Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (17 page)

Well, the Pirahãs do constitute a society. Therefore, if Durkheim and other sociologists—indeed, common sense—are on the right track, then there has to be a way to keep people in line, some way to assure uniformity of behavior. Such behavior, after all, is beneficial to society and to the individuals that constitute the society. It brings, among other things, security of expectations. So how does Pirahã society manifest coercion?

There is no “official” coercion in Pirahã society—no police, courts, or chiefs. But it exists nonetheless. The principal forms I have observed are ostracism and spirits. If someone’s behavior is abnormal in a way that bothers the majority, he or she will be ostracized by degrees. An older man, Hoaaípi, whom I met at the beginning of my career among the Pirahãs, was unusual in that he and his wife lived alone, separated from the other Pirahãs by a considerable distance. When he paddled down to see me the first of the two times I ever saw him, he came without Western goods, in a
kagahóí
rather than a Brazilian canoe, wearing only a loincloth. This meant that he was outside the normal relationships of trade and social intercourse that almost all Pirahãs participate in with one another. When he arrived, he was stared at more than I was. And he had a fresh arrow wound from another Pirahã, Tíigíi. He didn’t want medicine for the arrow wound, but he did want some coffee and sugar, which I happily gave him, as a fair exchange for being able to meet him. Although he seemed like a sweet old man to me, the Pirahãs did not want him around. They said that he was mean. I have no idea to this day what they meant exactly, but I do know that he was the first, but not the last, Pirahã I saw who had been ostracized.

Another effective form of ostracism, much less dramatic but more common, is to exclude someone from food sharing for a while. Such exclusion can last for a day or a few days, but rarely longer. I had many men come to me to say that so-and-so was mad at them for one reason or another so they couldn’t use a canoe to fish, or that no one would share with them. They next either asked me to intervene, which I did not, or asked for food, which I often gave them, trying to avoid any impression of getting involved in a village dispute.

Spirits can tell the village what it should not have done or what it should not do. Spirits can single out individuals or simply talk to the group as a whole. Pirahãs listen carefully and often follow the exhortations of the
kaoáíbógí.
A spirit might say something like “Don’t want Jesus. He is not Pirahã,” or “Don’t hunt downriver tomorrow,” or things that are commonly shared values, such as “Don’t eat snakes.” Through spirits, ostracism, food-sharing regulation, and so on, Pirahã society disciplines itself. It has very little coercion by the standards of many other societies, but it seems to have just enough to control its members’ aberrant behavior.

M
y children’s experience living as a minority within an Amazonian culture taught them to “see” the world in a different way and contributed to their development. When they first saw the Pirahãs, all my children exclaimed that they were the ugliest people that they had ever seen. Pirahãs rarely bathe with soap (they don’t have any), the women don’t brush their hair (they lack brushes), and the average Pirahã child’s skin is encrusted with dirt, snot, and blood. But after they had come to know the Pirahãs, my children’s attitudes changed. Almost a year later, when a visiting Brazilian military officer commented that the Pirahãs were ugly, my children got furious. “How can anyone call the Pirahãs ugly?” they wondered. They had forgotten their own judgments and now thought of the Pirahãs as beautiful people. They learned to think simultaneously like Americans, Pirahãs, and Brazilians. Shannon and Kristene made friends quickly and began to leave early in the mornings with Pirahã girls their age, when they didn’t have study assignments, and canoe up or down the Maici, returning only in late afternoon with berries, nuts, and other jungle delicacies.

My children also learned about the Pirahãs’ ability to cope with danger from nature. Shannon and I once went with the men to hunt an anaconda. Kóhoibiíihíai, a good friend as well as language instructor, asked us to travel with him and his brother, Poióí, to a spot about four minutes upriver in my motorboat. When we got there, he told me to cut the engine so he could paddle us near the bank. I did what he asked and Kóhoi and Poióí both paddled silently to a spot just beneath some overhanging trees on the right bank of the river. Kóhoi turned to me and Shannon and asked, “Do you see its hole there just under the water?”

“No,” we replied. I didn’t see a thing.

“Watch!” he said.

