Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle (Vintage Departures)

It was interesting, but I eventually stopped reading it out of frustration with the author who started contradicting himself in terms of what these people's culture means to them and certain characteristics of it; and not in the way that shows growth or a change of heart after having experienced living amongst them for a longer period of time, I mean outright conflicting descriptions. I would still recommend checking it out just for its uniqueness.

This book is overwhelmingly the story of language and how the native's language goes to illustrate the author's theory, while little is devoted to his religious conversion and "awakening" which is potentially the most interesting aspect for one not embroiled in rhe academic dispute.

Interesting but the exploration of linguistics ultimately leads nowhere. I would have expected the author to come to important conclusions concerning, for example, the natives lack of a sense of time and to juxtapose his findings with a cultural critique of Western culture.

Poorly written by a oddly shallow ex-missionary who appears to have a savant-like ability to get college degrees with a mediocre IQ. Worth a read? Yes, but prepared yourself to be bored and annoyed by the author. As a quicker alternative, you can get all of the interesting material from various sources on the Internet. There isn't that much of it, actually.

I was hoping for an intriguing jaunt through the the store where the author not only brought to light a very interesing and virtually unique group of people, but also the dynamics of his personal conflicts with the jungle, the people trying to encroach upon the Piraha's and what brought him to his senses about christianity and his intial deceptive reasons for being there. Instead, the book is mired in tedious intricacies of linguistics. Little of what you hoped would be present in the book is there except in very small doses. If the author had focused more on the human side of these people, was more forthright about what brought him there, and how what he learned from this fascinating tribe that changed his own perceptions of existance, it would have been a much better book. Truely an opportunity lost.

I was turned onto this book by the rather mediocre monogram by Tom Wolfe, "The Kingdom of Speech", who described the ascendency of Noam Chomsky in the field of linguistics and how this book, "Don't Sleep There Are Snakes" managed to end that domanance. You see, Chomsky had hypothesized that language and grammar was lodged primarily in the brain, though it wasn't for certain sure how.

In particular Chomsky hypothesized that recursion, or the use of speech within speech via relative clauses and the like ("the cat which my family lost when I was twelve...." where "which" introduces a clause which explains the first clause; without it, the sentence would read two seperate sentences where the subject is restated, along the lines of "The family had a cat. The cat was lost when I was twelve.") If you really want to understand this, you need to read Noam Chomsky or better yet Steven PinkerThe Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (P.S.) or any number of other books by Pinker. I read six languages, including Thai and Arabic, but I find the Chomsky school of linguistics hard to follow. More on this soon.

In any case, Noam Chomsky had ruled linguisitics for 50 years and Everett single handedly disproved much of his most important work via this book and a series of papers. Chomsky is still important, but not nearly so dominant. Under Chomsky linguists had stopped going out into the field as much (Chomsky never really even learned a foriegn language, his work is all theoretical), which many of them no doubt loved. The amount of theoretical work was being produced at a prodigious rate, while field work and research suffered as a consequence. The best and brightest wanted to be behind a desk instead of out in some third world country where you can catch tropical diseases. But linguistics is properly about LANGUAGE, and at some point the belief that all you really needed was English to make broad discoveries about how language works because of some "universal grammar" was bound to backfire.

Tom Wolfe describes the struggle that Everett had to get acceptence for his ideas among linguists because none of them wanted to believe it. Chomsky and his people were the Catholic church going after Galileo. How dare Everett upset the established theories. But in Everett's book he makes an eloquent case for the exact kind of "primitive" language lacking recursion and numerous other previouly determined essentials for human speech. The people are the Piraha, deep in the the store, and their discovery was the equivalant of a neverbefore seen prehistoric man. It was almost an archaeological discovery. This forced the establishment to accept that language is to a great degree a culturally created tool, similiar to any other tool used in a craft.

A few distinctive features: Piraha has no colors as such, no counting, no relative clauses (a particularly harsh blow, as it was believed that relative clauses and recursion were the most distinctive aspect of human language as described above), a very small set of phonemes, and many other such things that upended the world of linguistics. They don't even have a left or right; instead they orient themselves by the river. Culturally they have no leaders, no rulers, no laws.

Languages are generally believed to vary in how they are complex, but all languages had been thought to be roughly equal in overall complexity. Some are weak in some areas (e.g. English lacks distinctive 2nd/3rd person pronouns) but stronger in others (English has a simple verbal system that conveys tense without being heavily encumbered). R.M.W. Dixon recently wrote a book called "Are Some Languages Better than Others?", where he systematically showed how languages have different advantages, but most langauges use up the cognitive capacity of its users. To include all the advantageous options would create a language so difficult it would be of little use. I noticed, though, that he largely ignored the issue of Piraha. (though Dixon was also a critic of Chomsky before Everett, complaining that the number of theorists in Linguistics was a farce and that the "proper work of a linguist is to document undocumented languages" in "The Rise and Fall of Languages") And not unrightly so, as there really is no other example of it.

The genuinely "primitive" nature of Piraha was so startling that it prompted a revolution in the field. It was like an archaeological discovery of prehistoric humans. Yes, one must be careful applying the term "primitive," but in terms of the language itself -- it really does lack the accoutrements of all other known global languages. In that sense, it is literally primitive, it does not mean that they are not real people of worth. In fact, in this case, they are worth all the more for it.

This book has been out for a decade or so, and many of the people involved have more or less decided to move on. Piraha has changed the field and restored some balance to linguistics. Everett has climbed his mountain (sorry) and changed his field.

The book itself is quite an entertaining read. For all the linguistics stuff in in (and it's pretty light, a high school student could read it and not get bogged down anywhere) it's really more memoir. The memoir was moving. He must've married quite a woman to be willing to take the whole family and live in a place like the deep the store. In one scene both she and her child almost die from malaria. In another, they are almost murdered when the locals get their hands on hard liquor. The obvious fortidute and devotion of his wife and children to his work makes the ending of the book particularly sad.

Everett first he went as a missionary he later left the faith (as discussed at the end of the book). I found his reasons uncompelling, and the logical fallacies in his thinking were all the more sad because of what it cost him. I am not an evangelical christian, though I did serve a mission for two years where I also learned to speak a foreign language fluently (Thai), but most people have at least heard of Thai. To be honest, I never much liked the Evangelical missionary methods of going into remote villages and trying to convert everyone, I preferred the catholic method of building schools and hospitals and trying to help people. My own church's method is somewhere in the middle -- we built churches in major cities and towns and invite people to come and to learn. They either may do so or decline. In that regard we serve a function little different from University Professors (who generally aren't judged too harshly for sharing their views with others). Everett's own missionary work focused on translating the bible into the local language, and then letting the bible do the work for them.

The first flaw goes as follows. Everett repeatedly describes the Piraha as a happy people. A people who laugh and smile. They seem to have low blood pressure, little daily stress, and are totally happy with thier lot in life. Their worldview rejects all innovations -- even if taught how to make a canoe they won't do it, since "Piraha don't make canoes." This extreme conservatism is central to their language and in how they see the world. They don't plan, they don't think ahead. If they have food they eat it, if they need more the catch it.

Everett is sucked in by this because the Christian faith appears to have little to offer them. That may be so. Here's the flaw in the argument: while individual Piraha may be well adapted, as a society they are not. They live at the mercy of others, the Brazilian people for one. There are less than 400 speakers left. And, much of what makes their society work is their isolation and close tribal relationships. How they interact with others who are NOT Piraha is repeatedly shown to be much less... bucholic. In otherwords, their success depends on closer personal bonds. It is a culture that cannot expand and cannot thrive, because its values can't survive expansion. While it may look appealing in the moment, the total lack of adaptation will likely lead them to extinction.

In otherwords, Everett has made an apples to oranges comparision: modern society is designed to surive as large groups. Our leaders, our laws, our courts, our education, our liberal values -- all evolved out of the imperative to replace the role of tight, tribal bonds; to establish justice and peace among peoples on a much larger scale. Piraha survives because everything is local. I live in a county of 16,000 people, I know what local is like. And they are even more local than that. It is a LOT easier.

The second flaw: Everett closes the book by attacking the notion of truth itself, describing "god and truth are two sides of the same coin..." (pg 272). He admires their total lack of interest in it quite explicitly. And it's true, if you don't care about what is true and all you are worried about is the moment, and you live in a small community you will likely be quite happy. Everett himself though rejects his family because he no longer believes in God -- in other words, he loses the very thing that would matter most to a Piraha (family) because of something the Piraha don't care about (truth and God). And yet he claims to shape his worldview around the Piraha. I do not think that is the case. I think he is kidding himself. His whole life is a search for truth.

And he has found a group that perfectly illustrates why modern humanistic values matter so much (and here the reader may think I am making an error by not distinguishing between modern secular ethical theory and religion, but our culture remains profoundly infused with religious values even if they are being translated into a nondeistic model): they allow us to live in relative peace covering the globe. There are 360 million people in the United States. We live in relative peace. Traditional societies like that had to adapt in the far distant past in order to survive contact with "the other." The tribe across the river with 800 people instead of 400, for instance. While I can understand struggling in the face of such an apparent Paradise, I think he went a little too native and failed to look at the big picture.

