Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (33 page)

One way to describe the creative use of language is that human language, without reference to recursion, is free from control by the environment and is not restricted to merely “practical” functions. The American linguist Charles Hockett called this the “productivity” of language. We can talk about anything, in principle, as the received wisdom goes.

Of course, practically this is false. We cannot talk about just anything. We are ignorant of most things there are to talk about. We do not even know that they exist. Moreover, many things we do or encounter every day, like the faces of people we have seen, directions to a familiar restaurant, and so on, can be very hard to talk about. That is why we find pictures and maps and other visual aids so useful.

Nevertheless, the idea of creativity in language has been rightly influential for nearly four centuries. There is an obvious appeal to the notion that humans are special and that they are, at least in their minds, unfettered by the limitations that beset the rest of the animal kingdom. The French philosopher René Descartes, whom Chomsky popularized among linguists, believed that there is a separate mental, creative essence that distinguishes humans from animals. Hovering over this idea is the concomitant view that man has a spiritual essence alongside his physical structure. This dualism has a “breath of God”smell about it, namely, that human language is profoundly “special,”the idea that something animates the physical form of man, the mere dust that houses our consciousness.

Instead of this quasi-religious and somewhat mystical dualism that underlies much of the work of Descartes and, on some readings, Chomsky’s work, I would propose a more concrete understanding of language. Language is a by-product of general properties of human cognition, rather than a special universal grammar, in conjunction with the constraints on communication that are common to evolved primates (such as the need for words to appear out of the mouth in a certain order, the need for units like words for things and events, and so on), and the overarching constraints of specific human cultures on the languages that evolve from them. It is clear that the original cultural circumstances can be lost. For example, a Pirahã moving to and adapting to life in Los Angeles would lose many of the cultural constraints of Pirahãs living along the Maici. His or her language might change. But if it didn’t, at least initially, this would show us that languages can indeed be separated from cultures.

What I am suggesting here is trying to understand language in a situation as close to the original cultural context as possible. If this is on the right track, one cannot do linguistic field research apart from these cultural contexts—so I could not really hope to understand Pirahã by studying a Pirahã speaker in Los Angeles, or Navajo by studying a Navajo speaker in Tucson. I would need to study a language in its cultural context. I could study a language outside of its cultural context of course, and still discover many interesting things. But fundamental pieces to the puzzle of its grammar would be missing.

16                  Crooked Heads and Straight Heads:
Perspectives on Language and Truth

T
he Pirahãs’ language and culture began to attract the attention of some Brazilian anthropologists not long after my trip with the FUNAI to map the people’s reservation. One new graduate student, a young man from Rio de Janeiro, contacted me to enlist my help in working with the Pirahãs. To aid his efforts in establishing himself among them, I recorded a tape in Pirahã, introducing him to the people, telling them that he wanted to learn their language, and asking them to build him a house. The Pirahãs heard my voice coming out of his tape recorder and assumed that it was like a two-way radio, a device with which they are familiar.

After playing my tape for them and getting started in his investigations, he asked them about the creation of the world. Returning from the village to the city, he visited me one day in São Paulo to show me his results. We sat down to
cafezinhos
to hear the tape.

“You were wrong, Daniel,” he blurted out, unable to contain himself any longer, even before we began listening.

I stopped sipping my
cafezinho.
“What do you mean I was wrong?”

“I mean, I found a creation myth,” he said with a smile. “You said there weren’t any, but I got one. Can you listen to my tape and help me translate the text?”

Part of the reason this student had chosen to do his graduate research on the Pirahãs was that he had heard of my claim that the Pirahãs have no creation myths, that is, no stories about their past—where they come from, how the world was created, and so on.

“OK, let’s hear it,” I replied, keenly curious.

So we put on the tape. It began with the anthropology student’s voice, speaking with a Pirahã man near the tape recorder, in Portuguese. The student did not know more than a few Pirahã words, so was obliged to conduct his interview in Portuguese, even though few Pirahãs spoke more than a few words of Portuguese.

The Pirahãs proceeded to talk to me on the tape about the village, who was there, what they wanted, when was I coming back, and so on. The student had thought that this part of the tape, which was clearly fluent and animated, was their creation myth. But the Pirahãs only knew that I could hear them directly on some devices that they had seen, such as phones and radios, so they assumed that communication into any electronic device, like a tape recorder, worked the same way. They were talking to me now, not answering the student’s questions. He took the news in apparent good spirits, though with considerable bemusement that he could have been so misguided (we often find what we look for even when it doesn’t exist). By then in any case he had realized that he wasn’t in fact going to spend enough time with the Pirahãs to learn their language and that this research was going to be a bigger struggle than he had initially supposed.

