Don't Sleep, There are Snakes by Daniel Everett - Summary

Preface Science is not only about researchers working a lab wearing coats, it can also be pursued by lone individuals putÝng themselves in strange and unknown situations, feeling lost and over their heads. This book is about scientific work of the latter type as it documents the writer experience living with the Piraha – pidahàs - Indians of Brazil, in the Amazonian jungle. Prologue The writer recalls a scene happened on a Saturday morning in august 1980: he woke up just to find the whole village gathering right at the borders of their camp looking at what they described as Xigagai, one of the beings that lives above the clouds, who was supposedly standing in the middle of an apparently empty beach. The lens of culture and folklore can definitely shape your perception of reality. Then, he explains the title of the book: don’t sleep there are snakes is a Piraha way to say goodnight which is linked to the belief that lack of sleep can harden a person, make him or her stronger, to the point where the narrator recalls rarely hearing the village completely quiet at night: people don’t sleep, but they spend the night talking and joking, meaning that, while life is hard and it requires sacrifices, it doesn’t mean people can’t enjoy it though its length. Part one: life The narrator is a missionary sent there by evangelical churches in the US to change the Pirana’s heart and persuade them to worship the god he believed in. His priority is to translate the bible into the local language. Piraha’s language is one of the hardest in world, not related to any other idiom: he only knows how it sounded on the tapes recorded by previous linguists who quickly gave up. It’s tonal like Chinese since it can place a high or low pitch on any vowel (there are only three of them). It also has no way to compare two things, no direct words for colors and no indication for the past tense. The difÏculty also comes from the fact that there’s no middle language because the situation in which the study is conducted is monolingual. Daniel’s method consists of using a notebook and writing down everything he hears as well as carrying flashcards with common words attached to his belt. He quickly realizes piraha’s language completely lacks phatic communications, namely expressions that are used to express social and interpersonal interest or to attest the other speaker - like thanks, hello, goodbye, how are you? Or I’m sorry – and do not add any specific information to the interaction. Gratitude, happiness or penitence are all expressed by actions, not by words. When he arrives, he is warmly welcomed: people look happy and healthy, they smile and touch him just like they would with a pet. The first man he meets is Koxoi, with whom he starts to practice the language. Koxoi – kohòi - is one the best hunters among the Pirahas and is later seen when he is celebrated by his peers as he returns from a hunting session with many preys. At this point Danile is given his Piraha’s name which is assigned based on the resemblance with other members of the tribe. When a name gets old, a new one is given - Daniel’s name changes roughly every 10 years. Daniel then described the daily routine of the villagers, which starts at 5 in the morning – since they sleep so little, it’s hard to say when the old day ends and the new one begins – with people – mostly women - speaking loudly about the day’s events and whatnot. Men go fishing alone or with a few friends mainly using bow and arrow while at least one male remains in the village to watch over their belongings. Women and children spend their days cooking or pulling a local specie of tuber from the ground. In the late afternoon people eat together the fish that was captured during the day. After overcoming some legal problems by applying for a graduate linguistics program at the University of Campina – Unicamp – Daniel is able to get back to the Pirahas with his family which is composed by his wife and 3 children. They first gathered medicines and food supplies, as well as school books so that the children could be home-schooled in the village. The family is warmly welcomed and introduced to their new home, which has been prepared for them by Daniel. Later that night, Daniel kills a tarantula he saw in his house, only to be scolded by one of the villagers: we don’t kill those, they eat bugs and cockroaches. They feel safe and protected for the first time. Part 2: the Amazon As expected, heat is a huge problem in the jungle, but the latter provides many shady places. Humidity is ever harder to tolerate because it doesn’t allow any kind of physical transpiration. Insects and mosquitoes are also incredibly annoying. The Amazon is huge, accounting for 2% of the world land. 1/3 of all known species live there. A physical description of the forest and its rivers follows, with a focus on the Maici river, which flows between the village’s huts. The Amazon has been the source of countless books: the author’s favorites are