Dark Matter of the Mind

by Daniel L. Everett

  Through their relationship to birthing, animals, and nursing, the Pirahãs establish an immediate and lifelong learning, living connection with nature and their community from the moment they are born. This is a connection that distinguishes them sharply from Brazilians and the rapidly assimilating Parintintin and Tenharim Kawahiv–speaking groups whose own reservations abut the Pirahãs’. Animal relationships and knowledge underscore the distinctiveness of their community from the river traders, explorers, missionaries, pilots, and others who visit their village from time to time. In recent books, Descola (2013) and Kohn (2013) have argued strongly that an understanding of human cultures is only possible as we understand them in their surrounding environment and ecology—that flora, fauna, topography, and so on, play a nontrivial role in human roles, values, and knowledge structures.

  These points of group attachment are strengthened during the children’s maturation through other natural experiences of community life as the children learn their language, the configuration of their village and to sleep on the ground or on rough, uneven wooden platforms made from branches or saplings. As with other children of traditional societies, Pirahã young people experience the biological aspects of life with far less buffering than Western children. They remember these experiences, consciously or unconsciously, even though these apperceptions are not linguistic.

  Pirahã children observe their parents’ physical activities in ways that children from more buffered societies do not (though often similar to the surrounding cultures just mentioned). They regularly see and hear their parents and other members of the village engage in sex (though Pirahã adults are modest by most standards, there is still only so much privacy available in a world without walls and locked doors), eliminate bodily waste, bathe, die, suffer severe pain without medication, and so on.8 They know that their parents are like them. A small toddler will walk up to its mother while she is talking, making a basket, or spinning cotton and pull her breast out of the top of her dress (Pirahã women use only one dress design for all), and nurse—its mother’s body is its own in this respect. This access to the mother’s body is a form of entitlement and strong attachment. However, it is transitory, leading to the huge shock that is produced by the onset of weaning.

  At about four to five years of age—or much sooner, if the mother gives birth to a new infant—the confident, satiated toddler loses access to its mother’s milk. The cutoff is sudden and unexpected, and exposes the toddler to hunger, work, independence, and an end to the sense of ownership of its mother’s body. The transition is always unpleasant for the toddler, who begins to scream and cry most of the night and day, sounding to the unaccustomed ear as though they are suffering horrible pain of some sort (though as one gets to know Pirahã crying patterns, it becomes easy enough to pick out the signs of anger and petulance in the crying).9

  During the day, one sees children throwing tantrums as a protest against being hungry, cut off from the mother’s milk, and losing the privilege of its mother’s arms to a newborn infant. I have seen young children writhing in the dirt screaming, pounding their faces with their fists, deliberately throwing themselves full force on the ground, not infrequently close to or even in the fire (serious burns have occurred), spitting, and carrying on as though they were in the throes of epilepsy. The reaction by the entire village is almost always the same—complete indifference. The children are ignored even though they carry on for hours and occasionally hurt themselves. They are ignored even though they are in the hot sun, not drinking, seemingly using all of their available energy to the point of exhaustion. They are ignored even though they are pitching their fit in the main path of the village, forcing everyone to step over or around them. The thrashing little discontent will usually tire, stop pitching fits, and become much more stable within a few weeks. Any long-term psychological effects of this non-ritualistic rite of passage are invisible to the external observer. The attachment to the mother has been weakened. In its place now begins the accelerated growth in attachment to the Pirahãs as a group.

  This accelerated group identification comes from what I call the “hard edge” learning phase for weaned toddlers. The newly weaned child goes from a soft life of no hunger, no work, and pampering to a life in which it must begin to walk more (to the field, to the river, into the jungle, etc.), rather than be carried most of the time; to take on duties, especially carrying small (and always appropriate for its size) loads of firewood, legumes, fish, and so on; to go fishing with older children; to watching and carrying its younger siblings, and so on. They play without adults watching their every move as well—for example, paddling canoes alone on the Maici River. At all stages of life, but especially in this transition to a new independence, the Pirahã child faces risks with little supervision. Children run carrying sharp knives, walk near the fire, reach out to touch living, dangerous animals, and otherwise engage in many activities that some Westerners would consider unsafe. They get bitten, burned, cut, banged up, lost, stung, and hurt in numerous ways during this stage. But in my experience, Pirahã children build from these experiences selves of confidence, grace, and pragmatic knowledge. Such risks and their consequences are crucial for learning and living in Pirahã culture.

  One might think (incorrectly) that Pirahã are children innately programmed to carry knives, walk near fires, and be more graceful than Western children. Raising my own children (two girls and a boy) among the Pirahãs and later seeing my grandchildren play in the village, the contrast between the quietness, lack of clumsiness, and common sense and awareness of dangerous things in the environment between the Pirahãs and my own offspring (and certainly myself) was stark. American children (and many adults) run screaming loudly, pounding the ground with their feet. They fall, get stung by wasps and other insects, bump their heads, fall in the river, fall in the canoe, can’t sit still, and on and on. Pirahã children show poise and elegance as they move, are relatively quiet, rarely trip and fall, rarely bump their heads or get stung or hurt, compared to American or European children. Pirahãs believe that the contrast between their abilities and ours distinguish us as peoples. These contrasts in apperceptibly shaped carriage and skills strengthen their sense of group identity.

