He gave [many] box[es]. The guy. The [guy in the] small boat.
30. ahía tobooá hóááobáá agaíísi ao.
He paid many sacks [of] manioc meal, the foreigner.
31. o o áái hiabáaí hiaba. Hi áihi aogosa.
Brazil nut grove he paid not. He Brazil nut grove [did not pay] the foreigner.
32. agá Paohósa gaísai aooíi hiabaaihiabisaíáaga.
Thus pão rosa [rosewood] speaking. The foreigner remained without paying.
33. aoooiíi hiabaaí hiabisaiága. Paohósa igaísaí.
The foreigner remained not paying. Talking [about] rosewood.
34. aooiíii hi píai ógaabá. áooiíi hi píai.
Foreigner he also wanted it. Foreigner too [wanted it].
35. ii gaabáhá paohósa. Gai hiahóá ao hoo.
He took the rosewood. Then he took it.
36. Hi aagáaoákaisi. óogísi aagaoa kaihiabaaí.
He [promised to] make a canoe. [We] wanted a canoe. He did not make one.
37. isáooi aooá. aooí hihiabaaí. Hiabísóai.
Xisáooi, foreigner. [That] foreigner really paid not. He just paid not.
38. í soáo ai kagáíahoaáí sigíai.
João [paid for] it, [the Brazil nut grove] Jaguar place.
39. Hiaitíihi iáiiakoíaahá. ioága.
The Pirahãs hunger. [They are] hungry.
40. oógihoigíaihi. áíia. áíia baagabaikoí.
In the jungle. The Brazil nut grove. The Brazil nut grove. He gave it.
41. aboitóhoi. Hiboitóhoi. Gísóógábáí.
Foreigner’s boat. His boat. [I] want this. [Says the foreigner.]
42. ihiaa áíiaasi hiábaaíhiaba. igaahíá pasabíi.
He did not pay the Pirahã’s Brazil nut grove. The one called Passar Bem.
43. iai hi sogohóíiga. ai goatáa ai.
The Brazil nut grove Sogohóíiga. [Nor] the Brazil nut grove Guatá.
44. ii opísi ao áíia soabógabái aháa.
The foreigner wanted to take Xopísi’s Brazil nut grove.
45. opísihi áíia sabáisiii Bogáaiiabai.
Xopísi’s Brazil nut grove has a name. Bogáaiiabai.
46. aoi tóhoi gaogabaii. opísi hi gáísáí. áíiaabagi.
The foreigner wanted to take his boat [to the Brazil nut grove to get Brazil nuts]. Xopísi spoke. About the Brazil nut grove.
47. Toisáaoaí hiaitíihi áiapi. abáógooíhi.
Tuchawa is the Pirahãs’ Brazil nut grove too. The foreigner really wants it.
48. áóoi itopáhátaío. abásaiaagáti aooíi.
Foreigners take from it. The foreigners remain.
49. Topápá. abá boitoisáaoaáí. Hoiíí píaii híai.
They have taken. They probably took [Brazil nuts] in their boat. Óther products too.
50. Hi opísi aga áíias abóaiisihaá. Higáísai.
Xopísi did. He took the Brazil nut grove. He spoke.
51. Hibáógoohigí áooáapísaohaáí. Síinti (Vicente).
He really wants it. Will he take it? Vicente?
52. o áooaáti gíai. aiia kabísiaíípí. Hisíáí.
Speak to [the foreigners about our] Brazil nut grove. The Brazil nut grove will be gone. The sun will be hot.
53. Nósi (Não sei)
I don’t know.
This story was told to me on my second visit to the Pirahã community in January to March of 1979, after a life-threatening trip, recounted in Everett (2008).
Again, the storyteller was Kaabogí, a man perhaps two or three years older than me, one of the two most experienced language teachers of the community, the other being my main teacher, Kohoibiíihiai (Kohoi), and both having worked extensively with my predecessor among the Pirahãs, SIL missionary Steven N. Sheldon.
