The Pirahã are not afraid of death—while being alive, they have no reason to worry about it. They don’t plan for what will be and don’t reminisce about what was. They’re cheerful, busy with the here and now—yet they triggered one of the largest linguistic wars of the world.
The Pirahã people, inhabitants of the Amazon River basin, refer to themselves híaitíihí, “straight,” while all outsiders are aoói—“crooked, twisted.” The híaitíihí speak a language that is unrelated to any other living dialect in the world. It encompasses only eleven sounds, and women only use ten. It lacks numerals and color names. Daniel Everett, a missionary-turned-anthropologist and the only person from outside of the tribe who knows the language well—claims that its syntax has no recursion, a characteristic which, according to the prevalent linguistic theory, is fundamental to any human language, and even distinguishes Homo sapiens as a species. Due to this controversial theory, the world heard about the 300-strong tribe and its researcher. Moreover, it sparked a frenzy in the world of science, engaging the most brilliant minds in a heated debate.
A Brazilian Western
In 1977 the twenty-six-year-old Everett lands an avionette on the Maici River in the Amazon. He has an ambitious plan to learn the language of the isolated people and he successfully does so. The young missionary linguist’s work is to be crowned by a translation of the Bible. He believes that introducing the Indigenous people to the Book of Revelation will cause them to convert to Catholicism, and this is where he utterly fails. Everett describes nearly three decades of his research on the Pirahã language and culture in Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes published in 2008. This report, written with much gusto, also documents the process of how the author dissolves into the culture of his studies.
Everett was sent to Amazonia by the Summer Institute of Linguistics—an organization associated with the American Presbyterian Church that analyzes the languages of Indigenous peoples for evangelizing purposes. The difficulty of the mission is that no one in the Pirahã tribe speaks any foreign language apart from rudimentary Portuguese. For the scholar with a talent for languages, this won’t be the biggest obstacle. What’s more difficult is that Everett wasn’t prepared for an encounter with a different culture—for this he almost paid with his own life, and the lives of his family.
The Pirahã consider their land, situated around the Maici River, to be the best place to live. In both rainy and dry seasons the river provides them with enough food, supplemented by wild harvesting and hunting in the Amazon jungle. These favorable conditions permit a life in which material culture is reduced to a minimum, and the outside world’s offer of consumption doesn’t appear attractive to the híaitíihí (with a few exceptions). This inwardness and the lack of positive value assigned to the wonders of the outside world distinguishes the Pirahã from other tribes. The Pirahã—first encountered by Portuguese gold prospectors over 200 years ago— preserved their cultural model, wisely choosing not to intensify their contact with outsiders.
Apart from missionaries—Everett and his two predecessors—merchants plying their river trade provide sporadic communication with the outside world. These merchants are most frequently caboclos of mestiço extraction, who purchase the Amazonian bounty, mainly Brazil nuts, in exchange for items that the Pirahã consider useful—fish hooks, batteries, clothes or firearms, as well as cachaça—sugarcane alcohol. (Cachaça trade is banned on Indigenous territories by FUNAI, or the National Indian Foundation.)
“Bitter water”—as the Pirahã call cachaça—will be the catalyst of the narrator’s anthropological growth. The village men, intoxicated by a Brazilian merchant, let themselves be persuaded to kill the missionary and his family in exchange for a new shotgun. Everett, woken up in the middle of the night, hears the drunk men spurring each other on to kill him. Like the lone ranger from an old western, Dan hides his wife Karen and their three children in the only room with a lock and goes straight to the hut where the slurring is coming from. He disarms the neighbors, who, sadly, include some of the language teachers he’s befriended, and returns with their arsenal—bows, machetes, and two shotguns—to his veranda, to guard his sleeping family. The next day he reaches an understanding with the villagers. This nocturnal adventure gives him food for thought. He was baffled by the possibility that the river merchant who thought that the white intruder was ruining his business found it so easy to persuade Everett’s village informants, with whom he’d grown close with during his six-month stay, to attempt murder. Everett realizes that he knows nothing about his hosts’ culture and just studying the language is not enough.
Focused Only on the Present
The researcher explains that his initial inaction in that area was due to being disappointed with the scant material culture and lack of distinct rituals. In the dry season, the Pirahã live on riverine beaches, satisfied with flimsy bowers that offer some shade. In the rainy season, when the tide rises, they construct makeshift huts—scattered haphazardly along the river—they don’t form any structural plans known from ethnological accounts of Yanomami or Bororo architecture. They make bows and arrows, and baskets for carrying nuts—which, interestingly, they discard after an exchange is made, and weave new ones before the next excursion. There is no attachment to objects. They have their own bark pirogues, but they prefer to buy or steal Brazilians’ sturdier canoes. Trying to help his “wards,” Everett even hires an instructor to teach the híaitíihí how to build a kayak. They successfully construct a boat, but they buy the next one from their neighbors, as before. “Pirahãs don’t make canoes,” they tell the surprised Everett. Importing outside know-hows is not of value to them.