At this, Kóhoi took his bow, like all Pirahã bows about two yards in length, and probed under the water for a few seconds.

“That will make it mad.” He giggled. “See it?” he asked.

“No,” I responded. Neither Shannon nor I could see a thing other than murky water, since it was still the rainy season.

“See the dirt!” Kóhoi exclaimed. “It’s moving now.”

I did see a small swirl of mud in the water. Before I could remark, Kóhoi had stood in the boat and drawn his bow.
Thwang! Thwang!
Two arrows were fired into the water within a second of each other.

Almost immediately a ten-foot-long anaconda burst through the surface of the river, thrashing, with long Pirahã arrows through its head and body.

“Help me pull it in,” Kóhoi said to me and Poióí, who was grinning widely.

“What are we going to do with this?” I asked him, even as I pulled on the snake’s body, trying to grab its tail to help hoist it aboard, while Shannon stared openmouthed. I knew that the Pirahãs don’t eat anacondas, so I couldn’t figure out why we were putting this writhing mass in my boat.

“We’re going to take it to scare the women,” Kóhoi said, laughing.

We took it back to the village. Once we got back, I noticed the snake start to move again. So I beat it over the head with a paddle to make sure it was dead, breaking the paddle in the process. This caused Kóhoi and Poióí to laugh out loud. Imagine worrying about a snake with an arrow in its head. Then, after removing the arrows, we placed the snake near the bank where the women went to bathe.

“That will scare them!” Kóhoi and Poióí laughed as they ran up the bank.

I moored the boat and removed the outboard, and Shannon and I climbed the bank to the village. Shannon ran ahead to tell her mother and siblings what we had seen.

The attempt to scare the women didn’t work, though. They had seen us coming with the snake, and as soon as we got up the bank, the women ran down and pulled the snake out of the water, holding it up and laughing.

Pirahã humor like this works because of their strong sense of community. They can show sarcasm, play practical jokes like the anaconda at the river’s edge, and so on, because they are knitted together tightly in a community of trust (not complete trust—there is, after all, stealing and unfaithfulness—but mainly trust that each member of the community will understand each other member of the community and share the same values).

And this sense of community,
xahaigí,
is built on the nuclear family, where most values and the language are first learned. Families are central to Pirahã society. Every one of the Pirahãs is, in a sense, a brother or sister of all other Pirahãs. But their closest ties by far are with their nuclear family.

7                  Nature and the Immediacy of Experience

T
he Pirahãs’ relationship to nature is fundamental to understanding them. Understanding this relationship is as important to gaining a full picture of their values and overall culture as understanding their material culture and their sense of community. As I began to study how the Pirahãs relate to nature in more detail, I discovered that concepts and words for the environment help to define their perspective on how nature fits together and how it is related to human beings. Two terms,
bigí
and
xoí,
are telling in this regard and help us comprehend the Pirahã worldview.

I learned something about
bigí
one day just after a rain. First, I recorded the phrase
bigí xihoíxaagá
as a description of wet or muddy ground. Then I pointed up to the cloudy sky to get the phrase for
cloudy sky.
The speaker just repeated
bigí xihoíxaagá—
the same phrase he had just given me for
muddy ground.
I thought I must be missing something. Ground and sky are two very different things. So I tried again with several other speakers. Everyone gave me the same answer. It is possible, of course, that I was getting a nonresponsive answer from all my teachers, along the lines of “You are an idiot” or “You’re pointing.”But I was fairly confident that this was not the case.

These concepts are important in various ways. Especially interesting is their contribution to our understanding of sickness among the Pirahãs. I learned this early on when Kóhoibiíihíai and I were talking about his daughter, Xíbií. I was trying to explain to him why she had malaria. I was starting to talk about mosquitoes and blood.

“No, no,” Kóhoi stopped me in midsentence. “Xíbií is sick because she stepped on a leaf.”

“What?
I
stepped on a leaf. I’m not sick,” I answered, puzzled by his account of Xíbií’s malaria.

“A leaf from above,” he said, increasing the enigma for me.

“What leaf from above?”

“A bloodless one from the upper
bigí
came to the lower
bigí
and left a leaf. When the Pirahãs step on leaves from the upper
bigí,
it makes them sick. They are like our leaves. But they make you sick.”

