Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle

“They have no craving for truth as a transcendental reality. Indeed, the concept has no place in their values. Truth to the Pirahãs is catching a fish, rowing a canoe, laughing with your children, loving your brother, dying of malaria. Does this make them more primitive? Many anthropologists have suggested so, which is why they are so concerned about finding out the Pirahãs notions about God, the world, and creation.But there is an interesting alternative to think about things. Perhaps it is their presence of these concerns that makes a culture more primitive, and their absense that renders a culture more sophisticated. If that is true, the Pirahãs are a very sophisticated people. Does this sound far-fetched? Let's ask ourselves if it is more sophisticated to look at the universe with worry, concern, and a believe that we can understand it all, or to enjoy life as it comes, recognizing the likely futility of looking for truth or God?”

“I did not see Pirahã teenagers moping, sleeping in late, refusing to accept responsibility for their own actions, or trying out what they considered to be radically new approaches to life. They in fact are highly productive and conformist members of their community in the Pirahã sense of productivity (good fishermen, contributing generally to the security, food needs, and other aspects of the physical survival of the community). One gets no sense of teenage angst, depression, or insecurity among the Pirahã youth. They do not seem to be searching for answers. They have them. And new questions rarely arise.”

“My evangelism professor at Biola University, Dr. Curtis Mitchell, used to say, “You’ve gotta get ’em lost before you can get ’em saved.”

“I mean, what are you going to do to him for shooting your dog?” “I will do nothing. I won’t hurt my brother. He acted like a child. He did a bad thing. But he is drunk and his head is not working well. He should not have hurt my dog. It is like my child.” Even when provoked, as Kaaboogí was now, the Pirahãs were able to respond with patience, love, and understanding, in ways rarely matched in any other culture I have encountered.”

“I have never heard a Pirahã say that he or she is worried. In fact, so far as I can tell, the Pirahãs have no word for worry in their language. One group of visitors to the Pirahãs, psychologists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Brain and Cognitive Science Department, commented that the Pirahãs appeared to be the happiest people they had ever seen.”

“They felt certain that this baby was going to die. They felt it was suffering terribly. And they believed that my clever milk tubes contraption was hurting the child and prolonging its suffering. So they euthanized the child. The father himself put the baby to death, by forcing alcohol down its throat.”

“When we returned from our jog, several Pirahãs were huddled in a corner of our house, and there was a strong smell of alcohol in the air. Those in the huddle looked conspiratorial and stared at us. Some seemed angry, others ashamed. Others just stared down at something on the ground that they were all surrounding. As I approached, they parted. Pokó’s baby was on the ground, dead. They had forced cachaça down its throat and killed it. “What happened to the baby?” I asked, almost in tears. “It died. It was in pain. It wanted to die,” they replied. I just picked up the baby and held it, with tears now beginning to stream down my cheeks. “Why would they kill a baby?” I asked myself in confusion and grief.”

“Some have asked whether a language can communicate complicated information with only eleven phonemes. A computer scientist knows, however, that computers can communicate anything we program them to do, and that they do this with only two “letters” — 1 and 0, which can be thought of as phonemes. Morse code also has only two “letters,” long and short.And that is all any language needs. In fact, a language could get by with a single phoneme. In such a language words might look like a, aa, aaa, aaaa, and so on.”

“The Pirahãs are firmly committed to the pragmatic concept of utility. They don’t believe in a heaven above us, or a hell below us, or that any abstract cause is worth dying for. They give us an opportunity to consider what a life without absolutes, like righteousness or holiness and sin, could be like. And the vision is appealing.”

“On our furlough, I thought again of the challenge of the missionary:to convince a happy, satisfied people that they are lost and need Jesus as their personal savior. My evangelism professor at Biola University, Dr. Curtis Mitchell, used to say, “You’ve gotta get ’em lost before you can get ’em saved.”

“I said that our up-high father had made my life better. Once, I said, I used to drink like the Pirahãs. I had many women (exaggerating somewhat here), and I was unhappy. Then the up-high father came into my heart and made me happy and made my life better. I gave no thought to whether all these new concepts, metaphors, and names that I was inventing on the fly were actually intelligible to the Pirahãs. They made sense to me. This night, I decided to tell them something very personal about myself—something that I thought would make them understand how important God can be in our lives. So I told the Pirahãs how my stepmother committed suicide and how this led me to Jesus and how my life got better after I stopped drinking and doing drugs and accepted Jesus. I told this as a very serious story. When I concluded, the Pirahãs burst into laughter. This was unexpected, to put it mildly. I was used to reactions like “Praise God!”with my audience genuinely impressed by the great hardships I had been through and how God had pulled me out of them. “Why are you laughing?” I asked. “She killed herself? Ha ha ha. How stupid. Pirahãs don’t kill themselves,” they answered. They were utterly unimpressed. It was clear to them that the fact that someone I had loved had committed suicide was no reason at all for the Pirahãs to believe in my God. Indeed, it had the opposite effect, highlighting our differences. This was a setback for my missionary objectives. Days went by after this in which I thought long and hard about my purpose among the Pirahãs.”

“The words are related to the Pirahãs because bagiái (friend) means literally “to be touching” — someone you touch affectionately — and bágiái (enemy) means “to cause to come together.” Culturally, though, bágiái has an idiomatic meaning — an enemy is someone who causes things that are not his own to come together.”