Another feature of the Pirahã culture that Everett discovers—one that turns out to be essential—is their focus on the present and their related lack of interest in everything that’s beyond direct experience. The Pirahã live in the here and now, and they are happy. Perhaps even one of the happiest in the world, as later calculated by MIT psychologists during Everett’s next stay on the banks of the Maici. If one of the hunters asks the researcher about the customs of his country, it’s so that they have a reason to laugh, not to learn something that goes beyond his experience.
Can an Empiricist Be Converted?
The limited field of experience turns out to be the reason for the failure of evangelization. The Pirahã are only serious about events they’ve observed themselves, or perhaps know from eyewitness accounts. Everett quotes the following conversation with the villagers:
“Dan, tell us: does Jesus look more like you or like us?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never seen him.”
“Maybe your father saw him?”
“No, Jesus lived a very long time ago.”
“Then why are you even telling us about him?”
Everett, already equipped with anthropological and conceptual apparatus, finds an almost complete lack of ritual in the culture. He links this to an aversion towards formally codifying abstract categories and an attachment to the tangible. He also finds no origin myths, which should—according to ethnological theory—bind every human community. Everett associates this lacuna with a reluctance to speak of everything that is distant in time. He does, however, note events—dances during which the villagers impersonate the spirits of the dead or of the jungle. It could also be that it’s the spirits that impersonate the villagers, because these performances are mediumistic.
Contact with spirits is an everyday experience and seems as real as evening fireside chats with other villagers. One day in 1980, Everett is woken up by a bustle at the riverside. He runs there with his daughter; the crowd is watching the opposite riverbank, but neither Dan nor his daughter Kris see anything there. The villagers are looking at a spirit called Xigagai, who—according to their reports—is shouting that anyone who goes into the jungle today will die. Everett then realizes the discrepancy between him and the community that he’s become close with.
Despite their mutual affection, the Pirahã don’t consider Everett to be one of them. The American isn’t willing to give up his habits, including dietary ones. When, weary of the local diet, he orders lettuce from a remote town—one of his teachers in the village tells him: “Dan, you’re not Pirahã. The Pirahã don’t eat lettuce.” He tries to close the distance, “get off the veranda” (his house is much sturdier than the villagers’ huts), and participate in community life. He joins the barefoot hunters in the jungle, but because he wears all the accouterments of a colonial conqueror, he’s making so much noise that the hunters leave him in the forest and go on alone. A real difference between them is revealed when—according to the rules of puritan upbringing—Everett decides to punish his eldest daughter for inappropriate behavior. He orders her to take a switch and wait for him outside the village. Seeing the crying child, the villagers inquire about his intention. They don’t use corporal punishment themselves; the unfulfilled missionary gets a valuable lesson from the Indigenous people and gives it up, too.
Everett wanted to preach to the Pirahã to protect them from the fear of death—only they don’t experience that fear. In their culture, death is tangibly close, and they don’t deny it. Eschatological promises don’t appeal to happy people who live in the present. Everett concludes that the culture he comes from—with its institutionalized religion—has remained at the stage of postulate since its dawn and has nothing to offer to happy minimalists. Moreover, it no longer appeals to him either. Years later, Everett becomes an atheist—admitting that it’s due to the influence of the culture he’d studied. When he informs his family about it, his wife divorces him and two of his three children stop talking to him. That is Everett’s personal balance sheet of his journey to Pirahã country. But that is not the end of his struggles with hermetic communities.
Among Linguists
The experiences that underlie the failures of Everett’s personal life become a springboard for his academic career, which gains momentum with an article published in 2005 in Current Anthropology. In it, he poses the thesis that the language he is studying doesn’t feature recursion—the flow of one structure into another. In Pirahã syntax, it’s impossible to embed one sentence into another. The statement “Dan says he knows God, who created the stars” is impossible; it will be uttered as: “Dan says he knows God. God created the stars.” This thesis will set Everett on a collision course with the world’s most influential linguist, Noam Chomsky. He’s the one who formulated the concept of generative grammar, which has dominated the field of language studies for half a century—it claims that linguistic competence—an ability to learn a language by recognizing its structures that is embedded into the genetic code of Homo sapiens—is an inherent feature, common to all humanity. It’s also worth noting Chomsky’s favorite cosmic metaphor, a good illustration of the universal character of his language theory—“A Martian scientist observing humans might conclude that there is just a single language, with minor variants.”