In any case, a book of this nature that has so profoundly affected an academic field such as linguistics deserves full marks, and while I wonder about this book made me concerned for him as a person I do not mean to describe this book as flawed. It is ultumately a memoir, and a good memior teaches us more about ourselves and the world as it shows all: both warts and awards.

Mr. Everett, I hope you find peace in your life whatever your path, thank you for your offering.

But I don't think it was worth leaving the faith just because the Piraha are different. Our culture is evolved to handle a much larger society that doesn't rely on knowing everyone. Nor does missionary work have to involve compulsion, and is no less moral than a university professor who shares his ideas. Like I say, I didn't find it compelling. But you might relate.

Anyway, it makes for fascinating reading both from a linguistic perspective as well as a memoir. It is about 300 pages, and may or may not be worth your time, but it is worth knowing about if you didn't already.

Hope you're well and I look forward to talking soon!

This was a pretty good book. One could complain that it was a bit unfocused, but for me, that relieved what could have otherwise been a bit boring. For example, the chapters on linguistics are not going to appeal to everyone that chapters on adventure travel appeal to. I like adventure travel and linguistics so it was all ok. The reason I read this book is because I am interested in the evolution of consciousness and I think this book tells an interesting story which is relevant. Sometimes I felt like the author was being a bit defensive about his academic standing. I think there are a couple of chapters that could be paraphrased as "It's not inconceivable that I could be as smart as Noam Chomsky". I'm not even sure that Noam Chomsky is as smart as Noam Chomsky. (Recursive Chomsky reference FTW.) But I'm not knocking Dan who seems like a cool guy. I was simply more interested in hearing interesting details from the lives and especially the thinking of the Piraha. They do seem like they're running a very different operating system. I'm sure that most reviews for this will have a 50/50 mix of helpful/unhelpful ratings split down party lines between those who consider Dan's deconversion good or bad. I'm going to stay out of that. I will simply note (what the dust cover says) that the missionary position doesn't work out. If that causes sensitivity, well, don't read it. My personal criticisms were that it would be great if the illustrations were labeled. Also a map showing where these people were (though lat/long were given). And if you have a group of people who "talk like chickens" it might be good to give them names English speakers could follow. Every time one of them was mentioned it could have been random letters from a good password as far as I was concerned. Also, I couldn't read the transliteration of the Piraha language at all and I just mentally skipped every instance of it as random. The cover of the hardcover edition was pretty confusing, a wasted opportunity. That said, Dan is a pretty good writer, his adventures are pretty interesting, and the Piraha are very interesting.

One day, listening to the jungle drums on the info-stream, I heard that a study had concluded that the happiest people in the world were the Pirahã (pee-da-HAN) tribe of the the store (true). I heard that some guy then went to visit them, to discover the source of their bliss (false). I heard that his name was Daniel L. Everett, and the book was Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (true). My library had the book, and reading it was a rewarding experience (true).

Everett spent much of 30 years among the Pirahã (1977-2006), arriving long before the happiness study was published. His three children were raised among them, on the banks of the Maici River. The jungle was full of dangerous things. All night long, some natives stayed awake chatting. They rarely slept more than two hours at a time. Sleepers became a playground for dozens of three-inch cockroaches (annoyances), and were often joined by eight-inch roach-eating tarantulas (beloved allies).

Acquiring food required the natives to "work" 15 to 20 hours each week. They hunted, fished, foraged, and grew some manioc. About 70 percent of their diet was fish. They lived beside a major river that had not yet been emptied by commercial fishermen. Villagers who visited cities were shocked to observe how much food the civilized folks consumed -- three big meals a day!

The Pirahã were remarkably and genuinely happy. They wore bright smiles, and laughed about everything. Violence was rare, and so were angry outbursts. They were amazingly tolerant and patient. They were less pleasant to be around when traders brought them rum, and every man, woman, and child became blind drunk.

The people lived in a world that was spiritually alive, and they often saw and spoke with spirits that Everett was unable to perceive. Sometimes spirits took the form of jaguars or trees. Sometimes they spoke through a person in a trance. Sometimes they provided the people with guidance or warnings. Sometimes they killed people. Many folks wore necklaces to protect themselves from evil spirits.

The natives spoke to their children like equals; "baby talk" was unknown. Parents were not paranoid protectionists -- kids were free to burn themselves in the fire, or cut themselves with sharp knives, in the pursuit of higher learning. There was no spanking, and children were never given orders -- nor were adults. Pirahã teens were not confused, insecure, and depressed. They naturally conformed to the ways of the community. They were blessed to live in a stable sustainable society.

The Pirahã language had no numbers, or words to express quantities. They had no use for the knowledge of the whites, because their way of life worked just fine without it. After months of daily classes, none could count to ten, or calculate the sum of one plus one. Consequently, traders delighted in exploiting them, by underpaying them for jungle products.

Indigenous folks who lived with the Brazilians and their money economy were known as caboclos. Life in the culture of materialism infected them with madness. When prospectors found a section of streambed rich with gold, other caboclos did not hesitate to murder them and swipe the treasure. All that mattered was winning, by any means necessary.

They thought that the Pirahãs were lazy and stupid, because they had zero interest in pursuing wealth, or plundering their ecosystem. But the Pirahã had a time-proven way of life that worked very well -- wild, free, and happy. They always had everything they needed, and life was more or less grand, hence the smiles and laughter. Might this have been humankind's "normal" state in the good old days?

The caboclos were more sullen in nature. The demands of the money world were highly corrosive to their traditional culture, to the vitality of their ecosystem, and to their mental health. They were less secure, and had real reasons to worry about tomorrow, because their survival depended on an ever-changing external system that was beyond their control.

Everett was originally enlisted by the Summer Institute of Language to translate the New Testament into Pirahã. He was not supposed to preach or baptize. The SIL had great faith that the sacred words of the scriptures alone were all that was needed to illuminate the wicked souls of the heathens and inspire them to convert to the one true faith.

So, Everett spent much time at his desk, listening to recordings, thinking, taking notes. He was a linguist, not an anthropologist, and he was on a mission from God. "I had gone to the Pirahãs to tell them about Jesus..., to give them an opportunity to choose purpose over pointlessness, to choose life over death, to choose joy and faith over despair and fear, to choose heaven over hell."

Everett's heroic efforts were vexed by the fact that no other language on Earth bore the slightest resemblance to Pirahã. Learning it was devilishly difficult. The villagers only spoke their native tongue, so no translators were available to assist him. After years of struggle, he finally succeeded, and translated the Gospel of Mark. He read it to natives, and none saw the light. It had no effect. Only one item in the scriptures captured their complete attention: the decapitation of St. John.

Pirahã culture was focused entirely on the present. Their way of life was the same as it was 1,000 years ago, and would remain the same for the next 1,000 years. So, there was no reason for history, and fear of the future was silly. They lived in the here and now, and believed what they could see. An event was only real if a living person in the community had been an eyewitness to it. Thus, Everett's stories about an ancient miracle worker named Jesus were purely meaningless.

One day, Everett gathered the folks together and delivered a testimonial. He had once been a hairy hippy, lost and confused, poisoning himself with drugs and booze. Then, his stepmother committed suicide, he saw the light, accepted Jesus, and his life became better. When the story was finished, the Pirahã all burst out laughing. "She killed herself? Ha ha ha. How stupid. Pirahãs don't kill themselves."

His perplexing objective was "to convince happy, satisfied people that they are lost and need Jesus as their personal savior." Missionaries had been trying to convert the Pirahã for nearly 300 years, without saving a single soul. The villagers insisted that they had no desire to live like Americans, and they begged him to stop talking about Jesus.

By the late `80s, after ten years of failed efforts, Everett realized that he had become a closet atheist. "I would go so far as to suggest that the Pirahãs are happier, fitter, and better adjusted to their environment than any Christian or other religious person I have ever known."

He remained in the closet for 20 years, in constant fear of being discovered. Finally, he confessed, and his family broke apart. Today he's a professor in the US. He helped to create an official reservation for the Pirahã, so that they will forever be safe from greedy materialists (true?).

Richard Adrian Reese
Author of What Is Sustainable

"I will not discuss the work of Daniel Everett. He has become a charlatan."
N. Chomsky

Chomsky's ire is not surprising if one takes into account that Everett's discoveries, insights and ideas obtained from studying a small, obscure the store tribe, demolish the core principles of Chomskyan linguistics including such hallowed concepts as 'universal' grammar, 'recursion' and reliance on overconceptualized symbolic 'grammar trees' that had been pulled out of thin air by the old polymath.

