Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (28 page)

14                  Values and Talking: The Partnership
between Language and Culture

O
ne of the most interesting conversations I’ve had about food was with a Pirahã. It occurred when I ate a salad in the village for the first time.

Rice, beans, fish, and wild game, smothered under copious amounts of Tabasco sauce, can keep one’s culinary drive satisfied up to a point. But if you like the crunch of fresh lettuce, then after a few months you might begin to dream about eating a salad.

The missionary plane visited us every eight weeks in the jungle to bring mail and supplies. It was our only contact with the world outside the Pirahãs. On one trip, I sent out a note to a fellow missionary and asked if he would do me the tremendous favor of sending some salad makings on the next flight. Two months later, our salad arrived.

That evening I sat down to my first taste of lettuce, tomatoes, and cabbage in six months. Xahóápati walked up to watch me eat. He looked bemused.

“Why are you eating leaves?” he asked. “Don’t you have any meat?”The Pirahãs are very particular about foods, and they believe, as we do to some degree, that the foods you eat determine the person you become.

“Yes, I have a lot of canned meat,” I assured him. “But I like these leaves! I have not had any for many moons.”

My Pirahã friend looked at me, then at the leaves, then back at me. “Pirahãs don’t eat leaves,” he informed me. “This is why you don’t speak our language well. We Pirahãs speak our language well and we don’t eat leaves.”

He walked away, apparently thinking that he had just given me the key to learning his language. But I found the correlation between lettuce eating and Pirahã speaking unfathomable. What on earth did he mean? A connection between what I ate and the language that I spoke?How ridiculous. The words continued to nag me, however, as though Xahóápati’s remarks had something useful in them, if only I could put my finger on it.

Then I noticed another bemusing fact. The Pirahãs would converse with me and then turn to one another, in my presence, to talk about me, as though I was not even there.

“Say, Dan, could you give me some matches?” Xipoógi asked me one day with others present.

“OK, sure.”

“OK, he is giving us two matches. Now I am going to ask for cloth.”Why would they talk about me in front of my face like this, as though I could not understand them? I had just demonstrated that I
could
understand them by answering the question about the matches. What was I missing?

Their language, in their view, emerges from their lives as Pirahãs and from their relationships to other Pirahãs. If I could utter appropriate responses to their questions, this was no more evidence that I spoke their language than a recorded message is to me evidence that my telephone is a native speaker of English. I was like one of the bright macaws or parrots so abundant along the Maici. My “speaking” was just some cute trick to some of them. It was not really
speaking.

Although I am claiming neither that the Pirahãs have nor that they do not have a theory of the relationship between language and culture, their questions and actions did serve as a catalyst to get me thinking about this relationship.

Like most unusual things I observed or heard among the Pirahãs, I realized ultimately that Xahóápati was telling me more than I had realized: that to speak their language is to live their culture. A few linguists today, in the tradition of early-twentieth-century pioneers Edward Sapir and Franz Boas, also believe that culture impinges on grammar and language in nontrivial ways. But my reasons are different from most of even this minority. My difficulty in successfully translating the Bible owed largely to the fact that Pirahã society and language are interconnected in ways that make even the understanding of grammar, a subcomponent of language, impossible without studying the language and culture simultaneously. And I believe that this is true for all languages and societies. Language is the product of synergism between values of a society, communication theory, biology, physiology, physics (of the inherent limitations of our brains as well as our phonetics), and human thought. I believe this is also true of the engine of language, grammar.

Both modern linguistics and the bulk of the philosophy of language have chosen to separate language from culture in their quests to understand human communication. But by this move they fail to come to grips with language as a “natural phenomenon,” to use the words of philosopher John Searle. Many linguists and philosophers since the 1950s have characterized language almost exclusively in terms of mathematical logic. It is almost as if the fact that language has meaning and is spoken by human beings is irrelevant to the enterprise of understanding it.

Language is perhaps our greatest accomplishment as a species. Once a people have established a language, they have a series of agreements on how to label, characterize, and categorize the world around them, as Searle has also pointed out. These agreements then serve as the foundation for all other agreements in the society. Rousseau’s social contract is not the first contractual foundation of human society, therefore, at least not as he thought of it. Language is. Language, on the other hand, is not the only source of societal values. Tradition and biology play a strong, nonlinguistic role as well. Many values of society are transmitted without language.

Biologists such as E. O. Wilson have shown that some of our values arise from our biology as primates and biological entities. Our need for companionship, our need for food, clothing, shelter, and so on are significantly related to our biology.

Other values arise from personal or family or cultural traditions. As an example, take the propensity to be a couch potato. Some people enjoy lying on the couch, eating greasy food, and watching TV, especially the food channel. This is unhealthy. Still, some enjoy it. Why?Well,
some
of this is biological. Apparently, our taste buds love the sensation and taste of fatty foods (such as Fritos and bean dip), our bodies like to conserve energy (the appeal of a soft sofa), and our minds like sensory stimulation (men chasing a ball, women prancing in bikinis, large desert vistas, or the latest creation from Emeril Lagasse).