In the renowned 2002 paper “The Faculty of Language,” co-published with M.D. Hauser and W.T. Fitch in Science, the doyen of linguistics announces that recursion is an intrinsic component of every human language. It’s also what differentiates human language from the ways other living beings communicate. Chomsky surrounds himself with a group of followers ready to stamp out any heresy within the universal theory of language. Everett, publishing his article three years later, doesn’t have to wait long for a reaction. Critics suspect him of falsifying his research (after all, nobody but him knows Pirahã); they also make the accusation that his paper is nothing but an attempt to make a name for himself in the world of science by criticizing Chomsky’s authority. In an interview for the Brazilian daily Folha de S.Paulo, Chomsky himself calls his former colleague and student (in the 1980s, Everett worked at MIT’s linguistics department) a charlatan. The debate gets heated. Tom Bartlett, the respected editor of the science section of The Chronicle Review, describes linguistic spats like this: “Linguists are a deeply divided group of scientists who aren’t even able to agree on what it is that they’re arguing about and who have a tendency to criticize their opponents and call them fools, fraudsters, or both fools and fraudsters. Similar divisions exist to varying degrees in all fields, but linguists seem unusually antagonistic. The word ‘brutal’ appears again and again, as does ‘malicious,’ ‘ridiculous,’ and ‘juvenile.’”
Starting a feud with one of the most important intellectuals of the 20th century comes at a cost. In the Australian documentary The Grammar of Happiness Everett can be seen organizing another expedition to the banks of the Maici, this time accompanied by cognitivist Ted Gibson, an MIT professor. They want to collect material for a computer analysis of the Pirahã language to demonstrate, on models of its possible grammars, its lack of recursion. The expedition turns into a fiasco as FUNAI (The National Indian Foundation of Brazil) retracts Everett’s permit to enter the reservation, explaining it as a way to protect the Indigenous culture from the missionary. The real reason is a letter, or rather a denunciation, sent by a Brazilian linguist Cilene Rodriguesto, to the institution that grants permits for research in the Amazonia. In her letter to FUNAI, she accuses Everett of racist conclusions found in his research. Apart from the act of transgressing the standards of scientific discourse, the accusation should be considered misguided. The American researcher values the tribe’s knowledge, which encompasses the local environment, and admits that even Pirahã children know thousands of species of the Amazon’s flora and fauna. Even if he romanticizes the Pirahã in his book, using the stereotype of the “noble savage,” he also frequently emphasizes the functionality of the way they live. He also examines his own missionary past with disarming honesty: “I understood at a late stage that it is a form of colonialism.”
In the film, Everett is trying to intervene—unsuccessfully—at the FUNAI headquarters in Brasília. He also attempts to give a lecture at a local university, but the room is almost empty—apart from a handful of students there are only two employees of the linguistics department. One of the professors sympathetically apologizes and clarifies the reason for the boycott: “Our department is very ‘generative.’” Another group tells him: you are not one of us.
Vying for Precedence
In Language: The Cultural Tool, published in 2012, Everett develops the thesis contained in his previous book as well, and claims that language cannot be explained without referring to the culture in which it’s embedded—opposing the universal school of thought. For Everett, the lack of any perfective tenses, quantifiers, numerals or color names in the Pirahã language stems directly from their cultural values—a focus on unmediated experience and the present. The language also has multiple channels of discourse—it can be whistled, murmured, and even shouted. This is possible because it’s tonal (like, for example, Chinese), so the same word can have multiple meanings, such as the above-mentioned aoói—depending on the intonation and stress it can mean “skin,” “ear,” “nut shell,” and “outsider.” Each channel is used in different circumstances—the whistling one is used when hunting, the shouting is used during the rainy season. According to Everett, this is further proof of the precedence of culture over language. Thus, he revisits the hypothesis of linguistic relativity formulated by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf—anthropologists who, in the early 20th century, studied the languages of North America’s Indigenous peoples. They reached the conclusion that languages can only be explained through cultural differences. This statement contradicts the universal grammar paradigm, which emphasizes similarities in all human languages, and has side-lined relativistic theories for many years.
Changed and battered, Everett leaves the linguistic battlefield. In his most recent book How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention, he goes deeper into time (how very un-Pirahã!), focusing on Homo erectus and the origins of language. As seen in the last scene of The Grammar of Happiness, on the banks of the Maici, bathrooms are being built and a generator has been installed, and the young Pirahã are learning Portuguese in the village school. The conservative model that doesn’t admit external values is breaking down. However, the principle of direct experience, which allows for the elimination of excess information, is something worth thinking about while living in the civilization filled with the hum of incessant bit streams.
Translated from the Polish by Marta Dziurosz
This translation was re-edited for context and accuracy on February 3, 2023.
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