Pirahas have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for "all," "each," "every," "most," or "few. No feathers, no elaborate rituals or creation stories. No heaven and no hell. No codified 'laws'. Their universe (and spatial concepts such as what we call left/right) are organized around the river that is their 'axis mundi.' They are relaxed about social contracts - marriage, and divorce, are uncomplicated affairs. Every Piraha, says Everett, has had sex with a large percentage of living Pirahas. Adults cannot (and do not want to) learn to count, nor are they interested in learning anything that is foreign to their culture. That includes the idea of an Omnipotent Deity: "God to us is a foreigner. We don't know him. We don't want him." Under certain conditions the Piraha language can be reduced to wordless prosody - singing - that relies on an acute awareness of each others' state of being, intentions, desires and is defined by human connectedness itself (roughly speaking, one may compare it to the 'whistling' language of Canary Islanders or the 'drumming languages' of Africa). The expert here is actually not Dan himself, but his wife Keren, about whom we hear relatively little in the book.

Instead of creating conceptual & symbolic edifices, Pirahas built their culture around survival in the jungle and the banks of the Maici river that teems with fish (and anacondas). They possess superb hunting skills which, together with a modest skill in growing manioc, results in their rarely having to go hungry. Everett emphasizes over and again their patience, happiness, kindness and child-rearing skills. Apart from hunting/cooking, they spend most of their time hanging out. When men had nothing to do,

"....they would sit around the graying embers of a fire, talking, laughing, farting, and pulling baked sweet potatoes out of the coals. Occasionally, they supplemented this routine by pulling one another's genitals and laughing as if they were the first earthlings to engage in something so clever. " Is this heaven or what?!

The Piraha language is focused on the experience of the present moment, on the living moment itself. What counts is the challenge of Now. I find it whimsical that this tribe effortlessly lives what Tibetans, Indians, Chinese and Europeans spend lifetimes to learn (ie, living in the present moment). No special breathing techniques for the Piraha, no visualizations, no asceticism, no gurus or philosophers - what they need to learn, they learn from each other and from nature. A holistic state of being of course has its drawbacks, as native peoples have discovered around the world. This includes the ease through which a non-conceptual mind is overwhelmed by alcohol (there is no inhibition provided by the brakes of conceptual thought) and the susceptibility to the tricks by unscrupulous traders.

However, living in the Now is no panacea and certainly no bed of roses. Everett tells us why.

Everett's experiences are narrated in a readable, gripping, irresistible book that combines field work, personal experience and his ideas about language, culture, Chomsky and Sapir-Whorff. This is anthropology at its best - a return to human experience and its logos rather than the other way around. And the anaconda incident at the end - whoa! Awesome book, highly recommended.

In his partial autobiography Mr. Everett weaves together a number of interrelated life-stories with candor and humility, courage and economy. One is the account of how he ended up as a field linguist specializing in the storeian languages and living among native speakers in their jungle habitat. (This can be compared profitably with Derek Bickerton's story of how he got into creoles, and both strongly urged upon budding young scholars of linguistics or anthropology.) No small part of that story consists of the exotic day-to-day details of subsisting in near Neolithic circumstances. Another is his personal life story, which I will not spoil in a review, showing many stages of growth, experimentation, failure, success, and learning. Still another is a compelling summary of his linguistic and anthropological studies among the Piraha, in the course of which you will learn how they may figure in the contemporary linguistic debates concerning "recursion" and "built-in" human linguistic cognitive capabilities.

This book is ideal for reading with a partner or a book club or an internet discussion group because of the possibilities for different points of view with respect to its various story lines. For example, I can imagine vigorous and productive debate concerning the role of missionaries among aborigines, the correctness of author's linguistic-anthropological analyses, the parenting decisions of the author and his wife, and so on.

One day, listening to the jungle drums on the info-stream, I heard that a study had concluded that the happiest people in the world were the Pirahã (pee-da-HAN) tribe of the the store (true). I heard that some guy then went to visit them, to discover the source of their bliss (false). I heard that his name was Daniel L. Everett, and the book was Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (true). My library had the book, and reading it was a rewarding experience (true).

Everett spent much of 30 years among the Pirahã (1977-2006), arriving long before the happiness study was published. His three children were raised among them, on the banks of the Maici River. The jungle was full of dangerous things. All night long, some natives stayed awake chatting. They rarely slept more than two hours at a time. Sleepers became a playground for dozens of three-inch cockroaches (annoyances), and were often joined by eight-inch roach-eating tarantulas (beloved allies).

Acquiring food required the natives to "work" 15 to 20 hours each week. They hunted, fished, foraged, and grew some manioc. About 70 percent of their diet was fish. They lived beside a major river that had not yet been emptied by commercial fishermen. Villagers who visited cities were shocked to observe how much food the civilized folks consumed -- three big meals a day!

The Pirahã were remarkably and genuinely happy. They wore bright smiles, and laughed about everything. Violence was rare, and so were angry outbursts. They were amazingly tolerant and patient. They were less pleasant to be around when traders brought them rum, and every man, woman, and child became blind drunk.

The people lived in a world that was spiritually alive, and they often saw and spoke with spirits that Everett was unable to perceive. Sometimes spirits took the form of jaguars or trees. Sometimes they spoke through a person in a trance. Sometimes they provided the people with guidance or warnings. Sometimes they killed people. Many folks wore necklaces to protect themselves from evil spirits.

The natives spoke to their children like equals; "baby talk" was unknown. Parents were not paranoid protectionists -- kids were free to burn themselves in the fire, or cut themselves with sharp knives, in the pursuit of higher learning. There was no spanking, and children were never given orders -- nor were adults. Pirahã teens were not confused, insecure, and depressed. They naturally conformed to the ways of the community. They were blessed to live in a stable sustainable society.

The Pirahã language had no numbers, or words to express quantities. They had no use for the knowledge of the whites, because their way of life worked just fine without it. After months of daily classes, none could count to ten, or calculate the sum of one plus one. Consequently, traders delighted in exploiting them, by underpaying them for jungle products.

Indigenous folks who lived with the Brazilians and their money economy were known as caboclos. Life in the culture of materialism infected them with madness. When prospectors found a section of streambed rich with gold, other caboclos did not hesitate to murder them and swipe the treasure. All that mattered was winning, by any means necessary.

They thought that the Pirahãs were lazy and stupid, because they had zero interest in pursuing wealth, or plundering their ecosystem. But the Pirahã had a time-proven way of life that worked very well -- wild, free, and happy. They always had everything they needed, and life was more or less grand, hence the smiles and laughter. Might this have been humankind's "normal" state in the good old days?

The caboclos were more sullen in nature. The demands of the money world were highly corrosive to their traditional culture, to the vitality of their ecosystem, and to their mental health. They were less secure, and had real reasons to worry about tomorrow, because their survival depended on an ever-changing external system that was beyond their control.

Everett was originally enlisted by the Summer Institute of Language to translate the New Testament into Pirahã. He was not supposed to preach or baptize. The SIL had great faith that the sacred words of the scriptures alone were all that was needed to illuminate the wicked souls of the heathens and inspire them to convert to the one true faith.

So, Everett spent much time at his desk, listening to recordings, thinking, taking notes. He was a linguist, not an anthropologist, and he was on a mission from God. "I had gone to the Pirahãs to tell them about Jesus..., to give them an opportunity to choose purpose over pointlessness, to choose life over death, to choose joy and faith over despair and fear, to choose heaven over hell."

Everett's heroic efforts were vexed by the fact that no other language on Earth bore the slightest resemblance to Pirahã. Learning it was devilishly difficult. The villagers only spoke their native tongue, so no translators were available to assist him. After years of struggle, he finally succeeded, and translated the Gospel of Mark. He read it to natives, and none saw the light. It had no effect. Only one item in the scriptures captured their complete attention: the decapitation of St. John.

Pirahã culture was focused entirely on the present. Their way of life was the same as it was 1,000 years ago, and would remain the same for the next 1,000 years. So, there was no reason for history, and fear of the future was silly. They lived in the here and now, and believed what they could see. An event was only real if a living person in the community had been an eyewitness to it. Thus, Everett's stories about an ancient miracle worker named Jesus were purely meaningless.

One day, Everett gathered the folks together and delivered a testimonial. He had once been a hairy hippy, lost and confused, poisoning himself with drugs and booze. Then, his stepmother committed suicide, he saw the light, accepted Jesus, and his life became better. When the story was finished, the Pirahã all burst out laughing. "She killed herself? Ha ha ha. How stupid. Pirahãs don't kill themselves."

His perplexing objective was "to convince happy, satisfied people that they are lost and need Jesus as their personal savior." Missionaries had been trying to convert the Pirahã for nearly 300 years, without saving a single soul. The villagers insisted that they had no desire to live like Americans, and they begged him to stop talking about Jesus.

By the late `80s, after ten years of failed efforts, Everett realized that he had become a closet atheist. "I would go so far as to suggest that the Pirahãs are happier, fitter, and better adjusted to their environment than any Christian or other religious person I have ever known."