But the explanation for such unsalubrious behavior is not exclusively biological. After all, not everyone is a couch potato. So why do some people satisfy their biological propensities one way while others satisfy their urges in different, perhaps even healthy, ways? This type of behavior is not learned via language. Rather, it is acquired by example in individual families or other groups.

The couch potato life is just one of many examples of learning cultural values without language. Specific values like this, along with the directly biological values (like shelter, clothing, food, and health), act together to produce an integrated whole of language and culture, by means of which we interpret and talk about the world. We often think that our values and ways of talking about our values are completely “natural,” but they are not. They are partially an accident of our birth into a particular culture and society.

The Pirahãs frequently allow their dogs to eat off their bowls or plates while they themselves are still eating. Some people get squeamish about this, but others think it is fine. Eating with dogs is not something I would normally do. I feed my dog snacks by hand and sometimes, when I forget, I then eat without washing my hands. But that is as close as I get. I know some people who let their dogs lick their plates clean, under the assumption that the dishwasher will sterilize it all. But I wouldn’t allow my dog to sit by me and share my plate.

I don’t want to share my plate with my dog because I believe in germs, which I think can make me ill. On the other hand, I have no direct evidence for germs. I am not sure I would know how to go about proving to anyone that germs exist or what their properties are. But I believe in them just the same, because the knowledge of germs and their connection to disease is a product of my culture. (Whether germs from dogs might ever make a human sick, I do not know. But my culturally inspired fear of germs makes the prospect of eating with dogs unappealing nonetheless.)

Like many other peoples around the world, the Pirahãs do not believe in germs. Therefore, they have no aversion to letting their dogs eat off the same plate at the same time. Their dogs are their allies in the fight for survival in the jungle and they love their dogs. So, without a belief in germs, the Pirahãs do not find it remotely repugnant to share a plate of food with their dogs.

Linguists know these things, of course. So do anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, and many others. Thus far, therefore, what I have said about cultural values and language is not intended to be new. But I missed the significance of much of this until the salad conversation with Xahóápati.

As we now know, the Pirahãs highly value direct experience and observation. In the sense of this concept, the Pirahãs are like people from Missouri, the “show me” state. However, the Pirahãs not only would agree that “seeing is believing,” but that “believing is seeing.” If you want to tell the Pirahãs something, they are going to want to know how you came by your knowledge. And especially they will want to know if you have direct evidence for your assertion.

Since for the Pirahãs spirits and dreams are immediate experiences, they often talk about them. Talk of the spiritual for the Pirahãs is not talk of fiction but talk of real events. For the principle of immediacy of experience to have an explanatory role in Pirahã spiritual life, the only crucial condition is that they believe that they see the spirits that they talk about. And this condition is easily met.

The following is a short recounting of a dream originally recorded by Steve Sheldon. There is nothing particularly special about this. The Pirahãs attach no mystical significance to their dreams. They are experiences like all others, though these may involve experiences in places other than the Maici or the lower “boundary,” or
bigí.

Casimiro Dreams
Informant: Kaboibagi
Recorded and transcribed by Steve Sheldon

Synopsis: This is a text about a dream that the speaker in the story had. He is dreaming about a Brazilian woman who used to live near the village, a very large woman.

The lack of transition between the first five lines and the sixth line could be curious if we approached this dream as a simple story. But it is just a recounting of what the speaker did. It is not that the Pirahãs confuse dreaming with daily activities. But they classify the two roughly the same: just types of experiences that we have and witness. They exemplify the immediacy of experience principle.

Now culture and language are intertwined for every society and people in multiple ways. The fact that culture can affect grammar, for example, is not incompatible with the idea that grammar can affect culture too. In fact, separating out the different kinds of relations between culture and grammar is a useful research priority for linguistics and anthropology generally.

The effects of grammar on culture are varied. Sometimes they can be as obvious as your right hand, as I discovered on one of the innumerable days I spent working with Kóhoi at the desk.

“OK. This hand is the one that Americans call the ‘left hand.’ Brazilians call it
mão esquerda.
What do the Pirahãs call it?”

“Hand.”

“Yes, I know that it is a hand. But how do you say
left
hand?”

“Your hand.”

“No, look. Here is your left hand. Here is your right hand. Here is my left hand. Here is my right hand. How do you say
that
?”

“This is my hand. That is your hand. This is my other hand. That is your other hand.”

Asking informants to tell me how they distinguished one hand from another in their language was clearly not working. I just could not for the life of me understand why it was so hard to get the names for left hand and right hand.

I decided I needed a cookie. I took a break and my language teacher and I had some instant coffee and cookies. I planned to ask Kóhoi to work with me on this again. If he couldn’t help this second time around, I’d need to come up with a very different plan.

How am I ever going to translate the Bible into Pirahã, I thought, if I can’t even figure out terms as simple as
left hand
and
right hand
? Aargh. I was exasperated. At least Kóhoi agreed to work with me more on this. So I went through my routine again.