Don't Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle

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This is described as a major challenge to Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar, since it is recursion that allows for the formation of an infinite number of sentences. But the bulk of the text is devoted to really trying to understand their culture, which he does through the “immediacy of experience” principle. I would go so far as to suggest that the Pirahãs are happier, fitter, and better adjusted to their environment than any Christian or other religious person I have ever known.

No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. The lack of a clear structure and aim to the book certainly didn't endear the author to me, and, while I come from a "faith-perspective" myself, I found his approach to the Piraha tribe he was working with, and his own inability to reflect on his own thinking and behaviour, deeply frustrating long before he revealed his loss of faith. Everett came to the tribe as a disciple both of Christ and Noam Chomsky's Universal Grammar, but gradually he realized that this tribe, the Pirahas, didn't have numerous attributes that Chomsky said should be in every grammar, such as conjunctions and recursions. Everett's theory is that someone has to feel like they are missing something in their life before they see a need for a belief system and the "redemption" it promises (in other words, you have to feel a need to be "saved" before you will agree to be "saved").The Pirahas have deep feelings, but to survive, they know life is hard and they strive to resolve our own problems. He shares many details I found interesting such as how they make their bows and arrows, their use of exocentric navigational orientation, and hum speech, to name a few. The Pirahã's primitive insisten

The Pirahã only concern themselves with directly experienced events, or at least those within living memory. Whereas “we define success in industrialized cultures at least partially as the ongoing improvement in our technology … the Pirahas show no such improvement, nor a desire for it.But I am so glad that I made the journey — it has given me precious and valuable insights into the nature of life, language, and thought that could not have been learned any other way. I understand the argument that Piraha lacks some features of almost all grammars and therefore the theory of a Universal grammar is incomplete.

His perplexing objective was “to convince happy, satisfied people that they are lost and need Jesus as their personal savior.So much that, based on the frequency of smiling and laughter among the Piraha, some psychologists believe they are among the happiest people in the world. Their idea of a family unit is nowhere near as rigid as Westerners are used to, and neither is their relationship to sexuality or child rearing. The Pirahã have managed, through sheer force of being content with their own lives, to reject Western culture and capitalism.

Physics and linguistics are, for instance, not equivalent: German dies without humans, but electrons don't.

I had gone to the Pirahãs to tell them about Jesus…, 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. What an eye-opener this book is for us civilized folks whose only imaginable way of life is the Western bourgeois life. UG (Chomsky) or The Language Instinct (Pinker) claims that human's ability to learn languages is innate, because all languages share some underlying common "grammar" whose "parameters" (e. Some very amusing anecdotes combined with some illuminating observations about the role of culture in shaping language, contrary to the prevailing paradigm of linguistics.