The attitudes of Kohoi and Kaabogí were very different. Kohoi was willing to help me learn his language, but to him it often seemed like just a job, one of the ways he provided for his family. Kaabogí was always joking during our sessions but trying to enlist my help for the community as a whole (he had no children at the time). He was particularly concerned for the relationships between the Pirahãs and the various river traders that came up the Maici to purchase jungle products from the Pirahãs or to hire them as laborers. He wanted a richer source of manufactured goods, an issue that appealed to some Pirahãs more than others (for example, Kohoi wanted mainly that outsiders leave the Pirahãs alone).
For his first story to me, therefore, Kaabogí chose to talk about various river traders and how they were exploiting the Pirahãs by taking Brazil nuts, rosewood, and other products out of the Maici without either paying the Pirahãs or paying them insufficiently for this access. I did not understand this very well at the time, both because I spoke very little Pirahã and because I had no knowledge or understanding of the complex relationships between a dozen or so individual Pirahãs and regular river traders.
As a general introduction to the text—material that I would have liked to have known at the time in order to interpret it—we need to understand some background. First, there are many caboclos, Brazilians who live along the banks of the Madeira, the Amazon, and other rivers of Northern Brazil. These people make their living from the land—cultivating, fishing, and hunting, but also by owning small boats powered by diesel engines that they use for traveling in smaller tributaries to collect jungle products, such as Brazil nuts, sorva, rubber, rosewood, mahogany, fish (that they salt for later sale), and palm oil. At one time they also brought back exotic birds, live jungle cats, otter skins, alligator skins, and so on, but these have been prohibited, dramatically affecting some caboclos’ income. Some caboclos became river traders. Many of these have become rich, though their visible standard of living is not dramatically affected. I have met simple-living caboclos with incomes of tens of thousands of dollars per week, made from owning several boats (even some very large boats, perhaps two hundred feet long and fifty feet wide), who purchase products from other traders and sell them in Manaus to the main dealers in jungle products for most of Brazil. However, most river traders are poor, barely able to support their families, working hard in their fields and hunting in the jungle when they are not out on their boats. It is an extremely tough life.
Rich caboclos live like poorer caboclos because of deeply held values shared in caboclo culture regarding wealth. Wealth is a sign of sloth and dishonesty among caboclos. To be wealthy is to have taken money away from workers for your own use, without earning it. This is because all respected forms of earning money to a caboclo must include physical labor—making fields, fishing, hunting, building a house, clearing land, trading, and so forth. Thus to ostensibly demonstrate their honesty and work ethic, even well-off caboclos live in (occasionally) slightly larger homes, dress like other caboclos (in old clothes and flip-flops), and use their machetes daily to clear land. Their wealth is shown in the cities, away from other caboclos, where many of these wealthier caboclos have large homes, drive cars, send their children to private schools, and so on. Wealthy caboclos thus, in the contrast between city and country lifestyles, illustrate a difference the field worker and theorist must be aware of: the difference between professed values and practical values.
All the traders who work among the Pirahãs live in small settlements, like the Auxiliadora—a Salesian-founded community on the banks of the Madeira River, about thirty miles north of the mouth of the Maici, where the Pirahãs live. These include the people named in the text above. These caboclos have interesting attitudes toward the Indians. They believe that the government and missionaries pamper the Indians by offering them services and support that the caboclos themselves have no access to. Indians such as the Pirahãs seem lazy and purposeless to the caboclos because they have only relatively tiny fields, spend a great deal of their day (to the outsider’s eyes at least) lying around chatting, find physical labor “repugnant”—to quote a river trader—and have no desire to accumulate wealth. Since the caboclos do want and need outside
goods, think that they work harder, think that they speak a “real” language, and are all around more deserving than the Pirahãs, they see nothing wrong with taking jungle products and not paying for them, or paying very little for them. The most common form of payment is cheap rum (cachaça) at about US$1 per liter. Six liters would at the time have paid an entire village for several days of product gathering labor.
