by Tom Wolfe
OOOF!—right into the solar plexus!—a twenty-five-thousand-word article in the August–October 2005 issue of Current Anthropology entitled “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã,” by one Daniel L. Everett. Pirahã was apparently a language spoken by several hundred—estimates ranged from 250 to 500—members of a tribe, the Pirahã (pronounced Pee-daa-hannh), isolated deep within Brazil’s vast Amazon basin (2,670,000 square miles, about 40 percent of South America’s entire landmass). Ordinarily, Chomsky was bored brainless by all those tiny little languages that old-fashioned flycatchers like Everett were still bringing back from out in “the field.” But this article was an affront aimed straight at him, by name, harping on two points: first, this particular tiny language, Pirahã, had no recursion, none at all, immediately reducing Chomsky’s law to just another feature found mainly in Western languages; and second, it was the Pirahã’s own distinctive culture, their unique ways of living, that shaped the language—not any “language organ,” not any “universal grammar” or “deep structure” or “language acquisition device” that Chomsky said all languages had in common.
It was unbelievable, this attack!—because Chomsky remembered the author, Daniel L. Everett, very well. At least twenty years earlier, in the 1980s, Everett had been a visiting scholar at MIT after working toward an ScD in linguistics from Brazil’s University of Campinas (Universidade Estadual de Campinas). He was a starstruck Chomskyite at the time.b He had an office right across the hall from Chomsky himself. In 1983 Everett received his doctorate from Campinas after writing his dissertation along devout Chomskyan lines, and he didn’t stop there. In 1986 he rewrote the dissertation into a 126-page entry in the Handbook of Amazonian Languages.122 It was very nearly an homage to Chomsky. Now that he had his ScD he took periodic breaks in his work with the Pirahã to teach at Campinas, at the University of Pittsburgh as chairman of the linguistics department, and at the University of Manchester in England, where he was professor of phonetics and phonology when he wrote his fateful paper on Pirahã’s cultural restraint for Current Anthropology.123
In his twenty-two years as an off-and-on faculty member, he had written three books and close to seventy articles for learnéd journals, most of them about his work with the Pirahã. But this was his first bombshell. It was one of the ten most cited articles in Current Anthropology’s fifty-plus-year history.
The blast set off no Ahahhs! let alone Ahuras! within the field, however. Quite the opposite. Noam Chomsky and his Chomskyites were the field. Everett struck them as a born-again Alfred Russel Wallace, the clueless outsider who crashes the party of the big thinkers. Look at him! Everett was everything Chomsky wasn’t: a rugged outdoorsman, a hard rider with a thatchy reddish beard and a head of thick thatchy reddish hair. He could have passed for a ranch hand or a West Virginia gas driller. But of course! He was an old-fashioned flycatcher inexplicably here in the midst of modern air-conditioned armchair linguists with their radiation-bluish computer-screen pallors and faux-manly open shirts. They never left the computer, much less the building. Not to mention Everett’s personal background…he was from a too small, too remote, too hot—it averaged one hundred degrees from June to September and occasionally hit 115—too dusty, too out-of-it California town called Holtville, way down near the Mexican border. His father was a sometime cowboy and all-the-time souse and roustabout. He and Everett’s mother had gotten married in their teens and broke up when Everett was not yet two years old. When he was eleven, his mother was in a restaurant staggering beneath a tray full of dirty dishes when she collapsed with a crash and died from an aneurysm.
His father returned from time to time and tried to do his best for his son. His “best” consisted of the lessons of life he taught him, such as taking the boy, who was fourteen at the time, to a Mexican whorehouse to lose his virginity…and then banging on the whore’s door and yelling to his son, “Jesus H. Christ, what’s keeping you?”…it being his, Dad’s, turn next.124
Helpless, hopeless, the boy went with the flow into the loose louche lysergic life of teenagers in the 1960s. He had just swallowed some LSD in a Methodist church—wondering what it would be like to experience acid zooms amid the curlicued decorations of the sanctuary—when he came upon a beautiful girl named Keren, about his age, with raven hair and ravishing lips. He fell so madly in love—what did it matter that she also had a willpower as blindingly bright and unbending as stainless steel?