the ones from Mark Twain and William James. Nearly no one in Brazil has been in the Amazonian forest and yet they feel it belongs to them and fear any kind of foreign intervention that affects the area. The origins of Amazonians are object of discussion: some says that the forest is so thick it does not offer enough arable land for a large human community to prosper, hence the little tribes such as the Pidahas, while others think that the forest does provide sufÏcient land for agriculture citing many cultures as examples. The theory when it comes to Pidaha is that they have been separated for so long from the other human groups that resided in the area that their language lost any kind of connection that would make it possible for it to be linked to other local idioms. Part 3: the cost of discipleship Karen – wife – and Shannon – oldest daughter – both fall ill: they begin to exhibit symptoms such as high fever, diarrhea and dreadful headaches. It’s malaria, even though Daniel mistakes it for typhoid fever – and starts treating it as such, thus giving them useless medications. They soon start to experience hallucinations followed by nearly comatose sleep sessions. The situation is critical since they don’t have two-way radios – not allowed by the Brazilian government – and no chance to get help by calling a plane. Daniel doesn’t have enough gas to make a river trip, so he asks Vicenzo, a catholic missionary, to lend him his boat, a humble canoe with a gasoline-powered engine. Vicenzo gives Daniel directions to Humaità where they could be able to get some help: he mispronounced Santa Luzia as Santa Lucia, a mistake that will impact Daniel’s future. While he tries to gather his family on the boat, Karen, in a semi-unconscious state, accuses him of being faithless, of not trusting God enough to remain in the village and ask him through prayers to help them. Daniel is morally torn but, in the end, despite risking being accused of being a faithless coward, decides to make the trip. Strangely enough, Pirahas ask Daniel to bring back matches, canned meat and blankets, a request so selfish that Daniel gets angry at them immediately, shouting to them hoping they understand the seriousness of the situation. Through the duration of the river trip, Karen keeps hallucinating and slapping her children and husband while occasionally making mean comments on everyone. During the trip, Daniel stops to ask for directions to a lady living on the river bank: he questions her about Santa Lucia just like Vicenzo instructed him to, so she does not understand he’s referring to Santa Luzia. Anyway, Daniel notices how these people, who own literally nothing except their clothes, are so welcoming and caring to stranger, more so than himself, which is so much richer when it comes to material possessions. Worried for the fate of his family, he prays asking God for help, but he’s soon captured by the beauty of the environment, with which he feels as one, in the eternal struggle every living thing must endure to survive. Even though this experience feels like something straight out of the bible, God seems distant. Once he arrives to Santa Luzia, Daniel starts seeking help: many men from the village offer their assistance. They carry Keren and Shannon to Auxiliadora where a local wealthy family offer them a place where to lay and rest for the night. The boat to Humaità – where they could see a doctor – arrives the following morning. Daniel tries to get Fernando, the ship’s captain, to skip the remaining stops and go straight to Humaità: it was a matter of life or death for his family. Not only Fernando refuses, but he and his crew stop along the way to play soccer against a local rival team. Daniel angrily watches them as they get off the boat to reach the football field. Seeing how helpful locals have been up to this point, Daniel begins to wonder why those people seem to be completely devoid of any human sentiment: he finds an answer to this question only a few years later as he realizes that what he was experiencing was nothing more than daily life for those people. Brazilian are more than willing to help you with small things, but can’t take the pain of life away from you, you have to face it by yourself as anyone else does. Eventually he manages to get to the hospital in Humaità: there, the staff is rude to him, assuming that as a gringo and a protestant he must feel superior to them, Brazilian Catholics. He is, for the first time, victim of prejudice. Daniel decides to leave his wife and daughter there, where they were taken care of, to reach Porto Velho for his two remaining children to be seen by a doctor in a more efÏcient structure. The plan is to get to Porto Velho and then come back to pick the rest of the family. He gets to a missionary center and with the help of John and Betty he flies back to Humaità, gets Keren and Shannon on a plane and takes them both to Porto Velho where Betty immediately begins treating their malaria. She soon realizes that her condition is critical, she might