He remained in the closet for 20 years, in constant fear of being discovered. Finally, he confessed, and his family broke apart. Today he's a professor in the US. He helped to create an official reservation for the Pirahã, so that they will forever be safe from greedy materialists (true?).

Richard Adrian Reese
Author of What Is Sustainable

"I will not discuss the work of Daniel Everett. He has become a charlatan."
N. Chomsky

Chomsky's ire is not surprising if one takes into account that Everett's discoveries, insights and ideas obtained from studying a small, obscure the store tribe, demolish the core principles of Chomskyan linguistics including such hallowed concepts as 'universal' grammar, 'recursion' and reliance on overconceptualized symbolic 'grammar trees' that had been pulled out of thin air by the old polymath.

Pirahas have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for "all," "each," "every," "most," or "few. No feathers, no elaborate rituals or creation stories. No heaven and no hell. No codified 'laws'. Their universe (and spatial concepts such as what we call left/right) are organized around the river that is their 'axis mundi.' They are relaxed about social contracts - marriage, and divorce, are uncomplicated affairs. Every Piraha, says Everett, has had sex with a large percentage of living Pirahas. Adults cannot (and do not want to) learn to count, nor are they interested in learning anything that is foreign to their culture. That includes the idea of an Omnipotent Deity: "God to us is a foreigner. We don't know him. We don't want him." Under certain conditions the Piraha language can be reduced to wordless prosody - singing - that relies on an acute awareness of each others' state of being, intentions, desires and is defined by human connectedness itself (roughly speaking, one may compare it to the 'whistling' language of Canary Islanders or the 'drumming languages' of Africa). The expert here is actually not Dan himself, but his wife Keren, about whom we hear relatively little in the book.

Instead of creating conceptual & symbolic edifices, Pirahas built their culture around survival in the jungle and the banks of the Maici river that teems with fish (and anacondas). They possess superb hunting skills which, together with a modest skill in growing manioc, results in their rarely having to go hungry. Everett emphasizes over and again their patience, happiness, kindness and child-rearing skills. Apart from hunting/cooking, they spend most of their time hanging out. When men had nothing to do,

"....they would sit around the graying embers of a fire, talking, laughing, farting, and pulling baked sweet potatoes out of the coals. Occasionally, they supplemented this routine by pulling one another's genitals and laughing as if they were the first earthlings to engage in something so clever. " Is this heaven or what?!

The Piraha language is focused on the experience of the present moment, on the living moment itself. What counts is the challenge of Now. I find it whimsical that this tribe effortlessly lives what Tibetans, Indians, Chinese and Europeans spend lifetimes to learn (ie, living in the present moment). No special breathing techniques for the Piraha, no visualizations, no asceticism, no gurus or philosophers - what they need to learn, they learn from each other and from nature. A holistic state of being of course has its drawbacks, as native peoples have discovered around the world. This includes the ease through which a non-conceptual mind is overwhelmed by alcohol (there is no inhibition provided by the brakes of conceptual thought) and the susceptibility to the tricks by unscrupulous traders.

However, living in the Now is no panacea and certainly no bed of roses. Everett tells us why.

Everett's experiences are narrated in a readable, gripping, irresistible book that combines field work, personal experience and his ideas about language, culture, Chomsky and Sapir-Whorff. This is anthropology at its best - a return to human experience and its logos rather than the other way around. And the anaconda incident at the end - whoa! Awesome book, highly recommended.

In his partial autobiography Mr. Everett weaves together a number of interrelated life-stories with candor and humility, courage and economy. One is the account of how he ended up as a field linguist specializing in the storeian languages and living among native speakers in their jungle habitat. (This can be compared profitably with Derek Bickerton's story of how he got into creoles, and both strongly urged upon budding young scholars of linguistics or anthropology.) No small part of that story consists of the exotic day-to-day details of subsisting in near Neolithic circumstances. Another is his personal life story, which I will not spoil in a review, showing many stages of growth, experimentation, failure, success, and learning. Still another is a compelling summary of his linguistic and anthropological studies among the Piraha, in the course of which you will learn how they may figure in the contemporary linguistic debates concerning "recursion" and "built-in" human linguistic cognitive capabilities.

This book is ideal for reading with a partner or a book club or an internet discussion group because of the possibilities for different points of view with respect to its various story lines. For example, I can imagine vigorous and productive debate concerning the role of missionaries among aborigines, the correctness of author's linguistic-anthropological analyses, the parenting decisions of the author and his wife, and so on.

Everett's book "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes" is a brilliant book composed of essentially two parts; the first part describes important aspects of his life with the Piraha and their language, while the second part explains the ramifications of the Piraha language for linguistics. The first part was particularly interesting. Everett combines personal accounts of very difficult times with humorous anecdotes about the Piraha. After reading this book I felt that I truly had a broad (if somewhat shallow) understanding of the Piraha people.

The second part is where the gravity of Everett's research really hits home. He describes the general linguistic consensus of the past few decades (central to this is Noam Chomsky's "universal grammar") and then goes on to explain the ways the consensus is inadequate for describing the Piraha language. If Everett is right, the Piraha language acts as a potent counter-example to much of Chomsky's theory.

One thing that I felt he could have gone into more detail about is his deconversion from Christianity. It must have been an extremely important part of his life, since he first worked with the Piraha as a missionary, but his explanation for why he became an atheist was somewhat lacking. In fact it quite nearly acted as just a short footnote, being that it was in a short summary chapter at the end of the book.

Most of the book is very easy to understand, and Everett writes such that he can be understood by the lay-reader, but he tries to explain some difficult concepts that I, as someone with only a basic understanding of linguistics, found to be very confusing. Other than that, however, I heartily recommend this book to anyone with an interest in language, linguistics, or anthropology.

Very interesting account of the author's mission to the indigenous Piraha tribe of Brazil, his linguistic research to understand their culture, and the profound philosophical changes it made to his own life. Everett originally intended to convert the Piraha to Christianity, and set out to learn their language and culture so that he could translate the Bible more effectively and convey the gospel message to them accurately. Instead, as he delved deep into their intentionally isolated culture, he found a people who were exclusively rooted in the now, in what they could personally see or report. They therefore had very little language for abstract notions (such as counting), no mythology, and very little anxiety.

Part I recounts Everett's personal encounters with the Piraha; Part II is a more technical exploration of their language and its challenges to existing linguistic theory (maybe culture shapes everything about our brains!); and Part III his personal conclusions. This third part is the weakest - Everett, spending all his time as a scientist and in a purely empirical culture, has obviously "gone native" and let his linguistic observations erroneously shape his philosophy. Still worth a good read for the first two sections, though.

The book "Don't Sleep, there are snakes" is about the study of the Piraha Indians in Brazil by the linguist Daniel Everett. Everett sets out with his family in 1977 to study the unusual language of the Piraha Indians, and to convert them to Christianity. Referring to the quote above Everett and his family do not get what they expected. Instead, the author finds himself admiring the natives, and their non-violent culture so much that he finds himself tolerating, and learning from their practical ways. Everett grows disenchanted with the christian religion as a result of his living with the Pirahas.

The Piraha language is like no other in existance, and does not seem similar to any other languages. There are very few vowels in their language, and consonants that are pronounced one way in this language are pronounced very differently in Piraha. There are few if any references to personal property in the culture or in the language, and there is no mathmatical system.

Everett also discusses the differences in the Piraha culture and the American culture. Sexuality is very open, and the author cites many references to nudity and sexual occurances that are done publically. The Piraha culture have few to no rituals, even involving when a death occurs. There is evidence of marriage, but no ceremony to determine when someone is married. And there is virtually no health care-if someone gets sick and dies, it is all seen as the way of the world, and no attempts are made to do anything to prevent a death from disease or a wound. Everett feels that the Pirahas are the most content and at peace people he has ever seen, despite the fact they have no desire to know about how the universe works or to better themselves.

One of the many things that fascinated me about this book was that the author only aluded to his own life, and did not discuss in depth his personal, inner struggles with the difficult environment. The author's brother died at age 6, and his stepmother died when he was 11. We only get brief glimpses of how this affected him. Also, at some point, the author's marriage broke up. When did this happen? How? Was it a direct result of living in the jungle with the Pirahas? What is his relationship like with his three children? If Everett is no longer a Christian, then what is he now?

Everett's book is enchanting, and engrossing. It is very difficult to put down once you begin reading it (even if you do not have a background in linguistics). The pictures of some of the people Everett encountered also add to the content of the book.

I am surprised that no one has reviewed this fascinating book. It is a memoir of a missionary linguist who spends several years learning an obscure the storeian Indian language in order to translate the New Testament. This is what the Summer Institute of Linguistics and the Wycliffe Bible Translators do. They do not baptize or openly evangelize, instead they are trained linguists whose ultimate purpose is to bring the Word of God to remote, tribal peoples in the expectation that the Bible will speak for itself, work its unique magic and transform pagans into Christians.