The problem that my friend faced was that he spoke “crooked head”(Portuguese) and he was trying to communicate with “straight heads.”But isn’t this really just the problem we all face in communication—getting beyond the constraints of our own conventions of communication and trying to see things from the perspective of another set of conventions? This problem is found in science and in our professional and personal lives, between husbands and wives, parents and children, bosses and employees. We often think we know what our interlocutor is talking about, only to discover when we examine our conversation more closely that we misunderstood a great deal of it.

What do these kinds of misunderstandings tell us about the nature of our minds, our language, and who we are as
Homo sapiens
? To find out, we need to detour briefly to a discussion of the nature of knowledge and humans, for which this faux creation myth story is the catalyst. The purpose of this detour is to set the stage for larger issues that studying the Pirahãs raises for us.

We speak against a backdrop of assumptions that form the tapestry of our culture. When my friend tells me to turn left at the intersection, he doesn’t need to add, “Pull up just behind the white line and wait for the stoplight to turn green.” He knows that I know this as a member of my culture. Likewise, when a Pirahã father tells his son to shoot a fish in the river, he doesn’t have to tell him to to sit motionless in a canoe for hours or to shoot below the fish to compensate for light refraction—sitting still and adjusting for refraction are culturally acquired skills and are known implicitly to the Pirahãs; they don’t need to be stated overtly.

For the Pirahãs, like all of us, knowledge is experience interpreted through culture and individual psyches. Knowledge requires eye witness testimony for the Pirahãs, but they do not subject this testimony to “peer review.” If I entered the village to report seeing a bat with a twenty-foot wingspan, most wouldn’t immediately believe me. But they might go look for themselves just to check it out. And if I were to report seeing a jaguar turn into a man, they would ask where, when, and how this happened. There is in principle no higher authority than my eyewitness account. This does not mean that one cannot lie. Lying is common among the Pirahãs, frankly, just as in all societies (it has useful evolutionary functions, such as protecting oneself and one’s family). Nevertheless, knowledge is the explanation of one’s own experiences, the explanation that one considers most useful.

In this sense, the Pirahãs’ attitude toward knowledge, truth, and God is similar to the philosophy of pragmatism that emerges from the writings of William James, C. S. Peirce, and others—itself influenced by North American indigenous peoples’ concept of tolerance of physical and cultural differences. The Pirahãs and pragmatism share the idea that the test of knowledge is not whether it is true but whether it is useful. They want to know what they
need
to know in order to act. And the knowledge to act is based mainly on cultural conceptions of useful actions, of which theories are a part. So culture is helpful to us when we are in the locale where the culture developed.

When we’re in new territory, though, places of the mind or of the body that our culture hasn’t prepared us for, our culture can turn out to be an impediment. As an example of how poorly my culture has prepared me for some environments, I remember a night out walking with a teenage Pirahã, Kaioá. We were walking after dark from his hut to my house, about five hundred yards on a narrow jungle path that passed a shallow swamp. I was talking loudly to Kaioá and guiding myself on the path with my flashlight. Kaioá was slightly behind me, with no flashlight. Suddenly he interrupted the flow of my verbiage and said softly, “Look at the caiman up ahead!”

I directed the beam of my flashlight up the path. I did not see a thing.

“Turn off that lightninglike thing in your hand,” Kaioá suggested, “and look in the dark.”

I followed his instructions. Now I really saw absolutely nothing.

“What are you talking about?” I asked, beginning to feel that he was having me on. “There’s nothing up ahead.”

“No! Look!” Kaioá giggled. My inability to see beyond my nose is a source of constant merriment among the Pirahãs. “See those two bloodlike eyes up there?”

I strained my own eyes and then, sure enough, I could just make out two red dots about a hundred feet up ahead. Kaioá said that these were the eyes of a small caiman. He picked up a heavy stick from the dark jungle floor and ran ahead of me. After a couple of seconds I could hear the stick pounding something but I couldn’t see anything. Shortly thereafter, Kaioá came back toward me laughing and carrying by the tail a three-foot caiman, beaten unconscious but not yet dead. The small caiman had apparently come out of the swamp to hunt frogs and snakes in the surrounding brush. It was hardly life-threatening. Still, though, it could have bitten off a toe or severely mauled my bare leg, if I had just kept up my chatter and careless walking.