She straightened him out very fast. She turned out to be a real Methodist. Her mother and father were missionaries. She made a convert out of Everett in no time. Like Everett’s own parents, he and Keren got married in their late teens. Keren revved him up to an evangelical Methodist, and they resolved to head out into the world as missionaries, like Keren’s parents. They underwent several years of intensive linguistic training at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, founded by a popular late-nineteenth-century evangelist, Dwight Moody, and the Summer Institute of Linguistics, headed by a later evangelical Christian, Ken Pike. These were tough, rigorous academies, with no fooling around. The Summer Institute’s program gave advanced training in various tribal tongues and put the students through four months of survival training for life in the jungle, among other dangerous terrains. The purpose of the Moody Institute and the SIL, as the Summer Institute of Linguistics was called, was to produce missionaries who could convey to prospective converts the Word—the story of Jesus—in their own languages, anywhere on God’s earth.c
Everett had turned out to be such a remarkably adept student the SIL encouraged him to see what he could do with the Pirahã, a tribe that lived in isolation way up one of the Amazon’s nearly fifteen thousand tributaries, the Maici River. Other missionaries had tried to convert the Pirahã but could never really learn their language, thanks to highly esoteric constructions in grammar, including meaningful glottal stops and shifts in tone, plus a version consisting solely of bird sounds and whistles…to fool their prey while out hunting.125
It took three years, but Everett finally mastered it all, even the bird-word warbling, and became, so far as is known, the only outsider who ever did.d Pirahã was a version of the Mura tongue, which seemed to have vanished everywhere else.126 The Pirahã were isolated geographically. They had no neighbors to threaten them…or change them. It dawned on Everett that he had come upon a people who had preserved a civilization virtually unchanged for thousands, godknew-how-many thousands, of years.
They spoke only in the present tense. They had virtually no conception of “the future” or “the past,” not even words for “tomorrow” and “yesterday,” just a word for “other day,” which could mean either one.127 You couldn’t call them Stone Age or Bronze Age or Iron Age or any of the Hard Ages because the Ages were all named after the tools prehistoric people made. The Pirahã made none. They were pre-toolers. They had no conception of making something today that they could use “other day,” meaning tomorrow in this case. As a result, they made no implements of stone or bone or anything else. They made no artifacts at all—with the exception of the bow and arrow and a scraping tool used to make the arrow. So far no one has been able to figure out how the bow and arrow—an artifact if there ever was one—became common to the Inuit (the new “politically correct” name for Eskimos) at the North Pole, the Chinese in East Asia, to the Indians—er—Native-born in North America, and the Pirahã in Brazil.
Occasionally some Pirahã would sling together crude baskets of twigs and leaves. But as soon as they delivered the contents, they’d throw the twigs and leaves away.128 Likewise…housing. Only a few domiciles had reached the hut level. The rest were lean-tos of branches and leaves. Palm leaves made the best roofing—until the next strong wind blew the whole thing down. The Pirahã laughed and laughed and flung together another one…here in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.129
Pirahã was a language with only three vowels (a, o, i) and eight consonants (p, t, b, g, s, h, k, and x, which is the glottal stop). It was the sm
allest and leanest language known. The Pirahã were illiterate—not only lexically but also visually. Most could not figure out what they were looking at in two-tone, black-and-white photographs, even when they depicted familiar places and faces.130 In the Pirahã, Everett could see that he had before him the early history of speech and visual deciphering and, miraculously, could study them alive, in the here and now. No such luck with mathematics, however. The Pirahã had none. They had no numbers, not even 1 and 2; only the loose notion of “a little” and “a lot.” Money was a mystery to them. They couldn’t count and hadn’t the vaguest idea of what counting was. Every night for eight months—at their request—Everett had tried to teach them numbers and counting. They had a suspicion that the Brazilian river traders, who arrived regularly on the Maici, were cheating them. A few young Pirahã seemed to be catching on. They were beginning to do to real mathematics. The elders sent them away as soon as they noticed. They couldn’t stand children making them look bad. So much for math on the Maici. They had to continue paying the traders with vast quantities of Brazil nuts, which they gathered from the ground in the jungle. They were hunter-gatherers, as the phrase goes, but the hunting didn’t do them much good in the river trade. They had no clue about smoking or curing meat.131
Because they had little conception of “the past,” the Pirahã also had little conception of history. Everett ran into this problem when he tried to tell them about Jesus.