Anyone who has done anthropological fieldwork in the the store region--as I myself have done in the Suriname rain forest--has run across missionary linguistics and probably befriended a few. Life in remote villages is hard and it exposes not only oneself but also one's family (if they are with the linguist or anthropologist) to life-threatening diseases and other mortal dangers. It takes real motivation, commitment, sacrifice and clarity of purpose to actually live in a remote village in a rain forest--or other inhospitable parts of the globe--for an extended period

In the case of Daniel Everett, his wife almost dies early in his fieldwork. But he--they-survive this first existential crisis and soldier on. As the book progresses, we get to know his Indian group, the Piraha, increasingly well and begin to understand and sympathize with their world-view.

Professional linguists will be interested in Everett`s critical discussion about Chomsky, Pinker and others who have theorized about why all known languages possess the same essential features. But the lay reader will find enough of interest beyond linguistics to want to read this book

One of the most interesting and unexpected elements of this book is that the missionary linguist in the end loses his faith and as a result, loses his career, his wife and many friends and colleagues. Everett had gone to the Piraha confident that the Bible, once made accessible in the Piraha language, would allow people "to choose purpose over pointlessness, to choose life over death, to choose joy and faith over despair and death, to choose heaven over hell."(p. 264) The trouble is, Piraha believe in the immediacy of experience; they live in the present; they are happy and not lost or in a state of despair. And it is not just they who believe this; the missionary comes to believe it too. Everett quotes a Bible professor from his college days, "You've gotta get `em lost before you can get `em saved." And he observes, "If people don't perceive a serious lack of some sort in their lives, they are less likely to embrace new beliefs, especially about God and salvation." (p. 266)

I find this most interesting. I have myself come to recognize that people in difficult circumstances, and especially in crisis (as in finding oneself in a war zone, facing financial ruin, life-threatening illness or a long prison term, or hitting the "rock bottom" described by an alcoholic or drug addict) are more likely to reach out to God and salvation than those who are relatively comfortable in their lives. Dr Everett finally concludes that the Piraha don't need Christianity, that Christianity does not fit Piraha culture; that they are happy as they are and who is he to tell them they need salvation? The author does not reach this conclusion lightly and he knows it will have profound consequences for himself and his family.

This conclusion will doubtless sadden or anger many missionaries and other Christian readers, who will otherwise find much to like in this stunningly honest account of linguistic or missionary fieldwork. Discomfort with the outcome may account for why there are no the store reviews to date of this book. Christian readers may well be unhappy with the conclusion (which accounts for only 11 out of 283 pages.) And perhaps other potential reviewers don't want to publicly take the author's side of a topic as divisive as the existence or not of God.

In any case, I recommend this book as a searingly honest account of a missionary's struggle to learn an unwritten language, to immerse himself and his family in an alien (to him) culture, to understand the interaction between Piraha language and culture, all of which forces the author to reflect in a new way on his own spiritual "foundational" beliefs and purpose in life. And of course, there is always the fascination of watching someone commit professional suicide. This book explains what it took to drive one man to make his life-altering choice. If I had seen this book pre-publication, I would have suggested that more than 11 pages be devoted to the author's loss of faith. It almost seems that Everett was afraid he would lose readers if his flagging faith were signaled earlier in the book. In any case, there are many book s about how people came to accept Jesus. I suspect there are far fewer that explain how someone came to lose Jesus. I found myself wondering why loss in a particular faith led inexorably to loss of all faith in a First Cause, a Prime Mover. Could the ex-missionary not have became a deist, theist or Unitarian? I was left wanting to know more about his personal transformation.

The Pirahã are the "Show me!" tribe of the Brazilian the store. They don't bother with fiction or tall tales or even oral history. They have little art. They don't have a creation myth and don't want one. If they can't see it, hear it, touch it or taste it, they don't believe in it.

Missionaries have been preaching to the Pirahãs for 200 years and have converted not one. Everett did not know this when he first visited them in 1977 at age 26. A missionary and a linguist, he was sent to learn their language, translate the Bible for them, and ultimately bring them to Christ.

Instead, they brought him to atheism. "The Pirahãs have shown me that there is dignity and deep satisfaction in facing life and death without the comfort of heaven or the fear of hell and in sailing toward the great abyss with a smile."

Not that they have escaped religion entirely. Spirits live everywhere and may even caution or lecture them at times. But these spirits are visible to the Pirahãs, if not to Everett and his family, who spent 30 years, on and off, living with the tribe.

But they don't have marriage or funeral ceremonies. Cohabitation suffices as the wedding announcement and divorce is accomplished just as simply, though there may be more noise involved. Sexual mores are governed by common sense rather than stricture, which means that single people have sex at will while married people are more circumspect.

People are sometimes buried with their possessions, which are few, and larger people are often buried sitting "because this requires less digging." But there is no ritual for each family to follow.

"Perhaps the activity closest to ritual among the Pirahãs is their dancing. Dances bring the village together. They are often marked by promiscuity, fun, laughing, and merriment by the entire village. There are no musical instruments involved, only singing, clapping, and stomping of feet."

Everett's language studies began without benefit of dictionary or primer. None of the Pirahãs spoke any English or more than the most rudimentary Portuguese (Among their many eccentricities is their total lack of interest in any facet of any other culture including tools or language - not that they won't use tools, like canoes, they just won't make them or absorb them into their culture).

Amazingly, "Pirahã is not known to be related to any other living human language."

At first it seems rather deprived. There are only 11 phonemes (speech sounds). There are no numbers, no words for colors. No words for please, thank you or sorry. There are, however, tones, whistles and clicks. And the language comes in three forms - regular plus Humming speech and Yelling speech.

Over the years Everett comes to the conclusion that the Pirahã language reflects and arises from their culture in its directness, immediacy and simplicity. Ultimately he defies Noam Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar (Pirahã lacks a basic requirement) and starts a firestorm in the linguistics field. Everett alludes mildly to this in the book, but a little Internet browsing will leave readers shocked - shocked! - at the way linguists talk to one another.

There are plenty of anecdotes involving the reader in Everett's adventures, hardships, terrors, epiphanies and the pure strangeness of daily life with a people who live in the immediate present and whose most common "good-night" is "Don't sleep, there are snakes." (sound sleep is dangerous and, besides, toughening themselves is a strong cultural value - foodless days are also common).

Fascinating as both anthropological memoir and linguistic study, Everett's book will appeal to those interested in very not-North American cultures and in the ways people shape language and it shapes us.

It's a book that rouses a sense of wonder and gives rise to even more questions than it answers.

Daniel L. Everett is a linguist who first visited the Pirahã tribe as a family man and missionary. His experiences over the next 30 years broke up his family, put him at odds with the linguistic establishment, turned him into an atheist --- and have provided us with a fascinating book, which is part Boy Scout adventure, part reality TV, part crisis of faith, part anthropological study, and part linguistic treatise.

The Pirahã (pronounced Pee-da-HAN) are a little known tribe of the storeian Indians who live on the banks of two rivers in territory that, before Everett encountered them, had never been assigned officially to the tribe but that they defended, occasionally to the death. Largely peaceful, they have intermarried and retained a very primitive lifestyle that they consider to be in every way superior to that of outsiders, including Americans, for thousands of years. They are far less colorful than many the storeian groups, with no decorative arts or inventions. They purchase some pots and axes and make their own bows and arrows. If a plane comes, boys will make models of the planes but will throw them away days later. They live in the crudest of rudimentary stick and leaf shelters and survive by eating manioc, which simply grows nearby without being cultivated, and by hunting and fishing. They have no special rituals, and apart from the occasional visit from a spirit to frighten or inform them, they have no religion.

When Everett took his family and went to live for shorter and longer periods of time with this strange tribe, he was expected to learn their language, make a translation of the Bible and then convert the natives. What he learned was that the language itself held the key to their culture. And discovering the essence of that culture, he realized that they would never be converted --- not as long as they remained as they are --- and he saw no reason to change them, just as they saw no reason to change themselves.

There is an illustrative story (among many) of Everett being approached by men in the tribe who wanted him to buy them a big canoe from a neighboring tribe. With all the right instincts as a missionary and development agent, he did everything needed to transfer the skill of canoe construction to them. He invited the neighbors to come in and demonstrate, and insisted that the Pirahã men work alongside them. Not long afterwards, the same men came to him for money to buy another big boat. "I told them they could make their own now. They said, `Pirahãns don't make canoes.'"

Everett came to understand that the Pirahãns live entirely in the moment. They have no creation myths, no history past the living generations. Their language, which has only a few words, speaks primarily of immediacies, and is so dependent on tone that it can be hummed or whistled for clarification. All verbs have up to 65,000 combinations but only a handful of tenses. Everett is one of the few outsiders who ever learned to speak it, but he believes that after 30 years, the Pirahã people still do not regard him as a speaker any more than we consider a computer to be an English speaker. The tribe does not theorize or plan. They just exchange chit-chat. Yet the typical Pirahã is happier, Everett believes, "than any Christian or other religious person I have ever known."

