Book Reviews - Review 346

Daniel Everett spent thirty years, on and off, living with his family among the Pirahã Indians of Brazil. He was an Evangelical missionary, tasked with learning the Pirahã language so that he could translate the Bible into it. In this fascinating book, Everett descibes the daily life of the Pirahã, paying particular attention to how their environment and their view of reality affect their language. With no strong concept of time, and being dismissive of accounts of events not verified by personal experience or reliable eyewitnesses, how could they be convinced that their path to salvation lay in believing stories that took place thousands of years ago in a part of the world they had never heard of?

This "Immediacy of Experience" principle that conditions the Pirahãs' lives was not the only impediment to conversion. By Everett's account, they seemed a singularly contented people, enjoying their circumscribed life with humour and a strong sense of community. Death and disease were, without access to western medicine, regular occurrences, but accepted unsentimentally as part of life. Above all, the Pirahã were very resistant to outside influence, suspicious of the idea of progress and of the implicit threat it placed on their stable existence. Even when a change offered evident benefits, they rejected it. (Everett once brought in an outsider to teach the Pirahã how to build canoes. Though under his supervision, they made a beautiful canoe by themselves, they refused to make any more afterwards, asserting, "Pirahãs don't make canoes.")

Throughout the book, Everett presents examples of Pirahã speech to illustrate how different Pirahã thought processes are from ours. Every statement in Pirahã is anchored in the present moment; so, while there are basic past and future tenses, there are no complex compound tenses that shift the context of statements to other points in time ("I had done", "I will have done", etc.). There is also no scope for recursion - the effective embedding of one sentence within another, for example in subordinate clauses like "the man that I saw yesterday". This leads Everett into conflict with Noam Chomsky's theory of a "universal grammar" that is theoretically hard-coded into the human brain. According to Chomsky, features such as recursion precede the development of any particular language, but Everett offers convincing evidence that the logic underlying a particular language reflects the habitual thought processes of its speakers: to isolate a language from its cultural context is to go down a theoretical blind alley that ignores what gives any language its character and richness.

The latter part of the book is devoted entirely to the Pirahã language, and linguistic theory in general. It marks a somewhat abrupt change from the lively account of life in the Amazon jungle in the first half of the book, but it is no less interesting. Everett, now an academic linguist, applies a perceptive and refreshingly common-sense approach to his subject. His criticisms of Chomsky's thought, while never personal, are hard-hitting, and can't have gone down well with his illustrious former colleague at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Everett covers a lot of ground in his book, which is part memoir, part anthropological study, part linguistic discourse. Consequently, while very well-written, it is slightly disjointed taken as a whole, so that an individual thesis is hard to pin down. The central, hidden story, though only alluded to incidentally, is Everett's loss of religious faith, which he says was largely triggered by the recalcitrance of the Pirahã to the Christian message. His evangelism professor had told him, "You've gotta get 'em lost before you can get 'em saved", but the Pirahã resolutely refused to get lost. Whether their existence is quite as idyllic as Everett paints it, one can't be sure - he does tend to gloss over incidents of violence, sexual maltreatment and brutal selfishness that, if not necessarily daily features of Pirahã life, remind us that some degree of suffering is intrinsic to the human condition. The question is, one supposes, whether one deals with it pragmatically or theoretically. There is a thin strand of polemicism in Don't Sleep, There are Snakes - "Live for the moment and don't think too deeply" - that is typical of lapsed Christians, but it doesn't stop this from being a very informative and stimulating read.