“How tall is he?” the Pirahã would ask.
Well, I don’t really know, but—
“Does he have hair like you?,” meaning red hair.
I don’t know what his hair was like, but—
The Pirahã lost interest in Jesus immediately. He was unreal to them. “Why does our friend Dan keep telling us these Crooked-Head stories?” The Pirahã spoke of themselves as the Straight Heads. Everybody else was a Crooked Head, including Everett and Keren—and how could a Crooked Head possibly improve the thinking of a Straight Head? After about a week of Jesus, one of the Pirahã, Kóhoi, said to Everett politely but firmly, “We like you, Dan, but don’t tell us any more about this Jesus.” Everett paid attention to Kóhoi. Kóhoi had spent hours trying to teach him Pirahã. Neither Everett nor Keren ever converted a single Pirahã. Nobody else ever did, either.132
The Pirahã had not only the simplest language on earth but also the simplest culture. They had no leaders, let alone any form of government. They had no social classes. They had no religion. They believed there were bad spirits in the world but had no conception of good ones. They had no rituals or ceremonies at all. They had no music or dance whatsoever. They had no words for colors. To indicate that something was red they would liken it to blood or some berry. They made no jewelry or other bodily ornaments. They did wear necklaces…lumpy asymmetric ones intended only to ward off bad spirits. Aesthetics played no part—not in dress, such as it was; not in hairstyles. In fact, the very notion of style was foreign to them.133
Here, now, in the flesh, was the type of society that Chomsky considered ideal, namely, anarchy, a society perfectly free from all the ranking systems that stratified and stultified modern life. Well…here it is! Go take a look! If it left at some unlikely hour before dawn, you could catch an American Airlines flight from Logan International Airport, in Boston, to Brasília and from Brasília, a Cessna floatplane to the Maici River…you could see your dream, anarchy, walking…in the sunset.
Chomsky wasn’t even tempted. For a start, it would mean leaving the building and going out into the abominable “field.” But mainly it would be a triumph for Everett and a humiliation for himself, headlined:
Everett to Chomsky:
COME MEET THE TRIBE
THAT KO’D YOUR THEORY
Chomsky never willingly mentioned Everett by name after that, nor did he expound upon the Amazon tribesmen everybody else in linguistics and anthropology was suddenly talking about. Chomsky didn’t want to know. He didn’t particularly want to hear about the Pirahã lore that so fascinated other people, such as the way they said good night, which was “Don’t sleep—there are snakes.”
And there were snakes…anacondas thirty feet long and weighing five hundred pounds, often lurking near the banks in the shallows of the Maici, capable of coiling themselves around jaguars—and humans—and crushing them and swallowing them whole…lancehead pit vipers, whose bite injects a hemotoxin that immediately causes blood cells to disintegrate and burst, making it one of the deadliest snakes in the world…heavy-bodied tree boas that can descend from the branches above and suffocate human beings…plus various deadly amphibians, insects, and bats…black caimans, which are gigantic alligators up to twenty feet long with jaws capable of seizing monkeys, wild pigs, dogs, and now and again humans and forcing them under water to drown them and then, like anacondas, swallowing them whole…Brazilian wandering spiders, as they are called, if not the most venomous spiders on earth, close to it…golden poison dart frogs—poisonous frogs!—swollen with enough venom to kill ten humans…inch-long cone-nose assassin bugs, also known as kissing bugs because of their habit of biting humans on the face, transmitting Chagas’ disease and causing about 12,500 deaths a year…nocturnal vampire bats that can drink human blood for as long as thirty minutes at a time while their human victims sleep.
