Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (35 page)

Before the current theory that grammar originates in a part of the brain dedicated to it, there was a short period in which purely behavioral approaches to language studies were dominant, as in the work of B. F. Skinner.

But while behaviorism did indeed seem to fall short as an explanation for how we learn languages and the similarities among languages, because it has no place for cognition, theories based on universal grammar are not faring much better. There are various reasons for this. First, in the intervening years, excellent new research ideas have emerged which rely neither on Skinner’s extreme view that language is just a behavior like any other human behavior nor on Chomsky’s extreme position that our grammars are in our genes. There are other possible explanations, including logical requirements on communication, coupled with the nature of society and culture.

Michael Tomasello’s psycholinguistics research group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, is one of the leading research teams working on language and its emergence from membership in society. And this team’s research is un burdened by either behavioristic or Chomskyan assumptions.

Another major reason for the fading influence of Chomsky’s theory is the perception by many that the theory has become too vague and untestable to make much out of it these days. Many in the linguistics community at large find Chomsky’s current research program of little use in their own efforts.

A third problem for Chomsky’s theory of language—and the issue that I want to pursue here—is the simple fact that languages are less alike than Chomsky imagined, and their differences are profound.

If the Pirahãs were philosophers and linguists in the Western sense, they would be unlikely to develop a linguistics similar to Chomsky’s. Contrary to the Cartesian concept of creativity, Pirahã cultural values limit the range of acceptable subjects and acceptable ways of talking to a narrow range within immediate experience.

At the same time, the Pirahãs love to talk. One of the most common comments I hear from visitors to the Pirahãs is that they seem to be talking and laughing together constantly. The Pirahãs are not reserved in their behavior, at least not in their own villages. As they lie around the ever-burning fires of their huts, they often bury potatoes or tubers in the coals to roast slowly. Talking about fishing, spirits, the last visit by a foreigner, why the Brazil nut trees yielded fewer nuts this year, and so on, Pirahãs pause to pull up a hot potato, open it, and ruminate almost literally as the conversation progresses.

They just don’t talk about many things. But neither did my family in Southern California when I was growing up. We talked about cattle, field yields, boxing, barbeque, honky-tonks, movies, and politics, with a few other issues. No one in my family would be interested in “Cartesian creativity” either. Maybe linguists need it, though, because they talk about a much greater variety of topics? I don’t think so. Most linguists I know, in fact most university professors I know, have if anything as narrow a range of conversational topics as the Pirahãs. Linguists talk about linguistics and other linguists much of the time. Philosophers talk about philosophy and philosophers and wine. These are pretty much the conversational parameters most of us operate within—our profession and our coprofessionals. Of course, to do all of this talking within the confines of a single language, our language has to be adequate for all the academic disciplines, professions, trades, and so on.

We often think that what we know is “portable”—as though what we learn about perceiving and knowing the world in San Diego will enable us to perceive and understand the world competently in Delhi. But so much of what we think we know is local information, based on local perspectives, that is no easier to use in a new environment than a 110-volt appliance in a 220-volt power source. A linguist, for example, who studies linguistic theory in a modern university and then travels to the field for research, if she is sensitive to her new environment, will soon learn that her theories are not a precise fit with the languages that she encounters. Theories can be useful if they are locally adjusted. If they’re not, they can be like a Procrustean bed, in which facts are stretched and chopped to fit.

This is especially true for theories that language (or grammar, depending on the author’s terminology) is innate. Although these theories can look very appealing in the classroom, they are difficult to reconcile with the facts in the field. Chomsky and Pinker suggest that nature (biology) is the principal explanatory tool for understanding the evolution and current form of human grammars. They propose a universal grammar (Chomsky) or a language instinct (Pinker), either of which would be part of our genome. These views have had a major impact on research in human psychology and language for decades. But there are other potential explanations of the psychology, evolution, and form of human grammars and languages. For example, we know that B. F. Skinner’s view was that language is simply the product of environmental conditioning—all nurture, not nature. And we also know that Chomsky’s devastating review of Skinner’s theory in 1959 showed that Skinner’s model was unequal to the task of accounting for the emergence of language either phylogenetically, in the species, or ontogenetically, in the individual. On the other hand, Chomsky’s and Pinker’s approaches to the problem, laying the core aspects of language exclusively at the feet of nature, are fraught with problems too. The Pirahã evidence of no recursion and cultural constraints on grammar are counterexamples to the idea of a universal grammar. The best account of the origin and nature of language is more complex than any simple dichotomy.