  As an example of learning skills early on, consider the use of a bow and arrow. One day while talking to a Pirahã man, I felt a sharp poke on my upper back. The man started laughing as I turned to see toddler, still wobbly on his feet, picking up his blunt-tipped, six-inch-long arrow from the ground where it had fallen after striking me. He was shooting at a mosquito on my shoulder. The child returned my gaze with a serious expression before turning to take aim at a leaf on the ground. The man explained that all Pirahã males learn to handle a bow and arrow the same way—trial and error from childhood. By the time they are adolescents, they are good enough to hit just about anything they shoot at.10

  Sexual behavior is another behavior distinguishing Pirahãs from most middle-class Westerners early on. A young Pirahã girl of about five years came up to me once many years ago as I was working and made crude sexual gestures, holding her genitalia and thrusting them at me repeatedly, laughing hysterically the whole time. The people who saw this behavior gave no sign that they were bothered. Just child behavior, like picking your nose or farting. Not worth commenting about.

  But the lesson is not that a child acted in a way that a Western adult might find vulgar. Rather, the lesson, as I looked into this, is that Pirahã children learn a lot more about sex early on, by observation, than most American children. Moreover, their acquisition of carnal knowledge early on is not limited to observation. A man once introduced me to a nine- or ten-year-old girl and presented her as his wife. “But just to play,” he quickly added. Pirahã young people begin to engage sexually, though apparently not in full intercourse, from early on. Touching and being touched seem to be common for Pirahã boys and girls from about seven years of age on. They are all sexually active by puberty, with older men and women frequently initiating young
er girls and boys, respectively. There is no evidence that the children then or as adults find this pedophilia the least bit traumatic.

  To summarize, much of cultural identification and attachment is achieved by nonlinguistic imitation and learning. Such knowledge is almost exclusively tacit and largely ineffable. Thus tacit knowledge of a community can only—or at least best—be ascertained by the old-fashioned methods of participant observation, note taking, hermeneutics, and conversations, and the interpretations of a variety of behaviors, looking for the links between them, whether linguistic or below the threshold of consciousness. This epitomizes dark matter. Such learning is not limited to culture broadly speaking, however. It is seen in language learning as well.

  LANGUAGE AND ATTACHMENT

  Piaget (1926) and Vygotsky (1978) champion different, apparently incompatible, perspectives on the connection of language and society—such as egocentric language vs. language as socialization—and sociocultural development. Piaget’s egocentricism appears incompatible with Vygotsky’s views, at least as Piaget characterizes them. However, I believe that the two may in fact be reconciled if we interpret egocentricism as the “formation of identity,” at once a deeply personal psychological process that is nonpathological only during socialization in a specific culture. Thus a child learns language to form itself as an autonomous psychological being, but this autonomy makes sense only in comparison and contrast to others—that is, in a social environment.

  Pirahã language acquisition, though I have not studied it experimentally, follows the broad outlines of language acquisition in other cultures. The child begins to learn its language and culture from the womb. Culturally, the fetus learns its mother’s biological rhythms, her diet, her pitch range (modulo the wet medium the sound waves must cross), and so on. Linguistically, it is exposed to the mother’s prosody (tone, stress, and intonation) and other features of (at least) the mother’s speech. As soon as the child is born, it is exposed to the clearer and louder linguistic cacophony of its native community.

  In the case of a Pirahã child, it will be almost immediately exposed to five channels of speech (D. Everett 1985, 2008): hum speech, yell speech, musical speech, whistle speech, and consonant-vowel speech, each of which plays a different but important role in Pirahã culture. Mothers and other caregivers do not speak “baby talk” or “motherese” to babies. However, many mothers use hum speech more frequently with babies than other channels. Pirahã children thus learn the importance and use of the prosodic complexity of Pirahã at the very outset of their lives, from the womb. And this prosodic complexity is highly distinctive in Pirahã, setting them apart from any other known group of Brazil. Also, they are exposed as infants to sounds that occur in no other language of Brazil (one of these sounds occurs in no other language of the world)—a voiced apico-alveolar laminal double flap (a form of [l]) and a voiced bilabial trill (D. Everett 1982).

  In addition to sound features of their language, however, Pirahã children must master the structure and meanings of words as well as Pirahã grammar, the range of acceptable story topics, the way stories are told, structures of conversations, and so forth.

  Consider first stories. Pirahã children learn the topics that are appropriate in their culture for talking about and discussing—just as American children, German children, and Sesotho children do. Pirahã children will not learn any talk of creation, God, the end of the world, oral literature about the forest, and so on. They will learn that talk about nature is as they have experienced it—hunting, fishing, gathering, unexplained sights and sounds—are the most common topics.