not make it through the night if she didn’t receive a blood donation in a hospital. She is taken to a local private clinic and her parents are called in order for them to give her their last goodbye. Surprisingly, her health starts to recover. As soon as she and Shannon are able to walk, Daniel ask them to spend the following months at Karen’s parents house in Bèlem while he goes back to the Pirahas. Keren and the children spend 6 months of rest and recuperation, away from Daniel, after which they reach Daniel once again. Part 4: Sometimes you make mistake Daniel realizes the reason why Pirahas did not show any empathy when he and his family were looking for help is because they have to cope with this kind of situations on a daily basis without having access to even the most basic medical help. For them, it’s daily routine: when a relative falls ill, they can’t mourn, they have to continue gathering food in order for them not to starve. It’s not like they’re so stoic they don’t ‘even look for help during times of need, it’s just that they don’t feel entitled to any form of support by other individuals like we do. Sometimes people from the outskirts of the jungle would stop by the village during their search for tropical fruits, flowers and other valuable goods they could sell to the local market. Daniel is bothered by those men, not only because they hired some always his most useful language instructors - in order for them to guide those merchants through the forest – for months at a time, but also because they all wanted to speak to him, since he was known as a semi-celebrity for his white skin and red hair and beard, in order to gain access to his medicines and influence over the Pirahas. They were also incredibly racist as they thought of the Pirahas as sub-humans, creatures of the forest akin to monkeys speaking a language that sounded like chicken noises to their ears. One night, one of these men approaches Daniel in the middle of the night asking him to let him take 8 men in order for them to help the merchant picking nuts in the jungle. Daniel denies having the power to allow such operation and just instruct the man to offer the Pirahas trade goods as a wage for their work. Food or any kind of supply would have been fine, everything except alcohol, which cannot be used as retribution for indigenous tribes according to the law. Some time later, during the night, Daniel hears people talking in the jungle about killing the Americans: the merchant had been providing alcohol to the Pirahas in order to get them drunk and had asked them to kill Daniel and his family in exchange for a brand new shotgun. Daniel tries to reduce the tension by reaching those who were plotÝng his murder, greeting them in the most enthusiastic way and then causally grabbing the weapons they had around, but when he is trying to make his way back to the hut he meets Kokoi, who threatens to kill him. According to Kokoi, who has been manipulated by the Brazilian merchant, Daniel was trying to sabotage their work by declining the merchant’s offer. In the calmest way possible, Daniel explains to him that the foreign only wanted to give them cheap alcohol as payment, which was unfair and illegal. If Daniel didn’t know how to speak Piraha’s language, he and his family would have been dead. Kokoi understands the situation and they both reach the merchant’s boat, from which the man is observing the situation. Once he sees Daniel approaching him with the Pirahas at his side, he gets scared and quickly takes off with his boat. That night is spent by Daniel guarding his house with a shotgun in his hands, observing drunk Pirahas confusingly fighting each while mumbling sometimes apologetic, sometimes threatening words. With blood everywhere in the house, last night’s fights leftovers, the following morning Pirahas apologize for their behavior through Kokoi’s words, who cites alcohol as the reason of their actions. Wanting to really understand why the Pirahas were even thinking about killing him, Daniel decides to speak with the one who looked the angriest during the previous night happenings. With coffee and biscuits, he visits him at his hut, asking him why they were so furious at him and if they wanted him to stay. The man explains that the reason why they were so angry was because Daniel spoke as if he has authority over the Pirahas by declining the merchant’s alcohol offer: this wasn’t his jungle, he had no right to decide for the Pirahas, which is precisely why they were so mad at him. Even though the women of the tribe told Daniel that previous missionaries didn’t let the men drink – which is not true, they probably said it in order to keep their husbands away from booze – Daniel understands his mistake: he had no authority to decide what’s best for the Pirahas. Not too long after, in fact, Pirahas are given alcohol by a merchant and Daniel and his family are forced to temporarily leave the village to avoid the usual troubles. At the end of the chapter, Daniel stops to consider what he knew