Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (18 page)

We see this because in the example above a Pirahã will always repeat, in spite of taking away a piece of the anaconda skin, that “he bought the whole anaconda skin.” If the word really meant “all” this would not be possible. So Pirahã lacks quantifiers.

T
his accumulation of discoveries about Pirahã culture challenged me to look in more detail at some of the less obvious values of their society. I went about this mainly by studying their stories.

Pirahã conversations and stories took up most of my time in the village, since they clearly embodied the beliefs and values of the society as a whole, revealing these in ways that I could not learn nearly as well by simply observing the culture. The subjects of their stories were also revealing—the people do not talk about unexperienced events, such as long past or far future events, or fictional topics.

One story that I have always enjoyed is the story told to me by Kaaboogí, the day that he killed a panther (a black jaguar), perhaps weighing as much as three hundred pounds (my estimate is based on the size of the head and the fact that four Pirahãs could not carry the entire body back to the village). He brought its head and paws to the village in a basket for me to see.

In the original telling of the story, immediately after his presentation of the head and paws, there were more details. He told me that he was out hunting and that his dog got a scent and ran ahead. Then he heard his dog yelp and suddenly stop. He ran to see what had happened and saw half of his dog on one side of a log and half on the other side of the log. As he approached to look more closely, he saw a black blur out of the corner of his right eye. He carried with him a 28-gauge single-shot shotgun that I had bought him the year before. He turned and fired with this pathetically small weapon and some of the buckshot went into the panther’s eye. The panther fell to the side and started to get up. Since the shotgun didn’t eject shells automatically, Kaaboogí quickly knocked the spent shell out with a stick and reloaded—he had three shells with him. He fired again and broke the panther’s leg. Then he shot and killed it. The head of this panther was much larger than mine and the paws were large enough to completely cover my hand. The claws were about half as long as my fingers. The canines, when extracted with their roots, were more than three inches long, solid ivory.

When I got Kaaboogí to sit down to tell me the story for the tape recorder, he told it as it is on the following pages. In presenting the story here, I have removed most of the technical linguistic details so that it flows better. Talking to people from very different cultures, as this story shows, involves much more than merely getting the word meanings right. One can translate every word well and still have a hard time understanding the story. This is because our stories include unstated assumptions about the world that are made by our culture. I numbered the sentences to simplify following the story.

This story about the panther that Kaaboogí killed is interesting in many respects. We know that it is a complete story because it starts by introducing the principal character immediately, the jaguar. And it ends with
xigíai,
a Pirahã word meaning literally “it is combined,” and used generally for “OK.” In this situation it means that the story is finished.

To non-Pirahã ears, the story can seem massively repetitive in many places, as in the number of lines at the beginning that repeat that the panther killed the dog. This repetition has a rhetorical purpose, however. First, it expresses excitement. But it also serves to ensure that the hearer can tell what is going on in spite of the fact that there is a lot of noise in the background, including many other Pirahãs talking simultaneously. And the repetition is also “stylish” for the Pirahãs—they
like
stories that have lots of repetition.

“Killing the Panther” is a typical text in that it is about immediate experience. This is a crucial parameter circumscribing all Pirahã stories. After noticing that Pirahã stories are always about immediate experience, I learned a new word that turned out to be the key to understanding many of the facts that were so puzzling about the Pirahãs.

The word is
xibipíío
(i-bi-PEE-o). The first time I remember hearing this word was in descriptions of the arrival of a hunter back from the jungle. As Xipoógi, perhaps the best Pirahã hunter, walked out of the jungle into the village, several Pirahãs exclaimed,
“Xipoógi hi xibipíío xaboópai”
(Xipoógi he
xibipíío
arrives).

I next noticed the word when Kóhoibiíihíai arrived home in his canoe from a fishing trip downriver, just outside the mouth of the Maici, on the Marmelos River. Upon seeing him round the bend in the river and come into sight, a child yelled excitedly, “Kóhoibiíihíai is
xibipíío
arriving!”

But I heard this expression most frequently when planes landed and took off from the village. The first time I heard it in this context, I woke up in the morning, excited to see the plane after several weeks with my family in the village. I yelled to Kóhoibiíihíai, “Hey Ko! The plane will be here when the sun is straight above us!” He shouted back from his hut, upriver from mine, “I like to see the plane!” Then he turned and bellowed out to the other Pirahãs of the village, “Dan says that the plane is coming today.” As noon approached, all the Pirahãs in the village began to listen. There were several false reports of the plane coming, mainly from children. “There it is!” they shouted, only to start giggling and admit that they hadn’t seen or heard anything. Finally, minutes before I heard the plane, a shout went up from almost the entire village simultaneously:
“Gahióo, hi soxóá xaboópai”
(The plane already comes). Then people ran to the nearest clearing and strained their eyes to try to be the first to see the plane as it appeared in the clouds. Everyone shouted almost simultaneously, “Here comes the plane!
Gahióo xibipíío xaboópai.
”

When the plane left, they shouted a similar expression,
“Gahióo xibipíío xopitaha,”
as it disappeared over the horizon, heading back to Porto Velho.

Such observations gave me an initial guess as to the word’s meaning. It meant something like “just now,” as in “He is just now arriving,” or “The plane is just now leaving.” This guess seemed to work pretty well, and I began to use the word in my own speech. Pirahãs appeared to understand what I was saying whenever I used the word.

Then one night Xaikáibaí and Xabagi, an old man who had recently moved to our village from an upriver Pirahã village, came to my house. I had just extinguished my kerosene lamp a few minutes before their visit and didn’t want to bother with it again. So instead I switched on my flashlight. But while we were talking, the batteries of my flashlight began to go out. I went to the kitchen and got some matches, just as the batteries bit the dust. In the pitch-black night, I continued talking to Xaikáibaí and Xabagi. Xabagi suddenly dropped a couple of fishhooks that I had just given them. I used my matches to help us search for the precious fishhooks on the floor. The match began to flicker. The men commented, “The match is
xibipíío-
ing.” I heard this word used this way on another night about the flames of a campfire that were beginning to go out. In these contexts, the Pirahãs were not using the word as an adverb.

Whoa! It doesn’t mean “just now,” I realized one afternoon. It is used to describe the situation in which an entity comes into sight or goes out of sight! So, I thought, when someone comes around a bend in the river, they are just coming into sight. And this explains why the Pirahãs use the word when things go out of sight too, like the plane disappearing on the horizon.

I still felt that I was missing something, though. There must be a more general cultural concept that includes both
coming into sight
and its opposite,
going out of sight.
I recalled that
xibipíío
could be used to describe someone talking when he or she just became audible or just left audibility, as when I talked mornings on my two-way radio with SIL members in Porto Velho, letting them know that my family was all right, ordering supplies, and so on.

Pirahãs overhearing me talking might say of a man’s voice coming over the radio for the first time that morning, “The foreign man is
xibipíío
talking.”

When a canoe came around a bend in the river, whatever Pirahãs happened to be around the village at the time came running out to the edge of the bank to see who it was. This just seemed like natural curiosity to me about who might be coming to their village. But one morning as Kóhoibiíihíai was leaving to fish, I noticed that a group of children were giggling and staring at him as he paddled. At the precise moment that he disappeared around the bend, they all shouted in unison “
Kóhoi xibipíío!
” (Kóhoi disappeared!) This scene was repeated every time someone came or left—at least some Pirahãs would comment, “He disappeared!” And the same when they returned around the bend. The disappearing and appearing, not the identity of the person traveling, were what interested the Pirahãs.