  They will learn about their words and that verbs can take up to 65,000 possible forms (D. Everett 1983). Perhaps even more important than learning the immensely complex verb structure of Pirahã, is the learning of the evidentiality suffixes that are found at the rightmost end of the verb. Pirahã stories are about immediate experience (D. Everett 2005a, 2008, 2012a, 2012b, etc.), and the function of these suffixes is to communicate that the stated or even reported is based on the evidence of hearsay, deduction, or direct observation (D. Everett 1983). Because of their unusual constraints on storytelling and verb structure, as well as the importance of evidence, the Pirahã restrict their sentences to largely single verb frames (D. Everett 2012a, 2012b). That is, they lack recursive sentence structures (D. Everett 2005a, 2012a, 2012b; Futrell et al., forthcoming). The unusual features of discourse topics, absence of sentential recursion, the prosodic complexity of the language, unique sounds—not to mention that Pirahã is a language isolate and that the people are still monolingual (though this is changing)—mean that their language sets the Pirahãs apart from other populations.

  Language is the ultimate tool of attachment and group identification for all Pirahãs. If you speak Pirahã natively, you are a Pirahã. If you don’t, you aren’t. But what counts as “speaking” is not merely grammatical structure. Mastery of grammar is a necessary for being a Pirahã, in their terms. But ability to use that grammar to tell appropriate stories is the truly crucial skill, blending both language and culture, as discussed in Everett (2005a, 2008, 2012a). Thus, in this view, attachment is a process of defining the self, one’s place in society, and the separateness of one’s group and culture from others. Theories of attachment, like theories of language and culture, can only benefit from careful descriptive field studies by attachment specialists. Since I am not that kind of specialist, this description of Pirahã is intended only as a first step, perhaps an indication of empirical riches to be uncovered by such fieldwork.11

  Pirahã children begin life with an attachment to their mother, developing stronger and closer ties with their community as they age. Mothers are affectionate with their children, from infancy on. Their tenderness with infants superficially contrasts with the hard-edge stage of weaning and the toddler age. But their affection never wavers. They are always ready to come to the aid of their child if it is genuinely and seriously threatened. At the same time, the entire community recognizes the necessity of physical and survival characteristics that do not come easy. In an environment with no doctors, no dentists, no police—no one but yourself, your family, and your fellow Pirahãs to depend on—the imposition of toughness on children is not from machismo but from necessity. There are no attachment-related discourses that I am aware of, developing or explicating the growing relationship between child and mother, child and family, child and village, and so on. There might be, but I haven’t observed any. Rather, we see that the growing responsibility of the child forces upon it the need to form wider friendships and support within the village and the larger community in order to survive. As with so much of cultural learning, imitation and relationship building are essential and without any special language.

  I have often thought that the Pirahãs are among the few people anywhere on earth where just about any member of the society could walk naked into the center of the jungle and emerge well fed, healthy, clothed (after a fashion), and armed. When I am there, I depend on them and am always grateful for their knowledge, their willingness to instruct me, and their ability to teach me (as I ask questions—i.e., at my initiative). Like many traditional peoples around the world, they represent a richness of life and possess a set of solutions to life’s problems that can never be recovered if this people or their culture is lost to the world. Unfortunately, they are now under greater threat than ever before.

  Cultural transmission, like genetic transmission, is always corrupted in some way, leading to “mutations” (cf. Newson, Richerson, and Boyd 2007; Schönpflug 2008). For example, among the Sateré people of the Amazon, there is a famous wooden club, the poranting, that has writing/marking on both sides. The people say that one side tells them the good they should do and the other has the bad things they are to avoid. The problem is that they have forgotten which side is which. Assuming that it was ever clear what each side was for, this is a case of serious transmission breakdown (or a useful legend that was never intended to have a resoluti
on). But cases of smaller magnitude abound. Consider something as concrete as the making of a blowgun. I have witnessed the transmission of this skill in Arawan societies of the Amazon from father to son. Sons observe, imitate, and work alongside their fathers. Surprisingly little linguistic instruction takes place in this skill transmission (at least, relative to anything my dad ever taught me how to do). The wood for the blowgun comes from a narrow range of wood species. The vine used to tie the blowgun and render it airtight is limited to a couple of types. The needle used for the darts likewise requires highly specific knowledge of local flora. The kind of large jungle vine used to extract the poison (strychnine) and the other ingredients of the poison that help it enter the bloodstream more effectively: all of these steps and bits of knowledge, even without language, can be transmitted faithfully or inaccurately. For example, someone might accidentally use different type of wood. Or a different way of tying the blowgun. A different binding agent for the poison. Error or innovation may occur at any step of the transmission process in one father-son pair, leading to a divergence from the cultural norm. From the perspective of the culture, it doesn’t matter whether the deviation was intentional or not; there is a deviation, a potential for mutation—a different type of blowgun or an inferior or superior weapon. Clearly such deviations have occurred, because in closely related Arawan languages, blowguns differ (as do the languages themselves!) in nontrivial ways. The technology varied and the language varied due to imperfect imitation and innovation. Such examples show that not all (however important) cultural knowledge is propositional.