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

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I'm sure the fact that they won't believe second hand stories also helps, but the Pirahã plainly don't have any use for Western religion or technology. That being said, this section is rich and fascinating for linguists who may have heard of the controversy surrounding recursion in Piraha.

Everett states in his book that he as well as a series of psychologists completed experiments to prove that the Pirahas had no words for numbers in their culture. They are walking in a single-file line even when it is not necessary, because that is how you would walk in the jungle. He actions often cause mocking from other Piraha, whether it is at the poor way that he hunts or carries objects or speaks their language or identifies an animal threat. The third section, which unfortunately only makes up a small fraction of the book, is about Everett's re-evaluation, and ultimately rejection, of his faith in god and other supernatural ideas.

Additionally, I also thought that it was interesting that the Piraha do not have words for colors or numbers. I think creating useless hypotheses might be common for people that work with non-mathematical, anthropological linguistics, but it's far cry from the hard science I'm used to read and make. Although, as in all societies there were exceptions to the rule, this is still my impression of the Pirahas after all these years. The Piraha have frequent contact with neighboring tribes and Brazilians, traders, anthropologists, linguists on a regular basis, yet they are isolationists and somehow seem to avoid being contaminated by any hint of consumerism, ambition or outside culture in any sense.

I wanted to like this book but I never really trusted its author, a linguist with an editor who used the phrase "a myriad of" in the first chapter. And I think you’re right about this book – there are at least three ‘ways in’ for people with different interests to be attracted to it. However, it is an entertaining and thought-provoking read, and so I guess I'd recommend it, if you don't have this issue. Eventually he leaves his religion as well, and his life with the Piraha seems to have a lot to do with it. Children were usually laughing, chasing one another, or noisily crying to nurse, the sounds reverberating through the village.I’d also query the spirits on the beach thing, they have no words for colour but they do for unseen spirits? I was also unaware of how heated linguistics debates can get between two linguists with differeing ideas. They have very simple kinship groups that extend only to children, siblings, parents and grandparents. 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.

Most of the study seems to have been conducted on male pirahã even though he alludes to the fact women speak differently. A father of one family will feed or care for another child, at least temporarily, if that child is abandoned, even for a day.It is a novel about a child from an undiscovered tribe in Brazil who is adopted by a Brit and grows up in England. As I continued to read more of the book as well as had the opportunity to listen to an interview done with Daniel Everett these strange concepts began to make more sense to me.

Everett went to the Pirahas as a linguist, to study what he believed to be a language isolate (one that is “not demonstrably related to any living language”), and as a missionary. I gave this book a relatively poor rating, not because I am a Christian minister and this book concludes (SPOILER ALERT) with the unsurprising revelation that through his work with the Piraha he had abandoned his Christian faith, but because it was a literary dog's dinner. He mentions, at one point, that the Piraha women douse their fires and run into the jungle to hide when their men are drinking.

On page 169 we have this story of a little boy who is upset that his grandmother will not let him have a Coca-Cola. Thanks Trevor for the link – all the photos in the book are by the same photographer, who presumably accompanied Everett and his family on some of their stays with the Piraha.

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