about the Pirahas so far: from a certain standpoint, he was kind of let down by their lack of spectacular cultural expressions – many other tribes had intricate rituals or amazing costumes – mainly because their life looked very dull and repetitive from the outside. Men spent their days hunting, joking and farting while women looked after the harvest and their children; they’re village weren’t even well kept, with weeds and trash everywhere. He wanted to look deeper into their social structure and habits, but with no anthropology knowledge, he had a rough patch ahead of him. 5: Material culture and the absence of ritual Pirahas, only having two kinds of huts – palm thing, smaller and only useful for its shade, daughter thing, slightly bigger and more resistant to the elements – don’t use them for protection since neither of them has walls. They don’t serve as social status symbols or privacy tools either: houses are just places to sleep in or to keep dogs or the few belongings families have. For sex or relieving themselves they use the jungle. They’re material culture is just as simple: they produce very few tools and artifacts such as their large powerful bows and arrows, which are the result of the combined efforts of both men and women working together. Many of the things they make are not permanent, meaning that if they need a basket to carry thing they just produce one on the spot and then throw them away after two or three uses. Necklaces are used to look more desirable (secondary purpose) or to protect from spirits (primary purpose): they rarely show symmetry and are not very attractive since they use a random combination of feathers, teeth, rocks and leaves to manufacture them. They can make canoes out of bark but they rarely do because they would rather use the sturdier ones provided by the Brazilians. Canoes are shared, but they still belong to a single person: if a canoe is borrowed, the borrower has to donate a part of the fish to the owner. Daniel wonder why they don’t create their own canoes more often and tries to get Pirahas to learn a more effective method to do so by inviting Semplicio, a local canoe maker: even though Pirahas looks enthusiastic when he’s there, they refuse to put what they learn in practice once he left. Daniel understand that Pirahas rarely import knowledge from the outside, no matter how useful it is. Pirahas consume everything as soon as it is gathered, they don’t store and conserve anything. They consider hunger as a way to strengthen themselves, so they go as long as 3 days without eating: they’re fit and strong. Their diet is 70% fish, often mixed with flour. They’re no differentiation when it comes to fishing between day and night: they’ll do it at night or during the day, and as soon as the fish is caught it will be eaten, doesn’t matter if it’s 3 A.M. They’ll also eat maniac tubers but they won’t grow them in an organized way nor take care of the tools that are needed to make their job easier. It’s clear that they lack even the most basic notion of the future: they’re not lazy, they work hard, but they just consider the present as the important dimension. They enjoy each day as it comes without planning ahead of the times. We define success as something that have to be achieved over a long time by planning and sticking to a tight schedule, but the Pirahas just seem to enjoy their days with no worry for tomorrow. Some people think that this is because of the trauma caused by meeting the European in the XIIIX: the often led to culture shock, loss of culture and habits disintegration, but early European accounts about the Pirahas describes a culture that is very similar to the one of today, so it looks like this is not the case. They were defined as the least acculturated tribe of the area. Pirahas village are as close to the river as they can build them and, in the summer, they’ll sleep directly on the sand with no protection. Houses are built in a line along the river and house a single family each. They dry season is the most prosperous time of the year since it’s easier to catch fish. Pirahas culture lacks rituals: when someone dies he or she is buried immediately, but there’s very little ritual apart from the fact they they’re buried in a sitÝng position if they’re large – it requires less digging –. They don’t use cofÏns, they just wrap the dead in banana leaves and bury him or her very close the surface, so much so that during the rainy season corpses often resurface. Sometimes they will imitate Brazilian burial by placing a cross on the ground. Sex and marriage also requires no rituals: their sexual lexicon uses a lot of animal language. Sex is practiced among married or non-married couples with a very liberal mindset. Sexual aggression is pretty rare but it happens: they’re always persecuted. Dancing bring the village together: there are no musical instruments involved, only singing clapping and stomping while moving in circle. Sometimes spirits appear during dances through someone who wears specific clothes and speak the singing variant of the language (more on that later). Pirahas use personal accounts to transmit values, meaning that a person might recall a time when he or she met a spirit and tell everyone how it looks and what it was doing. There are no books nor codified myths. 