The Pirahãns did not accept Jesus because they had never met Him. Their simple view deeply affected Everett, who had been well trained as a missionary to confront and overcome almost any challenge --- superstition, malaria, filth, alligators. But this startling way of looking at life as entirely evidential shook his faith and eventually caused him to confess that he had lost it. Everett not only shocked his missionary peers and fractured his marriage; he sent ripples through the linguistic establishment with his claims about the construction of the Pirahã language, saying it did not build upon itself and was not recursive, which challenged the theories of the great Noam Chomsky. Chomsky's linguistic doctrine postulates a universal grammar, ever-increasing, ever able to branch out and express ever more complex concepts. Everett was saying that, perhaps unique in the world, here in the the store was a group of people whose language did not grow, whose experience did not expand with increased contact with the outside, and who liked it that way.

As Chair of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Illinois State University, Everett has proven his points and earned his laurels. He still visits with the Pirahã.

--- Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott

What leads anyone in our western culture to try to convince
the so called primitive to change and find salvation?
Daniel L. Everett account of his journey in the the storeian jungle
answers that question for me. It is an amazingly brave story about a family who have the courage to live their faith.
Is it the belief that the other is as lost as we are in
our violent, bomb infested culture that drives the missionary. Surely the mess where in can
be solved by prayer, no doubt salvation is just around the corner.
If faith in the New Testament can give hope to our crazed culture what miracles the Bible will accomplish in the Jungle. Linguistics is interesting but not as compelling as the changes that accompanies the shock to Everett when his beliefs do not help the Pirahas find happiness but his beliefs are cover ups for his own confusion. The Pirahas have no need for the Bible as their
day to day life which is fascinating is similar to our lost dream of the Garden. Why read
a book, see a movie when family and friends solve the riddle of lost purpose. The Pirahas have no need to understand linguistics,
they already have a satisfying culture.

My introduction to linguistics came in the late 60's, in the heady early days of the Chomskyian revolution. I remain fascinated by human language, and this book was like intellectual candy. Everett's heroic efforts to understand the Pirahã language and culture have touched off firestorms in several academic fields. It will be most interesting to see what's left when the dust settles. At the moment, it appears that Chomsky and his faithful are redefining some of their terms in an attempt to rescue their dogma.
There are a few minor inconsistencies in the book that Everett should fix in a second edition. For example, he states unequivocally that the Pirahã have no number words, then later translates a passage as meaning "There were two pigs." I contacted him and he explained that this translation was done early in his research, when he believed the language did have number words; a more accurate translation would be "There were a larger quantity of pigs."
As I said, fascinating.

This book is fascinating! Languages vary greatly in complexity, phonology, and means of expression. It is interesting to see how this happens in the Piraha language. I like how Daniel Everett explains the language in detail describing how the language is so different from all other languages in the discovery that it lacks recursion. I also enjoyed reading about the Piraha culture and daily life. The Piraha are so peaceful and I feel that we can all learn a few things from them. It is one of my favorite books.

"Pirahãs laugh about everything. They laugh at their own misfortune: when someone's hut blows over in a rainstorm, the occupants laugh more loudly than anyone. They laugh when they catch a lot of fish. They laugh when they catch no fish. They laugh when they're full and they laugh when they're hungry... This pervasive happiness is hard to explain, though I believe that the Pirahãs are so confident and secure in their ability to handle anything that their environment throws at them that they can enjoy whatever comes their way. This is not at all because their lives are easy, but because they are good at what they do."
"The Pirahã have no word meaning "Thank you." They show gratitude by returning the favor or giving a gift. They do not say "I'm sorry" or "you're welcome" or "hello." Instead of bidding someone goodnight, they say, "Don't sleep, there are snakes" -- a gentle reminder that wild beasts lurk in the nearby jungle ready to slither, scurry or pounce at the first hint of an unsuspecting, defenseless snore. "Goodnight," is an empty phrase, argues Everett. At least the Pirahã saying serves a purpose.

But when the talking stops and the sentences have all been diagramed, Everett's book becomes more than just the personal journey of a man deep in the heart of godless, grammatical darkness. There is no horror for Everett or the Pirahã, just friendship, respect, and endless fascination with each other's differences."

[...]

This book has the flavor of two different books intertwined, one about cultural memoir and the other about linguistics. However, you can see that this is exactly the kind of linguistics that the author is arguing for in his presentation. That is, linguistics that takes the culture and its original setting into account.

The story takes you into another culture. And a fascinating one which reveals its idiosyncrasies through language, and asks us questions about our own language that may in fact lead you to wonder whether much of our unhappiness is built into our use of language (I would agree with this).

There is a story in here about a missionary's "fall from faith" in the face of a culture that wholeheartedly believes in the principle of immediacy. I wonder why the author (a trained linguist) never seemed to have considered his own religious system a set of metaphors that have everything to do with the immediate, present moment.

A book about living linguistics. Recommended.

I had first heard about this tribe and their language a year or so back in hearing an interview with the author. I found it interesting then, and was pleasantly surprised when I found out a book had been written on the subject. The first half of the book recounts the author's experiences with the Piraha tribe over a 30 year span. This includes some harrowing tales, such as his wife's brush with death from Malaria, and when tribesmen almost killed he and his family. It reads like a thriller novel in places- a real page-turner. One gets to know some simply fascinating details about how the tribe views themselves and the world, and how their language reflects this. The author makes some linguistic assertions that may or may not proved to be true, but his analysis is definitely well thought out and detailed. Some readers may find this section of the book to be a cumbersome and overly complex read. The descriptions and stories about the piraha themselves are really enough of a reason to buy this book, even if you decide to skip out on the technical section.
I personally read this book in one day, after a late night out at a bar and 3 hours of sleep. That ought to tell you about how much of a great read it is!! I feel like I have look at the world slightly differently since this read- it puts things into perspective, and reaffirms to me that you can be happy and content without belief in the supernatural (Christians- no, this book does not attack God or belief in any way. The author happened to be a missionary who ended up converting to atheism due to what he learned from the Piraha tribe. To truly understand his path, you have to read the book. You will not have strong faith shaken by this book).

The author began living with this tribe as a lead-by-example missionary and as a linguistic anthropologist. He led a fascinating life, for a couple of decades, among this small and very isolated and very unusual tribe of people. He sought to change the people but was himself transformed. It was wonderful watch his mind and heart open and change.

Fascinating book, but as another reviewer pointed out, his prose style is a bit clumsy. However, we shouldn't expect scientists to be Mark Twain, or even Hunter S. Thompson. The material is enough to carry you through to the end, and the content is excellent, stimulating and intellectually satisfying.

(This review is written by Dave Crocco) Dan Everett had an amazing experience while living among the primative (Yes Dan, they are primative, but more on that later) Pirahas of the the store. Dr. Everett is a linguist with a small, but sharp, ax to grind. He contends that the Pirahas are more advanced than the muggles of Western Civilization because, as he has observed, the Piraha are as happy as well fed puppies. This discovery was life changing for Dr. Everett, a former Christian missionary, and should have been the focus of his book. Instead he tucks his remarkable experiences into the corners of this highly technical treatise on the nature of the Piraha language. Gradually, as he lived apart from civilization, he began to see that his world view was childish, and abandoned it. So far, so good. Unfortunately, the world view that he adopted, that of materialism of the sort that he believes the Piraha have, is even more childish. He tells us that their lifestyle is one of living in the Present Moment, since they almost never speak of the past, have no creation story, and regard as truth only that which can be detected with the senses. This reminds me of a Hippie I knew far too long ago who tried to live thus until one day he got a stick in his eye, and then it was off the The Man's hospital ( and make it snappy). The Piraha are also uninterested in the West until one of their children gets sick, as Dr. Everett reports. I would not comment on Dr. Everett's world view at all had he not pronounced it thus in his Conclusion. It is enough that his experiences led him away from his ridiculous religious views. That alone would have made a great story had it led him to a state of not knowing, the actual state of living in the present moment. Instead, Dr. Everett tells us that nothing exits except the material world. What of Love, Doctor?
Alas, he did not travel far.

An excellent book to make us understand that our way of life is only one of many and give recognition to cultures we normally don't, treating them of "native" or "primitive". Simply the people from those cultures are adapted to their environment and that their way of life is different from ours does not imply that they have less human qualities or intelligence.

Be there a people with souls so bright that among them is no chronic fatigue, extreme anxiety nor panic attacks, depressives, etc. Their language doesn't even possess a word for worry. The Dalai Lama would have us believe that such is the achievement of some advanced Tibetan monks, and so would his western scientific followers who now peddle, `the art of happiness' to the masses. Daniel Everett claims that is the natural state of the four hundred indigenous Pirahã in the the storeian jungle. They live what Ram Das encourages us to do, "Be Here Now," and presumably possess what the popular spiritual author, Eckhart Tolle, expounds in his tome, "The Power of Now." The Pirahã know none of this. They are anything but spiritual. Everett lays their happiness at the feet of their culture and language.