“Of course, this homeostasis can stifle creativity and individuality, two important Western values. If one considers cultural evolution to be a good thing, then this may not be something to emulate, since cultural evolution likely requires conflict, angst, and challenge. But if your life is unthreatened (so far as you know) and everyone in your society is satisfied, why would you desire change? How could things be improved? Especially if the outsiders you came into contact with seemed more irritable and less satisfied with life than you. I asked the Pirahãs once during my early missionary years if they knew why I was there. “You are here because this is a beautiful place. The water is pretty. There are good things to eat here. The Pirahãs are nice people.” That was and is the Pirahãs’ perspective. Life is good. Their upbringing, everyone learning early on to pull their own weight, produces a society of satisfied members. That is hard to argue against.”

“This happened one afternoon after I had set out some old National Geographic magazines for the Pirahãs to thumb through. They love pictures of animals and peoples, whether from the Amazon or other parts of the world. Xiooitaóhoagí (i-owi-taO-hoa-gI) sat on the floor, looking through the magazine, with her baby suckling at her breast. Her legs straight out in front of her, dress pulled down to her knees, in the normal Pirahã manner, she was humming rhythmically to the child on her lap as he nursed energetically. I watched for a bit before I realized that what she was humming was a description of the whale and Eskimos whose pictures she was examining. The boy would look away from her breast to the picture from time to time, and she would point and hum louder.”

“While we were talking we had set up a video camera to record our interactions with the people. That evening as we watched bits of the video, we noticed that a toddler about two years old was sitting in the hut behind the man we were interviewing. The child was playing with a sharp kitchen knife, about nine inches in length. He was swinging the knife blade around him, often coming close to his eyes, his chest, his arm, and other body parts one would not like to slice off or perforate. What really got our attention, though, was that when he dropped the knife, his mother—talking to someone else—reached backward nonchalantly without interrupting her conversation, picked up the knife, and handed it back to the toddler. No one told him not to cut himself or hurt himself with the knife. And he didn’t. But I have seen other Pirahã children cut themselves severely with knives.”

“And this explains why they have resisted missionaries for so long. Creation myths are no match for this demand for evidence.”

“Those things scare us,” they exclaimed, still not over their tension.“They scare me too,” I agreed.“They are worse than jaguars,” Xipoógi concluded.”

“One gets no sense of teenage angst, depression, or insecurity among the Pirahã youth. They do not seem to be searching for answers. They have them. And new questions rarely arise.”

“For many people, like the Banawás, the loss of their language brings loss of identity and sense of community, loss of traditional spirituality, and even loss of the will to live.”

“The Pirahã men then asked, “Hey Dan, what does Jesus look like? Is he dark like us or light like you?”I said, “Well, I have never actually seen him. He lived a long time ago. But I do have his words.”“Well, Dan, how do you have his words if you have never heard him or seen him?”They then made it clear that if I had not actually seen this guy (and not in any metaphorical sense, but literally), they weren’t interested in any stories I had to tell about him. Period. This is because, as I now knew, the Pirahãs believe only what they see. Sometimes they also believe in things that someone else has told them, so long as that person has personally witnessed what he or she is reporting.”

“The Pirahãs know that you left your family and your own land to come here and live with us. We know that you do this to tell us about Jesus. You want us to live like Americans. But the Pirahãs do not want to live like Americans. We like to drink. We like more than one woman. We don’t want Jesus. But we like you. You can stay with us. But we don’t want to hear any more about Jesus. OK?”

“I asked the Pirahãs once during my early missionary years if they knew why I was there. “You are here because this is a beautiful place. The water is pretty. There are good things to eat here. The Pirahãs are nice people.” That was and is the Pirahãs’ perspective.”

“After I had worked with them for over twenty-five years, one night a group of Pirahã men, sipping coffee with me in the evening, asked out of the blue, “Hey Dan, do Americans die?”I answered them in the affirmative and hoped that no one would seek empirical verification.”

“And hum speech is conducted at very low volume. So it is also used for privacy, like our whispering. (The Pirahãs don’t whisper, they hum instead. I wondered about this for a while until German linguist Manfred Krifka reminded me of the obvious reason for it. In whispering, the vocal cords are unable to produce different tones, so Pirahã speech would be rendered unintelligible.) Hum speech is also used to talk when one’s mouth is full.”

“If I could utter appropriate responses to their questions, this was no more evidence that I spoke their language than a recorded message is to me evidence that my telephone is a native speaker of English. I was like one of the bright macaws or parrots so abundant along the Maici. My “speaking” was just some cute trick to some of them. It was not really speaking.”

“I have learned so much from the Pirahãs over the years. But this is perhaps my favorite lesson. Sure, life is hard and there is plenty of danger. And it might make us lose some sleep from time to time. But enjoy it. Life goes on.”

“Although SIL never allows its members to preach among indigenous peoples like the Pirahãs, Kóhoi had heard of my faith many times in conversations with me and in helping me translate small portions of the New Testament. Then, referring to the previous American missionaries among them, he added, “Arlo told us about Jesus. Steve told us about Jesus. But we don’t want Jesus.” The other men present seemed to agree with him. I replied, “If you don’t want Jesus, you don’t want us. My family is only here to tell you about Jesus.”

“On the Rausing Project’s Web site, they put part of their rationale for the interest in endangered languages this way: Today, there are about 6,500 languages and half of those are under threat of extinction within 50 to 100 years. This is a social, cultural and scientific disaster because languages express the unique knowledge, history and worldview of their communities; and each language is a specially evolved variation of the human capacity for communication.”

“The Pirahãs are unable to perceive some things that even children from Western culture perceive well. For one thing, Pirahãs cannot make out two-dimensional objects, as in drawings and photographs, very well. They often hold pictures sideways or upside down, and ask me what it is that they are supposed to be seeing. They are getting better nowadays, as they have been exposed to many photos, but still this is not easy for them.”

“Pirahãs occasionally talked about me, when I emerged from the river in the evenings after my bath. I heard them ask one another, “Is this the same one who entered the river or is it kapioxiai?”