6: family and community Pirahas often laugh, both in times of happiness as well as sadness: it’s a pervasive happiness that comes to the knowledge of being able to cope with extremely difÏcult situations. They’re generally peaceful and open minded. Their social structure is very flexible: some village may have a matriarchal society, some others have a patriarchal one. The kinship system is very minimal from a lexical point of view: they have a word to describe people who have to be respected, which can be used for parents, grandparents, by also for Daniel himself when they want something from him. It’s gender neutral. They have a word for siblings which also applies to individuals of the same generation of village. Finally, there’s also a word for parentless children and that’s it. Since the kinship system is so vague, marriage between cousins and close related individuals is accepted. Only brother-sister relationships are forbidden. As we saw before, sex is approached with a very open mindset. Family are open groups: a parent will feed a fatherless child for a while when his or her parents are missing. Child raising is very peculiar: children are seen as human being, they’re not treated any differently except for the fact that their physical weakness and size is taken into consideration. They’re not protected nor kept away from dangerous situations. They’re not qualitatively different from adults. Daniel recalls seeing children playing near the bonfire or with various weapons with no protection whatsoever provided by their parents: when they hurt themselves, women don’t try to comfort them, instead they scoff them, mock them and get angry for their behavior. They want their children to take care of themselves, to become resilient adults able to survive using their skills. Babies are born directly in the river, mostly alone, with no help: Daniel recalls an episode during which a woman died because of birth complications when no one helped her, not even her sister or the village elders. People must be strong, they have to get trough difÏculties on their own, that is the core principle that shapes their relationships. Daniel reads a written testimony of a Pirahas who was present when the accident happened: even though his words depict the dead woman as a victim, no one is blamed for her death, guilt is not assigned to anyone. Daniel recalls a story of a young woman who died shortly after giving birth: according to the Pirahas, there was no point in trying to help her baby since it was doomed now that it had no mother. Even though Daniel and his family volunteered to aid the baby, Pirahas still though it was going to die anyway since it has no parents. It was just inevitable: it was already near death, it had no mother and no one would take care of a baby in such conditions. Daniel still decides to help the baby and it seems like the creature is getÝng better, so he allow himself to go for a walk with his wife leaving the baby with his father. When he comes back, the baby is dead: Pirahas forced alcohol down his throat. When Daniel asks why they would do such a thing, they replied that there was no hope for the baby, so it was better to end his suffering. They were not being cruel or thoughtless, they just wanted to put the baby out if his misery. Older children are not raised by restricting and punishing their bad behavior: they have to learn by themselves about what is good for them and that isn’t: Daniel routinely saw drunk children, or children smoking cigarettes that were given to them by their parents. Everyone must share the hardship of life. On the flipside, threating children like adults means that they are as respected as grown ups when their behavior is beneficial to themselves or to the village. They’re free to make their own choices. Even teenagers, though sometimes weird and rude just like teenagers are everywhere, show no sign of the angst and the sadness that is often found in their western counterparts. They contribute to the well being of the society just like everyone else. Pirahas parenting involves no violence in theory, in fact Daniel think that he, as a father, was way more violent when it came to punishing his children mostly because of his Christian education: one time, when he wanted to spank Shannon, he’s soon confronted by the Pirahas who asked him what he was doing. They wanted to stop him. Pirahas always respond to bad behavior with patience, love and understanding, not only when it comes to their children: Daniel recalls the story of a man who, drunk, kills his bother’s dog because it was barking. The owner of the dog was sad because of the killed animal, but did not want to get back at his brother, since he knew he was drunk and not in control of his actions. They all