I know that some native peoples like to play tricks on outsiders, but linguistic anthropologists seem convinced that these people are for real. Their culture (or more specifically their lack thereof) has no numbers, only the most rudimentary language, no leaders, no gods etc. etc. It’s almost as if they are barely human in terms of using language and abstract reasoning.
Are these people for real or is it possible (for whatever reason) that this is some huge game being played on the researchers.
here’s a previous thread on the subject
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=369449&highlight=piraha
[I wonder how many answers we going to get here:
there are only a half dozen people in the Western world who have any first hand knowlege of this tribe…so this thread may be a record-setter for the Dope…a thread where ignorance wins, and all we can do is guess.]
When I read the report ( pdf file mentioned in post number 9 of the linked thread,but the link apparently is no longer good) )written by the one (and only?) anthropologist who lived with them for years…I found it impossible to believe.
Also, I found his report terribly vague. He said, (same as quoted in the wiki article) that he had tried to teach them how to count, and after 2 years of “lessons” they were totally unable to do so. But he did not describe his lessons.
My idea was simple—take a mother of 3 young children (under say, age 5, and thus totally dependent on the mother). When the kids are are hungry, give her 3 apples (or whatever).
I assume she will give one to each child, even if she does not have a word for “three” in her language. Then a day later, when once again, all 3 kids are crying and hungry…give her only 1
apple. The oldest child will probably reach out and grab the apple. But a good mother will presumably stop the kid, and will cut the apple into pieces for all of them.
Surely she will cut 3 pieces, and not 2. Isn’t that counting?
Or join a hunter with his bow,while you hold the arrows. When he sees two pigs , give him one arrow–surely he will ask you to pass him a second arrow.
That’s not the same as counting, though. It’s possible for a culture to have a concept of “the same amount of these two things” (e.g., apple pieces and children, or arrows and prey animals), while not having a concept of what that amount is. So, for instance, the hunter might keep on saying “more arrows” until he has enough, without ever saying “three arrows”.
No, I don’t know about the Pirahã specifically, but this is a common analogy used in describing Cantorian set theory.
Here’s a quote from Daniel Everett’s article “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language” published in Current Anthropology in 2005. It certainly suggests they have abstract reasoning and a concept of the “spirit world.” Elsewhere in the articles, he says that they do not express the concept of number and have a cultural avoidance of abstractions. He does say that the language distinguishes between “a large amount” and “a small amount.” I know this doesn’t precisely answer the question being asked (are the Pirahã unable to learn the distinction between “three” and “five”), but it’s a step.
I’m not sure what you mean by “rudimentary language”; apparently, they have a very small phonemic inventory, but the men’s language is no smaller than the phonemic inventory of Hawai’ian (11 sounds). The women’s, at 10 sounds, would be the smallest of any known language.
If this is true, then I wonder if these people might be a remnant population of Neanderthals, or some other “pre-modern” human line. It really sounds like these guys’ don’t have the brainpower that everybody else has.
I’ve now read through the section of the article I cited above where he attempts (unsuccessfully) to teach them the Portuguese numbers one through ten, and rudimentary arithmetic. It is pretty clear that the Pirahã adults do not learn because their culture (not their biology) has not prepared them for the exercise. Essentially, it boils down to the fact that what we think of as important, crucial, is to them pointless hair-splitting, and they can’t see the forest for the trees (or the trees for the forest, which is more apt). It actually reminded me of my attempts to teach phonetics, where my students simply couldn’t grasp that the sounds are primary, written language secondary.
It could easily be tested further: Pirahã children would have a more flexible world view, and might demonstrate the capacity to learn numbers or lack thereof, but there are larger issues in that the Pirahã are an indigenous minority culture under threat, and acculturating the children to mainstream Brazilian culture could ultimately be very harmful.
That’s kind of a silly thing to say. Just because they didn’t do certain things doesn’t mean that they are not physiologically equipped to do it.
The topic of the Piraha language is well known in [most] linguistic circles, especially as some claim that it confirms the Sapir-Whorf hypothosis. Accepting that the language is deficient compared to, for instance, English, in many areas, consider this note from Wikipedia:
In “The Language Instinct”, Steven Pinker avers that all languages display a similar level of grammatical complexity, and Piraha (in particular) merely has unconventional complexity, not less.
You might want to look at this article, from the journal Language: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~nevins/npr09.pdf
Here’s Everett’s reply:
http://www.llc.ilstu.edu/dlevere/docs/Reply%20in%20Language%202009.pdf
And here’s the reply to the reply:
It’s not a scam. Everett studied these people by himself for years before he made any attempt to tell other academics about his conclusions. Nobody’s making any money off this, so who would be getting scammed?
The Pirahã people are clearly normal human beings. Any differences are a matter of culture, not biology.