“How do you know it is a leaf from the upper
bigí
?” I inquired.

“Because when you step on it you get sick.”

I questioned Kóhoi further about this and then spoke with several other Pirahãs about it. It turns out that for the Pirahãs the universe is like a layer cake, each layer marked by a boundary called
bigí.
There are worlds above the sky and worlds beneath the ground. I recognized this as similar, though not identical, to the beliefs of the Yanomami, who also believe in a layered universe.

Just as
bigí
has a wider scope of meaning than I initially imagined possible, so did another major environmental term,
xoí.
Originally, I believed that
xoí
simply meant “jungle,” because that is its most common use. Then I realized that it in fact labels the entire space between
bigís.
That is, it can refer to “biosphere” or “jungle,” somewhat like our word
earth,
which can refer either to our planet or to just the soil on the planet’s surface. If you go into the jungle you say, “I am going into the
xoí.
” If you tell someone to remain motionless, as when sitting in a canoe or when a stinging insect lands on them, you say, “Don’t move in the
xoí.
” If it is a cloudless day you can say, “The
xoí
is pretty.” So the word is broader than merely “jungle.”

These terms were revelations to me about different ways to conceive of the environment. But bigger surprises were in store.

One of the first was the apparent lack of counting and numbers. At first I thought that the Pirahãs had the numbers one, two, and “many,” a common enough system around the world. But I realized that what I and previous workers thought were numbers were only relative quantities. I began to notice this when the Pirahãs asked me when the plane was coming again, a question they enjoy asking, I eventually realized, because they find it nearly magical that I seem to know the day that the plane is arriving.

I would hold up two fingers and say, “
Hoi
days,” using what I thought was their term for two. They would look puzzled. As I observed more carefully, I saw that they never used their fingers or any other body parts or external objects to count or tally with. And I also noticed that they could use what I thought meant “two” for two small fish or one relatively larger fish, contradicting my understanding that it meant “two” and supporting my new idea of the “numbers” as references to relative volume—two small fish and one medium-size fish are roughly equal in volume, but both would be less than, and thus trigger a different “number,” than a large fish. Eventually numerous published experiments were conducted by me and a series of psychologists that demonstrated conclusively that the Pirahãs have no numbers at all and no counting in any form.

Before carrying out these experiments, however, I already had experiential evidence supporting the lack of counting in the language.

In 1980, at the Pirahãs’ urging, Keren and I began a series of evening classes in counting and literacy. My entire family participated, with Shannon, Kristene, and Caleb (nine, six, and three at that time) sitting with Pirahã men and women and working with them. Each evening for eight months we tried to teach Pirahã men and women to count to ten in Portuguese. They wanted to learn this because they knew that they did not understand money and wanted to be able to tell whether they were being cheated (or so they told us) by the river traders. After eight months of daily efforts, without ever needing to call the Pirahãs to come for class (all meetings were started by them with much enthusiasm), the people concluded that they could not learn this material and classes were abandoned. Not one Pirahã learned to count to ten in eight months. None learned to add 3 + 1 or even 1 + 1 (if regularly writing or saying the numeral 2 in answer to the latter is evidence of learning).Only occasionally would some get the right answer.

Whatever else might be responsible for the Pirahãs’ lack of acquiring the skill of counting, I believe that one crucial factor is that they ultimately do not value Portuguese (or American) knowledge. In fact, they actively oppose some aspects of it coming into their lives. They ask questions about outside cultures largely for the entertainment value of the answers. If one tries to suggest, as we originally did, in a math class, that there is actually a preferred response to a specific question, this is unwelcome and will likely result in a change of conversational topic or simple irritation.

