The Pirahã people of Brazil - No numbers, gods, leaders or kinship - Is this an elaborate scam?

[constanze]

I hope this doesn’t count as zombie-thread yet, but here is a review of Everett’s book.

But I have to say that I’m reassured, largely because Everett shows that he’s done his homework. He didn’t start with these notions; indeed, he started as an orthodox Chomskyan. He did his best to elicit sentences with relative clauses, to teach mathematics, to find creation myths. He was worried that (say) the Pirahã were speaking more simply to him because he was a foreigner, so he recorded Pirahã speaking to each other (not hard to do, they’re basically talking all day long and most of the night). He was his own first skeptic. And really, he’s done the work and no one else has; people anxious to say he got it wrong are probably trying to save some favorite theory or another.

[Dr.Drake]

I think it has to be dead six months to be a zombie thread.

Anyway, I’ve since read Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, and found it very interesting. I’m more qualified to evaluate his work on narrative than on other aspects, but two things stood out: (1) the environment does not encourage the creation of permanent art, so all art is ephemeral. They may not draw on flat surfaces, but they certainly adorn the body, so they have visual / aesthetic art.
(2) They clearly have narrative. The fictional stories they tell are all (in his judgement) borrowed from other cultures, so, putting words into his mouth, there’s Pirahã myth, but no PURE Pirahã myth. Most modern scholars reject that kind of notion of homogeneous cultual purity. They also have a concept of the supernatural. Some of the classification of narrative goes back to culture. Since they interpret dreams as a second kind of reality, and not as we do, stories of events that occur in dreams are personal experience narratives, not myths, even if structurally they’re probably mythlike (he doesn’t give any texts).

So, most of the claims made for the group’s weirdness are explainable. He was pretty convincing on the counting thing, though.

[constanze]

@Alex_Dubinsky

Yet, I find the fact they modify their verbs to relate their source of information (and whether it is reliable) is fascinating. It is a language feature of great wisdom. Did it cause them to loose religion? In this and other supposed elements you could almost say they are Vulcan.

Zompist summarizes points of the book in his review, the interesting aspect is about Everett, not the natives themselves:

He does go out on a limb a bit about his idea that both Pirahã culture and language are explained by what he calls the Immediate Experience Principle– **basically, he sees the Pirahã as refusing to accept anything they can’t see for themselves. They’ll accept a friend’s testimony, but only if it’s eyewitness. (For this reason they weren’t at all interested in Jesus, once they understood that Everett didn’t know the man personally.) **This might well be a rough and ready guide to the culture (like the culture tests), but I’m not quite convinced that it’s incompatible with, say, counting or relativization.

**He has a single chapter on how his experiences led him to abandon not only his original missionary goal but his Christian faith. ** A bit part of this was realizing that the Pirahã didn’t in any way seem lost. They’re an unusually cheerful people, generous and friendly (except when drunk), well adapted to their life and little interested in any attempts to change it.

Ironically, though Everett abandoned belief in the supernatural,**the Pirahã believe in spirits, without any threat to their empiricism. They consider spirits an everyday occurence;**if Everett couldn’t see them, well, he often couldn’t see the caimans and anacondas that were right in front of him.

(bolding mine)

[smiling_bandit]

Frankly, and I try to say this with the utmost respect for the god Doctor, but he seems like a lost man trying to find himself, but not perhaps trying to find the Piraha.

[gonzomax]

They watch Fox News.

[An_Arky]

Reminds me of a Far Side…

[Wendell_Wagner]

I just noticed the following in the OP:

> . . . linguistic anthropologists seem convinced that these people are for real . . .

and there’s a link in this sentence to a webpage. The link is to a posting to Language Log by Geoffrey K. Pullum that quotes Daniel L. Everett. Both of these men are linguists, not linguistic anthropologists. The debate about the Pirahã language has been going on in the world of linguistics, not in that of anthropology, and any debate about anthropology has been a side issue.

[smiling_bandit]

Something else which I noticed: Comskyite linguistics is a very… how do I say it… never-was-in-date field. As in, it was outdated years before it actually appeared. AFAIK, there’s no good reason at all for any kind of Chomskyite linguistics anymore, as it was retrograde as it was developed.

I won’t get into it, but the theory is alluded to in the text there: among other things Chomsky believes there is a pre-existing linguistic structure which is automatic and inherent. This is heavily disputed by most neurobiologists and anthropologists. This also lends some credence, however, to the idea that he went looking for something, didn’t find it, and may have used the trek for his personal reasons. As a Christian, I have no problem with missionary work, but I question his half-hearted attempts and the fact that he would simply give up because (shockingly) the people he met didn’t sign up first thing.

[Wendell_Wagner]

It’s not easy to say what “Chomskyite” linguistics is. Syntactic Structures was published in 1957, and every part of linguistics is heavily influenced by Chomsky’s ideas. Any linguists who entered grad school before 1957 are now retired, so nobody currently teaching hasn’t been influenced by him a little. There are lots of ideas in Chomsky’s works, and they vary from reasonable proposals to ridiculous nonsense. Chomsky is an infuriating arguer. A lot of his works consist of him proposing some principle based on too little evidence, treating that principle for years like it has already been proved, and then ceasing to mention it anymore when he feels like forgetting about it.

His idea that there are inborn mental structures in humans that make it easier for them to learn languages (as children) and restrict the possible structures that can occur in languages is interesting (and this is only one of his ideas). It’s also incredibly hard to prove. There certainly seem to be some sorts of restrictions on how languages can operate. Nobody has come up with a really convincing way to formulate these restrictions. Chomsky, as usual, has come up with proposals that don’t really work and, when this is pointed out, he ignores the objections and pretends that his ideas have been proved.