see themselves as a family where each member takes care of the others. There’s a strong sense of belonging. Furthermore, they perceive a stranger as such when he or she does not share their values: they know Americans and Brazilians do dreadful thing like killing people in wars and murdering each other, so they know they’re incompatible with the Pirahas. They hate violence and gore. Since children are seen as adults, they’re not prohibited from taking part is sexual activities if no one gets hurt. The response to infidelity is not violent nor brutal, but humorous: Daniel recalls the story of a woman hitÝng his husband with a stick for hours, in a mix of moderate anger and laughter. The man, Kokoi, was a strong and fierce hunter, but still sat through hours of this not-so-gentle hitÝng like some sort of penitence, like they both know this was the procedure so that the wife might forgive the husband. It was a culturally prescribed remedy. Female infidelity is also pretty common, but it’s not violent either. They are, of course, divorces. Homosexual experiences are not frowned upon: they’re just defined as having fun together, nothing more. Daniel recalls entering a room just to find two men laughing and touching themselves. Children do have toys and are particularly fond of planes models. Pirahas are incredible in the jungle, as Daniel finds out when they go there to gather the necessary for his roof to be fixed: they apparently require no water nor food for hours upon hours, they’re fearless hunters and their reflexes are quick. During this trip, Daniel’s friendship with Kokoi is cemented as the latter helps him with the excessive load – a huge machete and various supplies – Daniel insisted on carrying. Pirahas lacks any form of authority: they’re egalitarians. What happens is that Europeans and Brazilians invested some individuals of the tribe with some authority so they could make deals and business with them. This authority was not present before and has no roots within the Amazonians tribes. How does the Pirahas maintain cohesion and unity? Why are rules respected? Two methods of disciplining those who misbehave are applied: ostracism – alienation from food sharing or, far less often, from the tribe - and the (fear of) spirits intervention, a common punishment for those who don’t conform to the tribe’s rules. 7. Pirahas culture seems to have a strong constrain when it comes to depicting or referencing anything that is not the immediate, current experience  The only dimension that is capable of validating data as true is the present, experienced first hand or trough the recollection someone we trust makes of his or her direct experience. Their language reflects that in the fact that they only make statements that are valid in the point in time and in the moment they are produced. That does not mean that as soon as something or someone isn’t part of their everyday experience they’re ignored of forgotten, but they rarely reference them. They will use the present, past and past tense in relation to their current state or action, but they won’t use perfect tenses, which are for referring to a finite action in the past or in future that doesn’t continue nor has a direct impact on the present. The example he makes is very illuminating: during rituals, someone might distance himself from the group for a while in order for him to have the time to dress up as a spirit; when he comes back acting as a deity, nobody would question his identity, nobody would connect seeing him leaving the group to the appearance of this new creature, because him leaving the group is something that happened in the past and has no direct correlation to the present. 8. There was another tribe living on the shores of the same river as Pirahas, similar to the latter but way more open to having material possessions: both tribes had been dealing in nuts and other jungle products with a local Brazilian family, who routinely exploited them by offering a well below market value price for their goods, knowing they had no way to find out they were being scammed. After a while, the other tribe discovered through the radio that they were being cheated, so they assaulted the Brazilian dealers once they showed up. The dealers decided they wanted to have their vendetta, so they hired a bunch of Pirahas teenagers and gave them a shotgun in order for them to kill selected members of the other tribe. They obeyed and actually murdered those people. The other tribe, unaware that Pirahas were in fact the murderers, thought Brazilians were the ones to blame, going as far as seeking help and shelter from the Pirahas. Once they found out the truth, it was too late, as they were being evicted from their village, forced to work in slave-like conditions for the Brazilians. They all die shortly after. Two lessons: even though Pirahas appear to be very peaceful towards each others, they can get very territorial and do not tolerate invasions of their own land, even by people they’ve been good neighbors with for a very long time. It is also important to notice that the Pirahas who was responsible for the killing was in fact ostracized and died not too long after in solitude: his peers were angered at him because his actions casted a bad light on the them, especially after police came to interrogate the whole village. 