Having been enamored of anthropologists' claims that among recently extent hunter-gatherers there are harmless peoples, forest peoples who live in harmony, debased peoples without culture and even intrinsically violent peoples, only to discover later that the lives of the people described are much more complicated and we were misled by the anthropologists' projections if not outright fabrications, how can we but meet Everett's assertions with other than skepticism. Yet on reading Everett's book I was prepared to be convinced. The book itself is kind of rough. Everett treats us to a humane and interesting story of his time among the Pirahã. They seem to exist in a never-never land surrounded by the Brazilian invasion of the the storeian jungle which either destroyed other indigenous cultures or, at least, partially assimilated them. The Pirahã have resisted this without having to fight it, maybe because they are very few and their land was not valuable enough to make worthwhile overcoming their resistance. We don't get a clear picture of this. Everett takes his family on a linguistic evangelical mission. Over a period of years they spend time among the Pirahã while Everett tries to learn their language in order to translate the Bible. He succeeds in some translation but eventually loses his faith. He is swept away by the life the Pirahã lead which does not need the solace his religion promises. In fact, Everett discovers that the Pirahã live the happiness of Christian immortality and they live it now, not in some future heaven which their language and culture cannot conceive of. After years of study, this really sinks in at the expense of his beliefs and the consequent loss of his co-religionist and, alas, his family. He gives us no details of this. Nor do we learn much about the Pirahã's relation with somewhat more assimilated indigenous groups who surround them and possess equal jungle skills but don't share their attitude toward life.

What we are presented with is Pirahã culture as reflected in their language and grammar. And here the author makes a complex argument about linguistic theory which is difficult to follow without knowing something about a field that is very technical. The picture of Pirahã culture is intriguing and I write more about it below. But Everett's arguments against established ideas in linguistics go over my head. I can assent to his claims: they seem sensible, but I would like to know how the people who represent the ideas he says are inaccurate would answer. And then I might not understand because I simply do not know technical linguistics. Everett claims Pirahã language disobeys all sorts of universal rules propounded by Noam Chomsky in his theory of grammar. I am predisposed to think language and culture interpenetrate each other: how we see the world effects what we can say and the reverse. No big deal. But apparently it is in the academy. Though I read the parts of Everett's books where he goes into this, I found my attention floating away. Despite my training as a mathematician and having interpreted Chomsky's mathematical like talks to anthropologists when I was a visiting scholar at Princeton in the mid `60s, I found presentation of the nitty-gritty of the debates in Everett's book interfering with other things I would have preferred to have learned about the Pirahã, such as the delicate balance they maintained with respect to tools they obtained from the outside or whether any Pirahã strayed to the towns or worked for traders and what this might imply about the Pirahã's world view. I would like to know more about how the author personally managed to move between the world of the Pirahã, his university studies, and his religious institution. And now that he is a university professor, how does that fit with his continued contact with the Pirahã. We know that famous anthropologists who studied the Mbuti, the Yanoamo, and !Kung have both exploited and helped their subjects. Also since so much of Everett's thesis is based on language, did he ever become a fluent speaker? And his children, we know that kids learn languages without much effort. Did his children, playing for hours with Pirahã kids, come to speak and think like Pirahã. How did may that have affected them? So I liked the book but it also frustrated me and led me to want to know more.

Here is my take on Pirahã life and thoughts about its relation to the spiritual goal of being here now:

The Pirahã live in the present. They are happy. They are sexually promiscuous and change family partners with only a modicum of fuss. They spend much of their time together, sometimes in family groups but often in larger gatherings. They talk and they talk and they talk. They don't seem to sleep much, talking all night long. Sometimes they help each other but at others, let nature take it course without interfering, especially around childbirth. They may not come to the aid of a birthing mother who is in trouble and dispose of infants without mothers. They make a big fuss about old men lost in the jungle. They let children play with dangerous things and don't coddle them when they hurt themselves. The crying of weaned children, who no longer get so attended to, are ignored. Children are quickly given adult tasks. They don't seem to fight much among themselves but have killed outsiders and exiled members who were troublesome. The author witnessed one incidence of gang rape which was forceful but not violent. The author doesn't tell us how it affected the victim. Women and men seems to have equal power in the culture. The Pirahã use imported tools but do not maintain them. They don't preserve food. They do not believe in spirits but experience them as real. They regard dreams as real. They have no rituals. They resist counting, have an odd relationship to the concepts `each', `all' and `every', and don't use generalized color terms. They have a simple kinship system. They have no history, no folklore, nor creation myth. Sometimes they dress in costume and then appear and act something out. But when asked later, did so and so act like a snake, they simply reiterate that a snake came. They apparently have not changed over time, resisting acculturation and conversion.

The Pirahã are only interested in events witnesses by the interlocutor or related by someone who was alive during the lifetime of the speaker. Since Jesus can not be witnessed, they are simply not interested They are not interested in abstractions. They use simple past, present and future tenses but no perfect tenses. Everett feels that the Pirahã world view as embedded in their language is governed by what he calls the principle of "immediacy of experience." They never say, "the man who is tall is in the room," because "who is tall" is not relevant to the moment. They have few consonants in spoken language but possess a number of different ways of communicating. They have normal speech, whistle speech, shouting speech, and humming speech. The latter is highly developed between mothers and infants. For those of us who often feel much more is communicated non-verbally than verbally this is some kind exoneration. Last night I went to what was advertised as a popular talk on geology. The speaker dove in using geology terms (of which there are an incredible abundance) without making generalized explanations so that it was really hard to follow and somewhat boring. Nonetheless he conveyed much about his youth in the energy toward and comments about the images of cliffs and gorges he was showing. So the presentation demonstrated a kind of weariness of his 60 or so years but a life that had been packed with excitement. During the break I spoke to a construction worker whose hobby is political theory. While the content of our conversation was dense, it was the pacing, modulations and uneven rapport (sometimes supportive, sometimes competitive) which marked the human meaning of the interchange.

The challenge of meditation implicit in Ram Das' and Eckhart Tolle's works and explicit in Buddhism is to strip away the noise and reside in the essence of existence. Is the interwoven cultural and linguistic baggage that civilizations carry a crucial part of what gets in the way of doing this? If one approaches meditation from one of its many perspective, inquiry, could we look at all those grammatical forms we use which are alien to the Pirahã and find in them some of the causes of our suffering? If my mental chatter (and I don't know if anyone has studied whether it is governed by English grammar) contained only immediate experience would I then be aware as meditation defines awareness? There are several levels to this. The fundamental five aggregates of Buddhism are form, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness. So I am sitting there meditating. I am not talking but there are those noisy mental formations. Except for my chattering mind, there is sensation---nothing to talk about. If the mental formations evoked by sensation were only the present, the simple past or future would paying attention to the sensation be easier. "It hurts," but no generic notion pain with all that is packed into to it like the accompanying, "I will never walk again." The ingrained habits of abstraction, built into our speech keep us out of the present, so that mental formations are loaded with what makes for suffering without even having to take account of our psychological history. Can you entertain the idea that without numbers, abstractions, the world `as if,' that is speculation, addictive planning (the Pirahã don't' have Blackberries or discuss when they are going fishing), no history, ritual, folktales, creation myths or global warming, life might have less suffering. It does not look like the Pirahã spend much time alone. They live in one big family, yet seem to have autonomy. Because there is not much tension, mechanisms of social control are not heavy. They have disappointments, like spouses hooking up with someone else, but they don't seem to dwell on them. What would it be like if I tried during meditation practice to relate to my mind in the spirit of Pirahã language and culture. Without words could I notice number, abstraction, past and future perfect, generalization, etc. and could I carry that into my daily life? Well, to begin I couldn't write this. But it is an interesting challenge to try to observe where my suffering hooks into my fundamental speech patterns. And then when I am really in the present, either on the cushion, or in daily life, is it because those speech habits are in abeyance as they are presumed to be among the Pirahã. If I could really hang out in that space would my troubles abate, but then again maybe I would not be able to function as the I think world now demands of me. I have tried to look at the internal narrative while meditating to see if I could how much my "self" is embedded in the grammar of the narrative. It is an overwhelming task but an interesting inquiry to pursue. When Zen Master Soen sa Nim came to talk to my meditation students, they asked him why he spoke when he so emphasized silence. His response was, "Your were born that was a mistake, but what to?" It may be that unraveling the self that is embedded in grammar would unravel my relationship to my world. But then Buddhist folklore, particularly Zen, is replete with characters who did not abide by convention. Thanks you Daniel Everett for giving me so much to chew on.

Charlie Fisher emeritus professor and author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World

This book pretends to be a popular science description of Piraha culture and language. Unfortunately, this book failed in this task.

