.
More attempts, more failures. Jesus somehow turns into a spirit with a foot-long penis, scaring the village women.
Eventually, Everett is done. He recalls one of his instructors: “You gotta get them lost before you can save them.” But they’re not lost. They always know where the river is.
Shaken by the enduring, deep satisfaction of the Pirahãs with their lives without any grand, overarching truths and explanations, he loses his own faith. His wife divorces him. His family breaks up. The Pirahãs laugh. The river remains.
Look, this is a fantastic book. Read it. I haven’t even mentioned that it’s also just a very fine travel book, replete with danger and fascination and scarred river pirates.
It’s infuriatingly short: My edition is 300 pages exactly, and that’s including the appendix. Everett keeps teasing you with things like the Pirahãs’ spirit LARP sessions, and while you’re reading on, forming ideas about what role they might play in keeping society together, you’ve suddenly reached the epilogue.
You think about the trade-off between complete mastery of all worth knowing and all worth doing, and a confused, incomprehensible modern society where nobody will leave you to die on a beach if your pregnancy becomes complicated – but the book runs out of space before you’ve learned enough.
You leave with the feeling that you’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s going on, that there’s so many more pieces of the puzzle just barely out of view, and maybe that’s on purpose: You get the impression that Everett, after dedicating his entire life to study and fieldwork, might feel the same.