That doesn’t then mean that Everett has correctly analyzed the culture and language of these people. He and his ex-wife are the only two fluent speakers of Pirahã who weren’t born in the culture. I’ll be more convinced of his conclusions when more linguists and anthropologists have studied the culture and language. Incidentally, the book Everett published last year, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, is fascinating. I highly recommend it.
This is very important. It’s extremely common (in fact, almost universal) for anthropologists or explorers to totally misinterpret or miscommunicate with the people they encounter at first. It often takes many expeditions and much further contact before we can realize exactly what they’re doing and why. Usually, the reasons people do or what they think and how they think are not that different from culture to culture. Real differences are often important but subtle. And it’s almost impossible to aboid seeing what you want to see (including jumping to conclusions and then being unable to further explore them)
Actually, Everett has published a mass-market book about his life with the Piraha and is on the book tour circuit promoting it. (See his webpage for details) So money is definitely changing hands. This doesn’t mean there’s a scam, of course – not at all – but this is defintely more than just a discussion among academics.
I didn’t follow the links, but I remember the general advice zompist had on his linguistics FAQ about weird and rudimentary languages: they usually were dying ones.
I dimly remember this discussion some time ago, and that some expert suggested that the current tribe was the remnant of some disaster that befell all the elders (who serve as living books in tribal societies) and left only youngsters with incomplete knowledge. Maybe that’s why they have no creation myth, and no remembrance over 2 generations back?
Constanze, that had indeed been seriously proposed (I think by Brent Berlin). Apparently the Pirahã are part of the larger Mura, who have all by and large switched to Portuguese. The suggestion is that instead of being the only extant member of the Muran family of languages, Pirahã is a dying version of Mura itself. Apparently it has recently borrowed a system of pronouns wholesale from another language, which is the sort of thing languages only do under stress and is a fairly good sign for the growth and health of Pirahã.
Daniel Everett said he actually found them very intelligent and capable, but they just approached the world differently in a lot of ways: he said when some young children watched a raft going out on the river, they created a perfect scaled-down model of the raft themselves and sent it out. Then they destroyed it; they just didn’t have any interest in keeping things like that for the purposes of ‘art’ or ‘toys’ unless it has a practical purpose.
I don’t think anyone on here is going to be able to answer the question; people like Daniel Everett say one thing about them, others are sceptical. I think that’s about as far as we can go really.
An interesting story is the one about “recursion”: if I understood it correctly a while back, Noam Chomsky and others came up with a highly-regarded theory of language that has as one of its cornerstones a belief that all human languages feature recursion, which is the concept of embedding one sentence into another (“the carpenter, who was thirsty, went down to the well” is composed of one sentence embedded within another, an example of recursion).
But supposedly the Piraha do not have recursion. Everett says he spent hours trying to get them to use recursive sentences: he’d use models to tell a story of a man killing a tiger, then going into the village and killing a woman. He’d show the Piraha the model of the man, along with two others, and say “which man killed the woman?”. Instead of answering “the man who killed tiger”, as we would, the Piraha would all answer “the tiger”. Everett concluded that meant their language had no recursion, but of course it might do, there might just have been a problem with the experiment. Interesting though.
What I meant was that there isn’t a scam going on like with the Tasaday people in the Philippines, where a Philippine official spread the story that the Tasaday were undiscovered and uninfluenced by other groups for thousands of years, so that they still lived a Stone Age existence. It’s also not a matter of a linguist/anthropologist being played for a fool by a group that he/she was studying, as apparently happened to Margaret Mead in Samoa. Everett didn’t write his book until decades after living with the Pirahã, so if he’s a scammer he sure did take his time about it. Now that I’ve read the papers linked to in post #10, it’s clear how hard it’s going to be to resolve this issue. This is not a matter of one group of ignorant and/or crazy people arguing with an authoritative source about the meaning of some aspects of a language. These are respected academics making reasonable arguments about a quite technical issue.
Kyzaj wrote:
> Actually, Everett has published a mass-market book about his life with the
> Piraha and is on the book tour circuit promoting it.
Um, you did notice that I mentioned that book in my post, didn’t you?
Considering that they number about 360 individuals, We might be seeing a group of people that have completely lost their cultural heritage. Imagine if the Piraha people were attacked by another group, and almost all of their fellow tribesmen were killed and the few remaining survivors were children.
They might be primitive because they’ve lost 200,000 years of human culture, and not because they never discovered it.
The number of people in this group is so small you’re not going to get any real useful informaton from a statistics standpoint.
The smaller the sample, the less number of people you can study, will always produce unusual results
That doesn’t mean those results are not true, but from a statistical standpoint, they are not valid, because the base is too low for result to be meaningful.
Supposing I did a study on a town that had 25 people in it. Anything in this town is meaningful in the town itself, but if you try and apply it to another situation or bigger set of people the result have no useful meaning.