First of all, only last 30 percents has something to do with science. First 70 are at most artistic retelling of stories about life with Piraha. These stories look dubious. There are lots of apparent contradictions. Once I've read a book about Japan, an author presented Japanese culture as a culture of contradictions, and he succesfully explains these contradiction. Daniel Everett failed to do so. His book left an expression that some parts of these stories are just fake.

Second, the scientific part is poorly written. For example, there are several pages of boring pure geographical information and two stories in Piraha with the translation. This is not the way one write popular science. The point of popular science is to make it interesting and easy to understand. Not to give a lots of tangled science-looking information to pretend the reader is too stupid to understand.

Third, Everett says that, among other facts, Piraha is unique, because it's words don't change their meaning depending on position in the sentence and because there might be up to 18 suffixes for every verb.
These facts might be surprising only for analitic language speakers. My native language is Russian - fusional language, so the meaning of any word doesn't depend on it's position at all and there are nothing unusual in having lots of suffixes or preffixes. So I started to doubt in his other conclusions. It seems like Piraha language is an agglutinative one, so it's irrelevant to judge it from analitic point of view. Of course, I understand that it's a book written for English speakers, but an author who can't explain such a simple difference doesn't look professional to me.

My conclusion is: I don't trust Everett. Even if this culture and language is true, he failed to convey it.

Five stars for making me think.

Reviewers have described how Dan Everett lost his Christian faith when he tried to convert the Piraha. I would argue that he never had it to begin with. He says (page 265) that he "communicated more or less correctly to the Pirahas about my Christian beliefs." Yet for all his years at the Moody Bible Institute, the only part of the Bible that he seems to have understood is the Law. The Law is not the message of salvation. It shows us our sin and our complete inability to please God with our behavior. The Gospel, on the other hand, shows us our Savior. Everett describe Jesus as a man who "wanted others to do what he told them." Jesus does want us to obey God, but as he repeatedly showed the Pharisees, no one can do this perfectly. Hence the reason he came. He became the fulfillment of the Law for us and reconciled us to God because we could not do it ourselves.

I was disturbed by Dan's "testimony." He said that is was given to motivate unbelievers in the audience to accept Jesus. Our dramatic efforts to obey the Law do not change hearts. Only the Godpel message of Jesus' death on the cross in payment for our sin will do that. Furthermore, even our "acceptance" of Jesus is something we cannot bring about. God is also responsible for that! Our lost condition is so complete that the Bible describes us as dead in our sins and slaves to sin--slaves to a human nature that is hostile to God. Everett mentions the story of the three blind men describing an elephant. We ARE like blind men, droping around, thinking this or that is the truth, but unable to discern what it really is. Would it not have been for God's revelation of himself in the Bible and his plan of redemption, we would still be blind.

Everett provides a perfect example of this condition of slavery on page 272 when he says that he has freed himself from the "tyranny of the mind--following outside authorities rather than one's own reason." Ironically, Everett has not found freedom, but rather has kept himself bound in the slavery of his own reason and sinful nature. Our sinful nature abhors God as an authority figure to who we are accountable. As Everett says on page 273, the vision of a life without the concepts of sin and holiness is appealing. Of course it is! But we were not created this way. In the beginning, when we still held the image of God, we understood that our life only has meaning in glorifying our Creator. Unfortunately, with the fall into sin, we lost that image and understanding. Too many people, along with Everett, believe that we are "no more nor less than evolved primates." (272) The fact that God, in an act of pure undeserved grace, deigned to become a man, place himself under his own law, fulfill it in our stead, and thereby justify us and make us heirs of heaven, gives us far more worth than that.

Is Everett correct when he says that the culture and language of the Piraha keep them from being converted? God works through the means of grace (Word and Sacrament) and his Word always accomplishes what it is sent to do (see the parable of the Sower and the Seed). However, until they have more contact with the outside world, how will they be able to think in a different way? Everett loves anthropology and linguistics because "it is vital in teaching us different ways of thinking about life, of approaching our day to day existence on planet Earth." Shouldn't the Piraha also have the opportunity to see that life is, in fact, not just about "catching a fish, rowing a canoe, laughing with your children"? Our wishing it were so does not make it so. Thousand of years of history have testified differently. Perhaps, as the world continues to change the culture of the Piraha will become more fertile soil for the proclamation of the Gospel. We must pray for the harvest.

Learning about the life of an obscure tribe of about three hundred souls in the middle of the the storeian jungle was a fascinating read; as was the section on the Piraha language and linguistics. Daniel Everett's thesis is that it's wrong to think of language being innate to humans but instead it is moulded by culture. This makes some sense. No doubt though the supporters of the time plus chance theory of the universe feel they have another nail to bang into the creator God's coffin. And the nail is sharp because the author used to be an evangelical Christian missionary, but is now an atheist.

But I have a question for this evolutionary linguistics scheme of things: what about speaking in tongues, the prayer language spoken by millions of Christians? These prayer languages are adapting to no cultural need. There is absolutely no way they are a part of a time plus chance evolutionary process. They are a gift. And their purpose surely points to the purpose of all language: to worship God, the chief end of man.

Speaking in tongues and other dramatic, immediate signs of God's presence also has something to say about Christian mission. Daniel Everett stresses that the Christian message makes no sense to the Piraha because they only believe in what they could see and only live in the now. So though Daniel Everett clearly did a Herculean job translating the Gospel of Mark into the Piraha language, and he and his family did all they could to show Christ's love to the tribe- at the end of the day this wasn't enough. From the Christian mission point of view there needed to be a demonstration of God's power and show down with the spirits as there was with Don Richardson and the head hunting Sawi tribe in Indonesia in the 1960's. And as there has been in countless confrontations between Christian missionaries and pagans.

Speaking in tongues also has an immediate relevance to Daniel Everett's own spiritual journey. He says towards the end of the book that as a scientist he does not believe in `anything supernatural'. What though is `speaking in tongues'? The prayer language is not natural, for not everyone speaks in tongues. So surely there is a case for saying they are `supernatural'. If he does not believe in speaking in tongues, then what are millions of Christians doing every day?

You cannot help but feel sympathy for Daniel Everett as he faces the seeming reality of the complete lack of relevance of the Christian message to the Piraha culture. But it's important to remember that all missionaries who have faced totally alien cultures grapple with this. Not all are successful, but surely the children of the head hunting Sawi who are now worshipping Christians are grateful that Don Richardson persevered. And surely we Europeans should be grateful to Augustine, Patrick, Boniface and countless others who preached Christ to our pagan ancestors, so that we have enjoyed living in a culture still moulded by Christian values.

Having read the article in the New Yorker, I thought this book would provide more interesting tidbits about life with the Piraha. Everett bends over backwards to tell the reader how peaceful this group of people is, and how they have no knowledge of sin. He is a moral relativist. The Pirahas behave like a bunch of Ayn Rand-style objectivists from the show-me state. In one instance, they ignore a woman's screams as she dies in childbirth on a river bank. Then there is Everett's account of his and his then-wife's adoption of a sick infant whose mother had died. None of the other Piraha mothers had offered to suckle the child. Everett rigged up a feeding device and the baby was recovering, only to be murdered by her own father when he was asked to look after her for a few hours. The Everetts were upset, but then Everett goes on to rationalize the killing as a kind of euthanasia that fits with the Piraha's Weltanschauung. He took no steps to contact the police (and there ARE police in the area; they showed up to investigate a murder that Everett chillingly relates, admitting he is friends with the perpetrators) or to discuss with the father why this might actually be WRONG. Their language and their lifestyle are quite interesting, but they are not noble savages. The UN came out with a universal set of human rights for a reason. I'm not even Christian, but if I were there I would try to convert them just to get them to stop killing infants and acting as if it were OK. It is horribly demeaning to a people to describe such events dispassionately without any effort to "interfere" and help them to develop a sense of moral agency.

I was terribly mislead by this book after reading several interesting tidbits discussing Dan Everett's life as a missionary with a remote, the storeian tribe. I expected an intriguing personal account infused with a religious dialogue between Christianity and those who only live in the present. Instead, I found an exhaustively insipid "story" filled to the brim with elaborate vaunts.

Everett spends the majority of the book attempting to disprove Noam Chomsky's theory of "universal grammar" based off of his findings in learning the Piraha language. The stories are the Piraha are easily discarded and the people are used as mere evidence to support the author's claims. Characters are difficult to follow because the appear for a paragraph in the story, only to be wiped away by tens of pages of linguistics.

Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes fails to capture the life and spirit of the the store. It reads like a textbook, and it'll certainly put you to sleep.

This is an informative book about the Piraha, one of the strangest cultures on the planet. I enjoyed the auto-biographical format of the book. The story keeps you interested while divulging anecdotes about how the Piraha live. Instead of Everett converting them to Christianity, they converted him to atheism. I love that aspect of the story. A must read for language nerds.