If this theory is inadequate, though, what are we left with?

We are left with a theory in which grammar—the mechanics of language—is much less important than the culture-based meanings and constraints on talking of each specific culture in the world.

And if this is correct, it has profound implications for themethodology of linguistics research. It means, again, that we cannot study languages effectively apart fromtheir cultural context, especially languages whose cultures differ radically from the culture of the researcher.

This also means that linguistics is not so much a part of psychology, as most contemporary linguists believe, as part of anthropology, as Sapir believed (in fact, this could mean that psychology itself is part of anthropology, as Sapir also believed). Linguistics apart from anthropology and field research is like chemistry apart from chemicals and the laboratory.

Sometimes, though, as we study these cultures, the lessons we learn range far beyond our scientific objectives. I was learning something about my own spirituality from the Pirahãs that was to change my life forever.

Part Three CONCLUSION

17                  Converting the Missionary

S
IL missionaries do not preach or baptize. They avoid pastorlike roles. Rather, SIL believes that the most effective way to evangelize indigenous peoples is to translate the New Testament into their language. Since SIL also believes that the Bible is literally the word of God, then, it is reasoned, the Bible should be able to speak for itself. So my daily activities among the Pirahãs were mainly linguistic, trying to figure out the language well enough to do a good translation of the New Testament. As I progressed, I would work on translating sections and test my translations with different people in the village. In free times during the day, I would often talk to people about my faith and why it was important to me. There was no more to my missionary activity than this, typical for SIL members.

One morning in November 1983, after I had spent about fourteen months off and on living among the Pirahãs, I was sitting in the front room of our house in the village drinking coffee with several Pirahã men. It was about ten o’clock and the day was getting hot, a heat that would intensify until about 4 p.m., when it would gradually begin to relent. I was facing the river and enjoying a midmorning breeze on my face as I talked to the fellows about boats they had heard going down the Marmelos River, a mile or so from the village. Kóhoibiíihíai entered and I got up and poured him a cup of coffee—we had an assortment of nonmatching cheap plastic cups in our kitchen. The coffee was weak and very sweet.

As he took the cup from me, Kóhoi said, “
Ko Xoogiái, ti gi xahoaisoogabagai
” (Hey Dan, I want to talk to you). He continued, “The Pirahãs know that you left your family and your own land to come here and live with us. We know that you do this to tell us about Jesus. You want us to live like Americans. But the Pirahãs do not want to live like Americans. We like to drink. We like more than one woman. We don’t want Jesus. But we like you. You can stay with us. But we don’t want to hear any more about Jesus. OK?”

Although SIL never allows its members to preach among indigenous peoples like the Pirahãs, Kóhoi had heard of my faith many times in conversations with me and in helping me translate small portions of the New Testament.

Then, referring to the previous American missionaries among them, he added, “Arlo told us about Jesus. Steve told us about Jesus. But we don’t want Jesus.”

The other men present seemed to agree with him.

I replied, “If you don’t want Jesus, you don’t want us. My family is only here to tell you about Jesus.”

I said I had to study. The men rose and left to take their turns fishing as other men arrived back in the village, making canoes available.

This information shocked me. And it presented me with a clear moral choice. I had gone to the Pirahãs to tell them about Jesus and, in my opinion at that time, to give them an opportunity to choose purpose over pointlessness, to choose life over death, to choose joy and faith over despair and fear, to choose heaven over hell.

If the Pirahãs had understood the gospel and were nevertheless rejecting it, that was one thing. But perhaps they had not understood it. This was a strong possibility, since my speaking ability in the Pirahã language was still far from native.

On another occasion during that first period with the Pirahãs, I felt I understood their language well enough to give my own story about why I accepted Jesus as my savior. This is a common practice among evangelical Christians, called “giving your testimony.” The idea is that the worse your life was before you accepted Jesus, the greater the miracle of your salvation and the greater the motive of unbelievers in the audience to accept Jesus too.

