Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes

Language is a reflection of culture and in 1979 when Daniel Everett with his wife and three young kids went to Brazil to live among one of the most remote tribes in the world, Dan was forever discovering differences rather than similarities between the cultures. Initially, Dan went as a missionary to the Pirahã with intentions to convert the natives to Christianity, but living among the tribe that had no word or concept for war, shared equally with all members of the village, was non-materialistic, he began to see that his "lifestyle" was inferior to the one he sought to convert, so he gave up mission work and refocused his energies on learning the Pirahã language and culture, both of which were hugely different from his own or any other he had studied.

Even the name of his book Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle is a reflection of that difference. The expression "Don't sleep, there are snakes" is actually a way of saying 'good night' but the difference comes with the intent in saying 'good night'. To the Pirahã, they believe that sound sleeping puts one in danger, drops one's defenses, and so they must "harden themselves" into nocturnal awareness to ward off predators. In fact, the Pirahã laugh and talk much of the night, and don't sleep much at any one time, perhaps 20 minutes to at most two hours at any time throughout each 24 hour period.

Euphemisms therefore seem common in the language. When visiting someone's house, the traditional way of approaching a house is to call out, "Hey, tell the dogs not to be mad at me!" Also, if someone gives you food, the person asks, "Do you already know how to eat this?" and if you want to politely refuse, you simply answer, "I already know how to eat this."

Similarly, phatic communication -- communication that primarily functions to maintain social and interpersonal channels like hello, goodbye, how are you?, I'm sorry, you're welcome and thank you -- do not exist as Pirahã sentences are either for requests for information (questions), assertions of new information (declarations), or for the most part commands. Their expressions are primarily limited to immediate experience, so they talk about what they have experienced or someone still living has experienced. Sentences are all simple sentences -- compound and complex sentences are structurally not possible and language structure is limited to simple present, past and future tenses; there are no perfect tenses, and certainly no embedded clauses. In application, translating the Bible, the Koran, or Buddhist Vedas would be impossible as these stories are outside of experienced immediacy and no eye witness could make assertions to their existence. Such stories would therefore, even if they could be translated, have no impact on the tribe. In fact, no known missionaries have had any impact on the Pirahãs for nearly 300 years.

The Pirahã's contact with the "outside" is virtually limited to the Caboclos, descendants of an Amazonian indigenous people living in close proximics to the Pirahã. The Pirahã call them xaobi-gii (authentic foreigners); Americans, Brazilians, etc are simply xaobi (foreigners), because the Pirahã view the Caboclos as more acceptable to interact with, partly because their two different tribes are still more alike than the Pirahã and "other" foreigners who the Pirahã have little social contact with and virtually no understanding of, which ultimately means no interest in.

The Pirahã have no counting system, no fixed expressions for color, no sense of tribal history, creation myth or folklore. Kinship terms are simple and limited to the lifespan, that is, with mortality at around 45, great-grandparents could not be known and so there is no term for such an imaginary relationship. There are no property terms and body-oriented directions are non-existent, e.g. 'turn left' or 'go straight ahead' are not spoken but rather directions for the Pirahã are focused on the directional path and flow of the river, which forces speakers to think of the overall world differently.

Their language has one of the smallest sets of speech sounds and phonemes in the world, with only three vowels (i, a, o) and just eight consonants (p, t, k, s, h, b, g, and the glottal stop x) for men and for women three vowels and seven consonants (women replace the masculine s sound with the h). Surprisingly the consonants are frequently interchangeable, but what is important is the tone, accent, and weight of the syllables which can ultimately be whistled, hummed, yelled or sung. Pirahã is very much a tonal language and cannot be whispered as voicing is necessary for completing communication. Pioneering work by the sociolinguist Dell Hymes noted that there are five pitch channels in Pirahã: whistle speech, hum speech, musical speech, yell speech, and normal speech, the latter using consonants and vowels.

One fascinating conversation Daniel had concerning food involved lettuce. A plane delivered lettuce, tomatoes and cabbage and Daniel was delighted to eat something besides rice, beans, fish and wild game smothered in tabasco sauce. A Pirahã was puzzled when he saw Daniel eating, and enjoying, the salad, and asked, "Why do you eat leaves? Don't you have any meat?" When assured that meat was available, the Pirahã made the "obvious" conclusion to the affair, "Pirahãs don't eat leaves. That is why you don't speak our language well. We Pirahãs speak our language well and we don't eat leaves." The statement confused Daniel but he was to finally come to the conclusion that to speak their language is to live their culture.

The Pirahãs were a hard to define tribe. Unlike other Amazonian groups, they did not wear feathers, enact elaborate rituals, paint their bodies, or have other outward exotic cultural manifestations. They don't display wealth because all Pirahã are equal, they don't need houses for privacy as privacy is not a strong value. They produce few tools, almost no art, and very few artifacts. Perhaps their most outstanding tools are their large, powerful bows (over two yards in length) and arrows (2-3 yards long). If a basket is needed, they quickly weave one on the spot out of wet palm leaves, of course not using the more durable wicker fibers but something for quickly completing what is immediately necessary. The women do wear necklaces made from seeds and homespun cotton string, decorated with feathers, beads, beer-tabs, and other objects, but their purpose is for warding off spirits, not to be artistic, show symmetry or reflect tribal colors or design, which don't exist. Neither do they have any method for food preservation. In death, Pirahã are buried in a prone position with their belongings alongside, but these amount to very little as Pirahã have relatively no material culture.

Marriage ties are for life but invariably men (maybe even women) cheat. The next day a woman will have the man with his head on her lap and she will be rapping his head repeatedly for hours. The woman can express her anger tangibly and the man by allowing her to rap expresses his remorse. The conflict is over by the end of the day, but this isn't to say that it won't happen again.

One anthropology student went to the Pirahã in order to collect data. Lacking Pirahã language, he attempted to conduct his research in Portuguese, which some the Pirahã had limited working knowledge of. When the Pirahã realized that the recording could go to their friend Daniel Everett (having long experienced tape recorders from Daniel's extended stays in the village), the researcher's questions were totally disregarded and they began talking about village affairs to Daniel. The researcher gave up trying, probably intuitively knowing that if he had been speaking "straight head" (Pirahã) instead of "crooked head" (Portuguese) his language constraints would have been lowered and his communication conventions would have been more in line with experiential immediacy.