9 This chapter documents the struggle Daniel has to go though to get a reservation, specifically designed around Pirahas needs in order for it to include the area they hunt and thrive, ofÏcially recognized by the Brazilian government with the help of the FUNAI association. For achieving the first step, delimiting the area that will be devoted to Pirahas’s needs, Daniel is asked to serve an anthropologist and a cartographer as an interpreter, allowing them to directly ask the Pirahas about the amount of land they really need to continue their activities. Through this journey, Daniel gets to know the other Pirahas settlements, while the aforementioned Brazilian scholars study the tribe and realize a considerable portion of the mapping data the government has relied on the for last years is in fact incorrect. 10 The chapter is dedicated to the description of the caboclo people, namely those who were once part of Amazonia indigenous group which in time learnt how to speak Portuguese, left their tribe-like life and settle in one of the cities found along the river, before the deeps of the jungle. Daniel often meets them when they’re dealing with the Pirahas, as well as during his trips to the nearest city of Porto Velho looking for medical supplies or food. According to him, they’re tough, hardworking people who, unlike the Pirahas, devote their entire life to improving their economic conditions, as their poverty is seen as insufferable. They value hard working and not complaining about the life’s hardness; like the Pirahas, they’ll only ask for help when they can’t do otherwise, as seeking other people’s aid is a sign of weakness. They’re easily offended, and they’ll fight you as soon as they perceive you think you’re better than them. Caboclos are also incredibly racist towards Indians, often time lamenting that the government gives too much attentions to who they considered to be monkey-like creatures. Daniel recalls the death of Alfredo, a caboclo that was converted to Christianity and spent his whole life spreading the message of Christ among other people: he was well respected and kind to everyone. On his deathbed, he’s still grateful for what life has provided him with: Daniel feels like he’s in front of a saint. The author also tells the story of a caboclo man whose young son is offered a job in the city as a radio and electronics technician, potentially giving him the chance to improve his financial condition; the father ultimately decides not to allow his son to leave, preferring to keep him with his family in order not to give up the help he was providing in their agricultural activity. Though Daniel at first thinks the man’s atÝtude is incredibly selfish, he later realizes Caboclos treat their offspring as a person property rather than people. 11 Pirahas language only has a limited number of phonemes, 11, as opposed to the 80 or so of English, meaning that the sounds it can use vary from a very restricted range. Different words are expressed though different tones and pitches, much like Chinese, to the point where consonants are so uninfluential they can be changed at the behest of the speaker with no impact on meaning. As a result, the language can not only be spoken through enunciated words, but also through singing, humming and whistling, as well as shouting. Those are called channels. What’s really important when it comes to speaking Pirahas is knowing which channel to use and when to use it: while enunciating words – which is to say, speaking normally as one would do – is the neutral channel, humming is used to transfer information so that nobody else can understand them, just like whispering, which is something Pirahas have a hard time doing because it’s difÏcult to change tone and pitch when you’re talking under your breath; on the other hand, singing – which identifies a pronunciation where the passage between high pitched words and low pitched ones is exaggerated – is only used in rituals and while communicating with spirits; shouting and whistling can only be performed by men and are often used while hunting: whistling has the added function of not revealing the identity of the person the sound is coming from. 12 Other technicality about Pirahas language, all of which goes to show Daniel controversial theory’s validity: according to Chomsky, all humans communicate by operating within a series of basic rules which are part of our own identity as human beings, unrelated to cultural differences; language defines culture. Daniel, on other hand, uses the Pirahas as an example of a culture whose needs language was built upon: Pirahas use different channels for different cultural scenarios, which is the proof language is primarily shaped by culture and not the way around. 