It was in the evening, just after my family had finished dinner, about seven o’clock. We were still cool from our baths in the Maici. This was when we made coffee for the people and they would come sit with us in the house and just visit. During these times I would talk about my faith in God and why I believed that the Pirahãs should want God too, as I did. Because the Pirahãs had no word for
God,
I used a term that Steve Sheldon had suggested to me,
Baíxi Hioóxio
(Up-high Father).

I said that our up-high father had made my life better. Once, I said, I used to drink like the Pirahãs. I had many women (exaggerating somewhat here), and I was unhappy. Then the up-high father came into my heart and made me happy and made my life better. I gave no thought to whether all these new concepts, metaphors, and names that I was inventing on the fly were actually intelligible to the Pirahãs. They made sense to me. This night, I decided to tell them something very personal about myself—something that I thought would make them understand how important God can be in our lives. So I told the Pirahãs how my stepmother committed suicide and how this led me to Jesus and how my life got better after I stopped drinking and doing drugs and accepted Jesus. I told this as a very serious story.

When I concluded, the Pirahãs burst into laughter. This was un expected, to put it mildly. I was used to reactions like “Praise God!”with my audience genuinely impressed by the great hardships I had been through and how God had pulled me out of them.

“Why are you laughing?” I asked.

“She killed herself? Ha ha ha. How stupid. Pirahãs don’t kill themselves,” they answered.

They were utterly unimpressed. It was clear to them that the fact that someone I had loved had committed suicide was no reason at all for the Pirahãs to believe in my God. Indeed, it had the opposite effect, highlighting our differences. This was a setback for my missionary objectives. Days went by after this in which I thought long and hard about my purpose among the Pirahãs.

Part of the difficulty of my task began to become clear to me. I communicated more or less correctly to the Pirahãs about my Christian beliefs. The men listening to me understood that there was a man named Hisó, Jesus, and that he wanted others to do what he told them.

The Pirahã men then asked, “Hey Dan, what does Jesus look like? Is he dark like us or light like you?”

I said, “Well, I have never actually seen him. He lived a long time ago. But I do have his words.”

“Well, Dan, how do you have his words if you have never heard him or seen him?”

They then made it clear that if I had not actually seen this guy (and not in any metaphorical sense, but literally), they weren’t interested in any stories I had to tell about him. Period. This is because, as I now knew, the Pirahãs believe only what they see. Sometimes they also believe in things that someone else has told them, so long as that person has personally witnessed what he or she is reporting.

I decided that part of the difficulty for receptivity to the gospel was that the Pirahãs at the village of Posto Novo where we currently worked had too much contact with caboclo culture and had come to see that culture as more compatible with their way of life than American culture, which is how they perceived the source of the gospel. I reasoned that if I moved to another village beyond the reach of the river traders, the gospel would have more success. There were two such villages that I knew of, one next to the Transamazon Highway and another more isolated yet, perhaps a day’s trip downriver from the Transamazon and three days upriver by motorboat from where we now lived.

I talked this over with Keren. We decided that before we made any decision we would take our first “furlough,” our first trip back to the United States in over five years. This was a time to report to our financial supporters, to rest, and to assess our progress as missionaries.

On our furlough, I thought again of the challenge of the missionary:to convince a happy, satisfied people that they are lost and need Jesus as their personal savior. My evangelism professor at Biola University, Dr. Curtis Mitchell, used to say, “You’ve gotta get ’em lost before you can get ’em saved.” If people don’t perceive a serious lack of some sort in their lives, they are less likely to embrace new beliefs, especially about God and salvation. The linguistic and cultural challenges are enormous. I didn’t even speak Pirahã well yet and was certainly unaware that it had characteristics that almost guaranteed that no message from the first century could be communicated.

We decided to move to another village, the more isolated one. We moved upriver about 150 miles to the village of Xagíopai, six hours downriver from the Transamazon Highway. The Pirahãs of this new village welcomed us warmly. For the first few years in this new location, we slept in tents and reached the village by taking the Transamazon, either by hitchhiking, renting a mission vehicle, or traveling on our own small off-road motorcycle, then taking our motorboat down the Maici to the village. Our supplies were carried to the river by pickup truck from the SIL missionary compound.

We had something to offer this group of Pirahãs that was new: the just-translated Gospel of Mark in Pirahã. I had worked very hard on this; it was finished a few weeks before our definitive move to the upriver village.

