Mick Hartley

"Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes", by Daniel Everett, has been causing something of a stir in linguistic circles. The book describes Everett's thirty-odd year involvement with the Pirahã, a tribe deep in the Amazon jungle who've been especially – perhaps uniquely – resistant to the joys of modern civilisation, and who speak a language so peculiar that no outsider till Everett had really managed to get a hold on it.

It's not hard to see why isolated tribes are of such interest. You can't rewind evolution to see how things might have turned out differently, but you can do something very like that with culture: you can see how human societies in radically different environments develop along their own peculiar lines. It's just a surprise, to me, that there are still any people left out there – in New Guinea, or the Amazon, or the Australian outback - that haven't had every last detail of their lives thoroughly catalogued by armies of PhD students and researchers.

In the Amazon the Yanomami were the last major cause celebre, and it just about split the anthropology profession in two. That time it was about accusations of genocide – the deliberate introduction of measles by scientists – which was basically (I simplify a little) a cover for an attack on controversial anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, who'd upset a number of cherished beliefs by championing sociobiology, and suggesting that not all savages were necessarily noble.

The Pirahã are not violent like the Yanomami. From Everett's description they're a remarkably happy and sociable bunch, always talking. They prefer to sleep in snatches, so the sound of gossiping voices can be heard right through the night. They also don't have any numbers, or colours, or, if Everett is to be believed, any way of talking about anything which isn't related to their immediate experience. That means no creation myths, or indeed history. They're the original "be here now" crowd. And, most significantly in terms of linguistics, they don't appear to use recursion in their sentences. Since recursion – the embedding of phrases within phrases, such as "John, the man who'd just finished painting the house, came by for a cup of tea" – is, according to the dominant Chomskyan paradigm, a defining feature of human language, this is highly controversial. There's a short (< 3 mins) New Scientist video here, with the regrettable heading "the world's most unique language", which explains some of this.

If that seems a little recondite – and to be honest I wasn't entirely persuaded, but it's a complex business and I'm not going to attempt to summarise all the arguments here – then where Everett's takes this is maybe less so. He wants to challenge the Cartesian basis of Chomsky's theory – the idea that there's a language instinct which does most of the work in our language learning, just waiting to fill in the minor details as it were, such as whether to call a large piece of water a lake, un lac, or ein See. Everett wants to bring back the whole Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, whereby language plays a determinant part in the way we perceive the world. And he thinks his work with the Pirahã supports that. He believes that the Pirahã are cognitively different from us, and that their language, developed in the Amazon jungle and adapted for precisely that lifestyle, is key to this.

It may well be true that the Chomskyan paradigm is on its last legs, but what's slightly less than persuasive about the book, is, firstly, that since no one else has really mastered the Pirahã language as well as Everett we have to take on trust much of what he says, and secondly, that he makes no secret of his admiration for the Pirahã and their way of life; which is something of a concern, given the power of the noble savage myth. 

As I wrote here, it's become something of a cliché now for travel writers to emphasise their incompetence compared to the natives – stumbling into ditches, not seeing the snake on the path ahead, talking loudly just when a possible prey's sighted on a hunting trip – and Everett does this a great deal. He's constantly pointing out how well the Pirahã are adapted to their life in the rainforest compared to his own bumbling efforts, and how long it takes him to realise this. He also describes one time when a couple of Pirahã came with him to the nearest town, and were absolutely incapable of learning how to deal with the traffic. For Everett this isn't just a matter of getting used to something: it runs deeper. It's embedded in the different worldviews and languages of Pirahã and Westerners.

And then there's the matter of Everett's initial role as a missionary. He started out with the express purpose of converting the Pirahã. His main motivation for learning the language was to translate the bible. But then at the end of the book he confesses that he lost his faith along the way. The Pirahã, it turns out, were completely impervious to his preaching, and could make no sense at all of what he was trying to get them to do. Eventually he not only gave up: he actually came to believe that the Pirahã way was superior. Back in the colonial heyday of the British Empire this kind of thing was known as going native. Nowadays no one talks in those terms, especially when it's a common enough notion that civilised people have somehow lost some kind of wisdom, some connection with the natural world, that tribal people still have. But it doesn't exactly help one – or didn't help me – to accept Everett's word as a neutral and unbiased observer.

It's just, somehow, so remarkable to come across a tribe like this, whose lives contradict so much of what civilisation is thought to mean, who live totally in the present, like some kind of hippie commune that actually – unlike all the others – managed to, you know, get it together. I can see, obviously, why Everett's so attracted to them. There's much that's appealing – though what appeals to him may differ from what appeals to me. He describes how, when he felt his mastery of the language was good enough, he embarked on a long talk about how lost he used to be, and how miserable, how his stepmother committed suicide and everything looked bleak until – hallelujah! - he found Jesus. The Pirahã, to his consternation, found this very funny - especially the bit about his stepmother.

I don't know. Maybe I'm being unfair, but I can't help getting a whiff of some kind of therapy session going on here which leaves me a bit supicious – the zeal of the new convert.

It's not as if the Pirahã are angels. The living-in-the-moment stuff and the wall-to-wall laughing is all very wonderful, but there are dark sides. A pregnant woman crying out in pain - a breech birth – and they refused either to help or let her be helped, and she died in agony, along with her baby. Or the time when a young child lost her mother, and, in the face of indifference from the tribe, Everett's family decided to adopt her. Having all been called away at one point, they returned to find that the tribe, led by the father, had killed her. They saw no future for a child without a mother, and that was that.

It's no doubt an fascinating and important book, though, and if Everett's right about their language, and how it blows a hole right through Chomskyan linguistics, then my concerns about his impartiality don't matter. It'll be interesting to see how this one develops.

For a more detailed discussion, there's a long piece in the New Yorker here.