DON’T SLEEP, THERE ARE SNAKES

Rich account of fieldwork among a tribe of hunter-gatherers in Brazil.

In 1977, the author was a 27-year-old Christian missionary determined to convert the Pirahã, a group of 300 living along the Maici River in the Amazon rainforest. Everett (Languages, Literatures, and Cultures/Illinois State Univ.) shares the discoveries he made over the course of three decades, during which he spent a total of seven years with these simple, hardy and seemingly endlessly happy people. The Pirahã have no rituals, no art, no myths and no concern about the future, and they spend much time laughing, he writes; they live in the present moment and believe “life is good.” Aspiring to translate the Bible into Pirahã, Everett gradually learned the difficult language, which is tonal like Chinese and has an unusually small set of phonemes: three vowels and eight consonants. The author found that the Pirahã could often simply dispense with their phonemes and sing, hum or whistle conversations. Drawing on his doctoral training in linguistics, the author argues that the language emerges from the tribe’s culture and contradicts the prevailing notion—based on linguist Noam Chomsky’s theory of a universal grammar—that biology accounts for the evolution of human grammars. Everett’s views on the significant role culture plays in language, which have been controversial since they were first expressed in academic journals in the 1980s, are nicely explicated here and will introduce non-specialists to the fascinating ongoing debate about the origin of languages. He believes the Pirahãs’ emphasis on living in the moment so shapes their lives that they base their perception of reality solely on direct experience. (Hence their reaction to Everett’s stories about Christ: “Have you met this man?”) Not only did the missionary fail to convert the Pirahã; he lost his own faith, won over by the appeal of “life without absolutes.”

Despite his understated style, Everett’s experiences and findings fairly explode from these pages and will reverberate in the minds of readers.