Urban folks like me look for cars, bicycles, and pedestrians in the path, not prehistoric reptiles. I didn’t know what to look for when walking briskly down a jungle trail. This had been another lesson about cognition and culture, though I didn’t quite recognize that at the time. We all perceive the world the way our cultures have taught us. If our culture-constrained perceptions hinder us, however, then for the particular environment in which they do so, our cultures obscure our perceptions of the world and put us at a disadvantage.

Another day I was swimming with my language teacher, Kóhoibiíi-híai, in the river just in front of my house. We were talking and cooling off, completely relaxed, when some women came to the river just a bit down from us. They had a dead monkey that had just been singed in the fire, its fur burned off and its skin blackened. Its paws and feet had already been removed for the children to snack on. Laying the charred primate on the riverbank, one woman proceeded to slice it open from the crotch to the chest and unceremoniously began to pull its guts out with her hands. When finished gutting it, she chopped off the arms and legs and washed all the blood into the river. She then tossed the gray pile of intestines into the water and started back up the riverbank. I noticed shortly thereafter that the water was beginning to froth.

“What’s that?” I ask Kóhoi.

“
Baixoó
” (Piranhas), he answered. “They like to eat blood and guts.”

I was concerned. I would have to swim close by that frothing water to get out of the river. And what if the piranhas started looking for food near me, white meat, for example?

“Won’t they try to eat us?” I asked.

“No. Just the monkey guts,” Kóhoi answered as he splashed contentedly beside me. He shortly announced that he was leaving the water.

“Me too!” I said, staying as close to him as I was able, glad when I stepped up onto the riverbank.

My Southern California culture had prepared me to have an image of piranhas, albeit not a particularly accurate one. But it had not prepared me to recognize them by their signs in the wild. And it had not prepared me to be calm around them, and calmness in the face of jungle life can mean the difference between life and death.

Just as urban, literate societies fail to prepare their members for jungle life, the Pirahãs’ jungle-based culture doesn’t prepare them well for the demands of urban life. The Pirahãs are unable to perceive some things that even children from Western culture perceive well. For one thing, Pirahãs cannot make out two-dimensional objects, as in drawings and photographs, very well. They often hold pictures sideways or upside down, and ask me what it is that they are supposed to be seeing. They are getting better nowadays, as they have been exposed to many photos, but still this is not easy for them.

Recently a team from MIT and Stanford carried out experiments on Pirahã perception of two-dimensional representations. These experiments involved recognition of both clear photos and photos degraded in various ways. The team later reported its findings:

Culture is thus important even in something apparently so universal and simple as reading photographs. How important might it be in more general tasks? I gave some examples earlier of culture’s importance in general tasks in my own experience. But there are also plenty of examples of its importance in general tasks for the Pirahãs.

In 1979, while Keren was recuperating from malaria, I brought two Pirahã men to Pôrto Velho to teach me more of their language, since I couldn’t be in the village. They only owned a single pair of gym shorts each and were self-conscious in the midst of city-dwelling Brazilians. In the jungle, the Brazilians the Pirahãs saw were mainly river traders, who usually wore only gym shorts and flip-flops, at least while working. But in the city, dress was much more elaborate—especially the brightly colored dresses and blouses of the Brazilian women.

Going to town with me, Xipoógi and Xahoábisi asked me lots of questions about these women. Then they asked me if I could buy them shoes, long pants, and collared shirts so they could fit in at least a little bit better in town. So we walked up Pôrto Velho’s main street, Sete de Setembro, shopping for clothes. We chatted as we walked. The men asked me lots of questions about cars (“Who made those houses? They go fast!”), buildings (“Who made those? Brazilians sure do know how to build houses!”), pavement (“What is this hard black ground?”), and Brazilians in general (“Where do they hunt their food?” “Who makes the goods we are seeing?”).

Passersby stared at these barefoot, bare-chested Indians. The Pirahãs stared back. Xipoógi and Xahoábisi thought the clean, nice-smelling, and colorfully dressed Brazilian women were gorgeous. They wondered if these women might have sex with them. I replied that I seriously doubted it because they didn’t know the Pirahãs.

We went into a store and a lovely brown-skinned young woman with bracelets and long black hair, tight clothes, sandals, and a sweet smile came to wait on us, smelling lightly of pleasing perfume. The Pirahãs smiled.

With her help we found pants, shoes, and shirts for the men. Like all Pirahã men, they were about five feet two, weighed 110 pounds, and wore pants with twenty-eight-inch waists. The salesgirl had lots of questions for the Pirahãs, which I duly translated. The men asked her a few questions too. They put on their new outfits and we left to buy them toothbrushes, deodorant, combs, and aftershave—things they had heard about and which they considered vital for city living. Their muscular, slim bodies and dark complexions looked very attractive in Western clothes.