Walking barefoot or in flip-flops at night in Pirahã land was a form of Russian roulette…and so the Pirahã had learned to be light sleepers. Long middle-of-the-night conversations were not uncommon, so wary were they throughout the midnight hours.
Whatever else it was, Everett’s twenty-five-thousand-word revelation of life among the Pirahã was sensational news in 2005. He had decided not to publish it in any of the leading linguistics journals. Their circulations were too small. Instead he chose Current Anthropology, which was willing to publish the entire twenty-five thousand words, uncut. That took up a third of the August–October 2005 issue and included eight formal comments solicited from scholars around the world—France, Brazil, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States.e Two of the scholars, Michael Tomasello and Stephen Levinson, were affiliated with the prestigious Max Planck Institute. By no means were their comments—or any others—valentines. They all had their reservations about this and that. So much the better. The big academic presentation paid off. Radio, television, and the popular press picked up on it here and abroad. Germany’s biggest and most influential magazine, Der Spiegel, said the Pirahã, a “small hunting and gathering tribe, with a population of only 310 to 350, has become the center of a raging debate between linguists, anthropologists and cognitive researchers. Even Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Steven Pinker of Harvard University, two of the most influential theorists on the subject, are still arguing over what it means for the study of human language that the Pirahã don’t use subordinate clauses.”134
The British newspaper the Independent zeroed in on recursion. “The Pirahã language has none of [recursion’s] features; every sentence stands alone and refers to a single event.…Professor Everett insists the example of the Pirahã, because of the impact their peculiar culture has had upon their language and way of thinking, strikes a devastating blow to Chomskyan theory. ‘Hypotheses such as universal grammar are inadequate to account for the Pirahã facts because they assume that language evolution has ceased to be shaped by the social life of the species.’” The Pirahã’s grammar, he argues, comes from their culture, not from any preexisting mental template.135
The New Scientist said, “Everett also argues that the Pirahã language is the final nail in the coffin for Noam Chomsky’s hugely influential theory of universal grammar. Although this has been modified considerably since its origins in the 1960s, most linguists still hold to its central idea, which is that the human mind has evolved an innate capacity for language and that all languages share certain universal forms that are constrained by the way that we think.”136
In academia scholars are supposed to think and write at a level far ab
ove the excitement of the popular media. But Everett and his Pirahã publicity got so deeply under the scholars’ skin, they couldn’t stand it any longer. In 2006, MIT’s linguistics department—not Noam Chomsky’s linguistics department—invited Everett to give a lecture about the “cultural factors” that made the Pirahã and their language so exceptional. Three days beforehand, a diatribe appeared on all the Listservs usually reserved for notices about talks to the MIT linguistics community, calling Everett a shameless out-and-out liar who falsifies evidence to support his claims concerning the Pirahã and their language. In fact, says the writer, Everett is so utterly shameless that he had already written about this small Amazonian tribe twenty years earlier in his doctoral dissertation…and is now blithely and brazenly contradicting himself whenever he feels like it. I’m publishing all this ahead of time, says the writer, for fear I and others who see through Everett’s scam will be “cut off” if we try to expose him at the event itself. In his peroration he says, eyeteeth oozing with irony:
“You, too, can enjoy the spotlight of mass media and closet exoticists! Just find a remote tribe and exploit them for your own fame by making claims nobody will bother to check!”137 It turned out to be by Andrew Nevins, a young, newly hired linguist at Harvard. He couldn’t hold it in any longer!
Nobody in the used-to-be-seemly field of linguistics or any other discipline had ever seen a performance like this before. Even Chomsky’s execration of B. F. Skinner had maintained a veneer of politeness and scholarly protocol.
When Tom Bartlett of the Chronicle of Higher Education e-requested an interview, Nevins e-replied:
“I may be being glib, but it seems you’ve already analyzed this kind of case!” Below Nevins’s message was a link to an article Bartlett had written about a Dutch psychologist who had confessed to fabricating results by citing studies that had never been made, i.e., were sheer fiction. Bartlett invited Nevins to expand on the implication that Everett was trying to pull off a hoax. Nevins replied, the “world does not need another article about Dan Everett.138