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

Product Information

I can heartily recommend this book – if you are not a language nut, you can skip the sections where Everett ponders on Chomsky's theories of language development - but if you are, you will find it fascinating, and there is so much else to enjoy in Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes. To put it far too simply, Chomsky and Everett are feuding over which has supremacy in linguistics: genetics or culture, nature or nurture.

By the late ‘80s, after ten years of failed efforts, Everett realized that he had become a closet atheist. The process is clearly something difficult and painful for him, but Everett only refers to his loss of faith in brief asides. Part 1 is a mixture of anthropology and personal memoir – for example in one chapter Everett relates how his wife and one of his children nearly died of malaria in 1979 – Part 2 is about the Pirahã language, and a short Part 3 relates how living with the Pirahã caused Everett to lose his Christian faith and become an atheist, an ironic outcome for a missionary.Even though the author, Everett, is a linguist and even though he makes reference to linguistic concepts throughout this section, he's writing for a general audience, so anyone should be able to follow this section just fine. On top of everything else Everett describes them as having a “very conservative” culture, in the sense of being unwilling to consider innovation. There is the normal speech, the hum speech, the whistle speech, the yell speech, and the musical speech.

He talks about how the Piraha's concern for the immediacy of experience prevents them from generalizing about even such simple things as color, number, or time. They live to a much younger age, have a real danger posed from jungle animals, and die of diseases that have routine cures in the US.They thought that the Pirahãs were lazy and stupid, because they had zero interest in pursuing wealth, or plundering their ecosystem. Xigagai, one of the beings that lives above the clouds, is standing on the beach yelling at us, telling us he will kill us if we go to the jungle. After many years, Elliot finds that the Pirahas and their culture change him, not the other way round, as he reassesses his attitudes to language, religion, life and death.

The Pirahas have deep feelings, but to survive, they know life is hard and they strive to resolve our own problems. The women wore the same sleeveless, collarless, midlength dresses they worked and slept in, stained a dark brown from dirt and smoke.Rarely have I heard the village completely quiet at night or noticed someone sleeping for several hours straight. Everett became obsessed with their language and its cultural and linguistic implications, and with the remarkable contentment with which they live–so much so that he eventually lost his faith in the God he’d hoped to introduce to them.

Understanding this culture is not easy but there is clearly a lot that can be learned from this isolated culture group. His dad looked at him and after a moment of silence offered a solution: "Let's go kill her, then," he said, with apparent sincerity. Unfortunaltly thought, I feel like this dissmisal of ideas could be a main thing holding linguistics back. I understand the argument that Piraha lacks some features of almost all grammars and therefore the theory of a Universal grammar is incomplete. Mornings among the Pirahãs, so many mornings, I picked up the faint smell of smoke drifting from their cook fires, and the warmth of the Brazilian sun on my face, its rays softened by my mosquito net.His perplexing objective was “to convince happy, satisfied people that they are lost and need Jesus as their personal savior. However, it's very difficult to accept that argument from someone who doesn't even really know if he speaks the language correctly.