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

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The boat she was on sank and sat on the bottom of the Maici. She drowned, I'm afraid." For about half a second the Pirahas all gawked at me. Then they broke out in laughter. 156 Wow! That's the only joke he can think of? I also found a few offhand remarks he made rather sexist and unprofessional. Ughhh I mentioned this book in my thesis proposal today and one of the committee members (linguistics professor) said to not take Everett's claims too seriously. The examples cited in this book were anecdotal, which is not necessarily always a problem. BUT - the issue was Everett has never been open to sharing his data (as he seemed to claim in this book). This book is about the lessons I have learned over three decades of studying and living with the Pirahas, a time in which I have tried my best to comprehend how they see, understand, and talk about the world and to transmit these lessons to my scientific colleagues. This journey has taken me to many places of astounding beauty and into many situations I would rather not have entered. 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.

urn:lcp:dontsleeptherear00ever:epub:04ebdb26-8c48-4982-95b3-3a5dcab6cd29 Extramarc MIT Libraries Foldoutcount 0 Identifier dontsleeptherear00ever Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t7hq55g0v Isbn 9780375425028Book Summary: The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius is a historical account of the lives of the first twelve Roman emperors. Written during the reign of Hadrian, the book provides a detailed and… When Everett translates many of the lines from Piraha to English, they are terse and simple. But they are also shed light into the very different ways there are of viewing the world. The Pirahas have shown me that there is dignity and deep satisfaction in facing life and death without the comfort of heaven or the fear of hell and in sailing toward the great abyss with a smile. I have learned these things from the Pirahas, and I will be grateful to them as long as I live.

The women wore the same sleeveless, collarless, midlength dresses they worked and slept in, stained a dark brown from dirt and smoke. The men wore gym shorts or loincloths. None of the men were carrying their bows and arrows. That was a relief. Prepubescent children were naked, their skin leathery from exposure to the elements. The babies' bottoms were calloused from scooting across the ground, a mode of locomotion that for some reason they prefer to crawling. Everyone was streaked from ashes and dust accumulated by sleeping and sitting on the ground near the fire.Everett is currently Trustee Professor of Cognitive Sciences at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. From July 1, 2010 to June 30, 2018, Everett served as Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley. Prior to Bentley University, Everett was chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. He has taught at the University of Manchester and the University of Campinas and is former chair of the Linguistics Department of the University of Pittsburgh. Furthermore, the idea of this being the result of a cultural bias (the existential primality principle or whatever he calls it) sure sounds nice, but even if I were to discount Everett's grounding in the western world, would still require a great deal of evidence, such as, perhaps a Piraha native learning English and discussing the theory in detail. The fact is that every phenomena has a multitude of explanations, and it's incredibly problematic that Everett argues from a position of experiential superiority (I lived with them, I know them, I am them, etc.) This is where the real story begins. 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. When discussing how this tribe may upend our entire theory of language, it seems like every paragraph he writes sets off new fireworks. He talks about how the Piraha's concern for the immediacy of experience prevents them from generalizing about even such simple things as color, number, or time. But, he knows, if such cultural concerns can influence grammar and language then the whole linguistic system of a-cultural grammar (elaborated by people like Pinker in the Language Instinct and McWhorter in The Tower of Babel) has to be overthrown. A language may tell us much more about a culture than we ever admitted possible. For instance, another language researcher found that tribes with fatalistic heros in their myths tended to use passive voice, while those with more active heros used active voice. Voice wasn't just a way for organizing information in a sentence, a la Chomsky, it was an everyday expression of belief. This is both the more common sense and perhaps more exciting view. There's so much more we can learn from languages that we ever thought possible before. Mary Claire Hersh. "Society of Midland Authors Prior Award Winners". www.midlandauthors.com . Retrieved 2015-09-19.

Grammars can be shaped by cultures; there are finite grammars in nonfinite languages [ clarification needed] The caboclos were more sullen in nature. The demands of the money world were highly corrosive to their traditional culture, to the vitality of their ecosystem, and to their mental health. They were less secure, and had real reasons to worry about tomorrow, because their survival depended on an ever-changing external system that was beyond their control. The book is part biography, part linguistics research, but also jumps into philosophy and trying to reconcile conflicting ideas on cultural values.

How's it working out for them? Well they're not exactly growing in size and they basically only survive because the Brazilian government protects their land, but apart from those minor concerns, they are quite happy. 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. Caboclo culture has impinged on the Pirahas almost daily for more than two hundred years. It is a macho culture, not unlike the cowboy culture I was raised in. 159 If there is one thing I know with certainty it is that machismo culture favors the men at the expense of women. Therefore, when Everett states this: But violence against anyone, children or adults, is unacceptable to the Pirahas. 104 or, this: The Pirahas seemed peaceful. I felt no aggression toward me or other outsiders, unlike in so many other new cultures I had entered over the years. And I saw no aggression internal to the group. Although, as in all societies there were exceptions to the rule, this is still my impression of the Pirahas after all these years. The peaceful people. 86 his contradictions leave me confused, which casts doubt, for me, on the clarity of his judgments. I need another perspective, preferably female, such as testimony from his wife, or the point of view of a female anthropologist. Is Everett blinded by male privilege? Linguistic Fieldwork (2012). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Daniel Everett & Jeanette Sakel.