13 Language and culture are deeply connected: people restrict the portion of the language they use on a daily basis in relation with the way they experience life. Things that are not part of an individual experience aren’t, in turn, part of the language. One reflects the other. Devices that cannot be operated if the knowledge that is required is not part of Pirahas cultures. They tend to avoid topics and ideas that would force them to reconsider the validity of their culture: very conservative culture. 14 Once again, this chapter tries to explain the link between culture, language and cognition and to demonstrate that Chomsky’s theory of a universal grammar is severely limited: according to the famous scholar, human beings develop their language in accordance to a series of regulation which admit variations, but only within a range of specific options, meaning that these linguistic rules exist before culture, which adopts some of them and reject others; Dan, in turns, thinks that since every person’s experience is different – as well as any human group’s understanding of the world – language can evolve in new ways that do not follow those rules and regulations, but rather create new method of expressing what is experienced, meaning that culture shapes language and grammar. 15 We perceive the world according to our expectation of it, which is based on our cultural categories, NOT according to how it actually is: Daniel mistakes an huge anaconda for a log because he’s not trained in spotÝng anacondas. Most languages have to ability to use recursion, which is to say they’re able to integrate a sentence inside another: the hamburger Bill ate was in fact mine, these are two sentences – Bill ate a hamburger and the hamburger was in fact mine combined into one. Some linguists – like Chomsky think that this is the key to differentiate advanced and basic languages and a core part of the so called universal grammar. At first Daniel thought Pirahas didn’t have recursion, which was true according to the definition of recursion as opposed to iteration: that led him to believe that Pirahas is a basic language. At the same time though, he realized Pirahas have no need for recursion because their everyday experiences don’t rely on many events that are related to each other. Therefore, recursion would be useless for them. Now, considering Pirahas seems to be tailored to be the most useful method of communication in the environment it is used, does that make Pirahas a basic language or is it the most advanced in existence? 17 A Brazilian anthropologist believes he has found a creation myth even though Daniel said Pirahas has none. In the end, it was just Pirahas asking Daniel for medicines and matches because they thought the recorder Daniel gave anthropologist to introduce himself was a radio with which they could speak to him. The anthropologist mistakenly thought Pirahas were referencing God asking for supplies when in fact they were mentioning Daniel. 18 A language can die either because its native speaker all disappear, and that is the case for the Pirahas, or because they switch to an idiom they feel is the most effective in allowing them to relate with outsiders mostly for economic reasons. Pirahas language isn’t disappearing because an increasing number of the tribe’s members are moving to Portuguese, but because they have little to no force to reject those who are interested in the area they occupy, plus the Brazilian government effort in preserving their lifestyle have been lackluster so far. One could argue that they it is inevitable for a language to fade away once it is not longer useful as a tool to convey meaning and messages among people, to they point where trying to oppose this natural Darwinist process seems to be useless, but according to Dan that is not the case: because of the fact the language can store centuries of lore and traditions, all of the knowledge that was deposited in it would be lost once it disappears. For that reason, it is important to preserve dying languages to make sure that that particular vision of the world won’t be forgotten. Pirahas’s vision of the world, for example, is so unique it appears to be able to make those who embrace it immune to mental disorders such as depression and anxiety, while in general keeping them much happier than their western, supposedly-civilized counterparts. A researcher at MIT suggested Dan that if they were to measure the time Pirahas spend laughing and smiling on a daily basis in comparison to that of Americans or European, Pirahas would be considered the happiest people in the world. Thinking that this would be related to the idea that Pirahas don’t experience the same anxiety-inducing situations as westerners would be ethnocentric as the members of this tribe have to deal with a great amount of life threatening situations involving deadly animals or diseases. Saving Pirahas and their language would be a step in the direction of making sure the secret of their endlessly happy disposition is saved.