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

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And I can look at some of those old men (old like me) who once threatened to kill me and recognize some of the dearest friends I have ever had—men who would now risk their lives for me. Also, the part about the author losing his faith is only 15 pages long and it's probably the worst chapter in the whole book. He goes on to explain that although the Pirahas understand the concepts of color and numbers they do not have specific words to codify these experiences.

I had already read Everett's How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention, and in this book he reiterates his arguments against Chomsky's idea of recursion being intrinsic to language and grammar having a genetic component. Although, as in all societies there were exceptions to the rule, this is still my impression of the Pirahas after all these years. 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. Instead, what he found in the jungle and what he learned from the the Piraha ended up challenging everything he believed in. The Pirahã's primitive insistenThey have very simple kinship groups that extend only to children, siblings, parents and grandparents. I can heartily recommend this book – if you are not a language nut, you can skip the sections where Everett ponders on Chomsky's theories of language development - but if you are, you will find it fascinating, and there is so much else to enjoy in Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes. The defining value of their culture is that the Piraha rarely, if ever speak of, think about, or make plans beyond a couple days out, and they don't reference the past outside of the living memory of their tribe, usually preferring to speak of much more immediate events. BUT - the issue was Everett has never been open to sharing his data (as he seemed to claim in this book).

After reading Everett’s book, Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes, and skyping with him in my Linguistics class I feel like I have been given a lot of new and useful information regaurding the field of linguistics. I need another perspective, preferably female, such as testimony from his wife, or the point of view of a female anthropologist. His writing style is refreshingly free from jargon and academic buzz words, and his explanatory style is clear and easy to follow. Everett also finds that there is no recursion in Piraha language, ie embedding of sentences within sentences (such as “the man who is tall came into the room”). I am familiar with the "caboclos" as a type of spirit in the context of Umbanda, an Afro-Brazilian tradition.Over the more than two decades since that summer morning, I have tried to come to grips with the significance of how two cultures, my European-based culture and the Pirahãs’ culture, could see reality so differently. Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes” means a few things: It means it first in the literal way, that you should be careful of sleeping too soundly because there are dangerous animals like snakes. Regarding the claim that Pirahã is non-recursive, I find an absolute lack of respect that linguists all around the world ague against Everett without even speaking Pirahã themselves. His perplexing objective was “to convince happy, satisfied people that they are lost and need Jesus as their personal savior.