Before releasing the translation for use among the Pirahãs, however, SIL required me to schedule what it calls a translation “checking session.” I persuaded Xisaóoxoi (his Portuguese name is Doutor) to come to Pôrto Velho and spend a couple of weeks at the missionary compound to work on checking the quality of my translation. Wycliffe Bible Translators’ director, John Taylor, who had studied classical languages at Oxford, agreed to check my efforts. In our first session, John held his Greek New Testament in front of him and asked me to ask Doutor, in Pirahã, how he understood particular sections of Mark’s gospel. Doutor listened to my first question, but barely looked up at me, focusing instead on picking at a callus on his heel. The air conditioner was on. When he lost interest in his callus, Doutor pointed at the air conditioner with his lower lip and asked, “What’s that?” Then he repeated the question for the doorknobs, the desk, and just about every other object in the room. John was at first worried that Doutor didn’t understand my translation.

And I was nervous because I so wanted this translation checking to be a success. I pressed Doutor until he finally responded directly to a question. We quickly got into a routine of a couple of hours per day. By the end of two weeks, John was convinced that Doutor understood Mark’s gospel. One of WBT’s checking requirements is that the native-speaker helper must not have played any role in the actual translation, that is, that they come to the checking “cold,” with no vested interest (as a helper might) in the outcome.

But Doutor’s understanding bothered me more than it pleased me. If he understood as well as he seemed to, why did it have so little impact on him? Doutor could not have been less interested in or affected by the “message” of Mark’s gospel. When we returned to the village, I recorded Mark’s gospel in my own voice for the Pirahãs to listen to. I then brought in a wind-up tape recorder to play the recording, and I taught the Pirahãs how to use it, which, surprisingly enough, some of the children did. Keren and I left the village and returned a few weeks later. The people were still listening to the gospel, with children cranking the recorder. I was initially quite excited about this, until it became clear that the only part of the book that they paid attention to was the beheading of John the Baptist. “Wow, they cut off his head. Play that again!”

Perhaps they weren’t listening to the whole gospel because of my accent, I thought. To solve this problem, we decided to have a Pirahã man record the translation on tape. I would say a line and then he would repeat after me, as naturally as possible. When it was all done we had a studio add music and sound effects, in addition to professionally editing the tape. We thought it sounded great.

We had multiple copies made and purchased more hand-cranked cassette players. Within a few days Pirahãs were playing the translation several hours a day. We were sure that with this new tool we would now be successful in converting the Pirahãs.

The recorders had hard green plastic cases with yellow handles. The first time I showed a Pirahã how to use one, I sat by Xaoóopisi, whom I was just getting to know, and showed him how to crank slowly to keep the electric power steady. We listened. He smiled and said that he liked it. I felt good and got up and left him to listen alone.

The next evening I saw a group of men sitting by a fire at a beach on the other side of the river from the main village, eating fish and laughing. I paddled my boat over to them, with a recorder. I asked them if they wanted to listen. “Sure,” they all said enthusiastically in unison. I knew that they liked new things to break the monotony. And they did not disappoint me.

I cranked a bit and listened to the beginning of the Gospel of Mark. I asked them if they could understand it. They answered yes, they could understand it, and paraphrased it back to me so that I could see that they did understand it. Night had fallen and we were sitting on the sand by the light of their fire talking about the gospel. It was what I had always dreamed of.

But suddenly, Doutor, one of the four men, asked me a question.

“Hey Dan, who is that on the tape? It sounds like Piihoatai.”

“It is Piihoatai,” I answered.

“Well, he has never seen Jesus. He told us that he doesn’t know Jesus and that he doesn’t want Jesus.”

And with this simple observation, the Pirahãs signaled that these tapes would have little or no spiritual influence. They had no epistemological grip on their minds.

But rather than give up, we supplemented audio recordings of Mark’s gospel with a slide show of commercially produced pictures of New Testament scenes—Jesus, the apostles, and so on.

The morning after one evening’s “show” an older Pirahã man, Kaaxaóoi, came to work with me on the language. As we were working, he startled me by suddenly saying, “The women are afraid of Jesus. We do not want him.”

“Why not?” I asked, wondering what had triggered this declaration.

“Because last night he came to our village and tried to have sex with our women. He chased them around the village, trying to stick his large penis into them.”