As a further example of this, I considered the fact that Pirahãs would “write stories” on paper, which I gave them for this purpose at their request. These inscriptions consisted of a series of identical, repetitive, usually circular marks. But the authors would “read” the stories back to me, telling me something about their day, about someone’s sickness, and so on—all of which they claimed to be reading from their marks. They might even make marks on paper and say Portuguese numbers, while holding the paper for me to see. They did not care at all that their symbols were all the same, nor that there are such things as correct and incorrect written forms. When I asked them to draw a symbol twice, it was never replicated. They considered their writing to be no different from the marks that I made. In classes, we were never able to train a Pirahã to draw a straight line without serious “coaching,” and they were never able to repeat the feat in subsequent trials without more coaching. Partially this was because they see the entire process as fun and enjoy the interaction, but it was also because the concept of a “correct” way to draw is profoundly foreign.

These were interesting facts, which I began to suspect could be linked to a larger fact about the Pirahã culture. I just had no idea yet what this larger fact might be.

I next noticed, discussing this with Keren and with Steve Sheldon and Arlo Heinrichs, that the Pirahãs had no simple color words, that is, no terms for color that were not composed of other words. I had originally simply accepted Steve Sheldon’s analysis that there were color terms in Pirahã. Sheldon’s list of colors consisted of the terms for black, white, red (also referring to yellow), and green (also referring to blue).

However, these were not simple words, as it turned out. They were phrases. More accurate translations of the Pirahãwords showed them to mean: “blood is dirty” for black; “it sees” or “it is transparent” for white; “it is blood” for red; and “it is temporarily being immature” for green.

I believe that color terms share at least one property with numbers. Numbers are generalizations that group entities into sets that share general arithmetical properties, rather than object-particular, immediate properties. Likewise, as numerous studies by psychologists, linguists, and philosophers have demonstrated, color terms are unlike other adjectives or other words because they involve special generalizations that put artificial boundaries in the spectrum of visible light.

This doesn’t mean that the Pirahãs cannot perceive colors or refer to them. They perceive the colors around them like any of us. But they don’t codify their color experiences with single words that are inflexibly used to generalize color experiences. They use phrases.

No numbers, no counting, and no color terms. I still didn’t understand all this, but the accumulation of evidence was beginning to give me a better idea, especially as I studied more Pirahã conversations and longer narratives.

Then I found out that Pirahã also lacks another category of words that many linguists believe to be universal, namely, quantifiers like
all, each, every,
and so on.

To appreciate this fact, it would be useful to look at the closest expressions Pirahã has to these quantifiers (I have put the quantifierlike words from Pirahã and English in boldface):

This latter sentence is the closest I have ever been able to get to a sentence that would substitute for a quantifier like
each,
as in
Each man went to the field.

However, there are two words, usually occurring in reference to an amount eaten or desired, which by their closest translation equivalents, “whole” (
báaiso
) and “part” (
gíiái
), might seem to be quantifiers:

Aside from their literal meanings, there are reasons for not interpreting these two words as quantifiers. First, they can be used in ways that real quantifiers could not be. The contrast in the following examples shows this. Someone has just killed an anaconda. Kóhoi utters the first sentence. Then someone takes a piece of the snake before it is sold to me. Kóhoi utters the second sentence, in which
báaiso
(whole) is still used in Pirahã. This would not be acceptable in English.

To understand why this exchange is important for showing that Pirahã has no quantifiers, let’s first compare it with the English equivalent. Imagine that someone, a store owner perhaps, says to you, “Sure, I’ll sell you
all
the meat.”

You then pay him the money for the entire piece of meat.

But then the store owner takes away a piece of the meat in front of you before wrapping and giving you the rest. Do you think the store owner did something dishonest? If you do it is because the word
all
in English, when used precisely, means that there is nothing left over, that every bit of something or every member of a set of entities is affected. English speakers, and others with a word like
all,
would not describe what just happened as the store owner selling
all
the meat—only, perhaps, a large portion of it. Linguists and philosophers refer to these properties of quantifier words as their truth conditions. Truth conditions are the circumstances under which speakers will admit that a word is used correctly or not. It is true that these can vary. So a child might say, “All the kids are coming to my party,” but neither they nor their parents actually believe that all children in the world, the country, the state, or the city will be coming—just a number of the child’s friends. In this sense, the child is not using
all
in its most precise meaning, but he or she is using it in an equally acceptable way. The point is that the truth conditions in Pirahã never include the precise, quantifierlike meaning of
all
(where
all
means “every single entity in a set”)for any word in their language.