To these traders, outsiders like me—who help the Pirahãs charge higher prices for their goods and services—are their enemies, taking from them, the deserving, to give to a group of lazy, barely human, worthless creatures. Tensions can be quite high, based on these misunderstandings. Such misunderstandings, which serve as the background to this text, result from different emicized values, knowledge structures, and roles. They may not be ineffable. But they are not usually talked about. They are simply obvious to both parties.
Other dark matter behind these texts is seen in the sophisticated way that Pirahãs (like other indigenous groups I have worked with) try to play outsiders off against one another. Neither the caboclos nor I are Pirahãs. We are all outsiders. Moreover, the Pirahãs understandably see themselves as the people that matter most. And they perceive me as wealthy and able to do even more for them than the river traders. Why else would they allow me to remain with them, other than for me to offer assistance to them? To many Pirahãs, I am as natural a friend as a Martian would be to the average American. They know I am not dangerous, so then, am I useful? Social scientists who fail to ask why they are being told this or that story relative to their own status in the community (and they always have one), is in fact not going to understand very well the context, purpose, or background behind what they are being told.
In my experience, a very common tactic in the encounter between outsiders and autochthonous populations (e.g., anthropologists or linguists and Amazonians) is the “You’re the best friend we have ever had” tactic. The people will tell the field researcher how much better that researcher treats them than previous researchers. They make him or her want to even outdo him- or herself in giving more, buying more, doing more for the people. The researcher who wants others to respect “their” people but who does not recognize the subtle psychology of some of the stories he or she is told, their content, and their theme is being no less disrespectful. But it is hard to see this because it is the indigenes playing on the dark matter of the researcher—the Western-culture syndrome. The researcher often believes or seems to believe that his or her motives are pure and untainted by desire for personal gain (too often forgetting or ignoring the fact that tenure decisions, promotions, book deals, salary increments, etc., are based on the researcher’s success at fieldwork). As the people see the researcher’s tendency to want to be their “ally” in this I sense, the stories include more accounts that call for help. There is nothing wrong with this. And the need for help is almost always real, acute, and essential. However, it is important that the researcher recognize all of this—his or her place in the cultural encounter—in order to better understand what is being done and thus better understand the intentionality and meaning behind it. But this requires meta-reflection on the dark matter of the text as well as the dark matter of the intricate dance between scientist and subject—roles that are more fluid than the “scientist” realizes (the Pirahãs, for example, were always faster to understand and predict my behavior than I theirs). Because it is such a rich source of insight into dark matter, I want to examine just over a third of this text line by line, bearing in mind that all we have just discussed is part of the background.
In line 1, we start off with a vague reference “He (a Brazilian trader) did not pay Xoágaii (Kaabogí’s brother).” Who was this thief? What was he stealing? Although some clarification is provided in the course of the text, much is assumed. The Pirahãs’ harvest their major jungle crop—Brazil nuts—between December and March, the height of the rainy season. The work is not easy. Brazil nut trees are among the tallest in the forest, up to and exceeding 160 feet, up to seven feet or more in diameter. Brazil nuts grow as wedges of an orange in very hard, thick-walled pods. The pods require several hard blows from a machete to be opened. The Brazil nuts must then be scooped out, placed in a basket, and later cleaned of the brown goop that surrounds them within the pod. This is labor intensive. When the trees are deep in the jungle, they can be located only by people with expert knowledge of that part of the jungle. Because the Pirahãs see the jungle along the entire length of the Maici, from its mouth up to and including the Trans-Amazonian Highway (Brazilian road BR-230), they expect to be compensated in some way for their knowledge in showing the trees. And they expect this (more dark matter) every single time the trees are accessed.
Local caboclos refer to the collection of Brazil nuts as quebrando castanha (literally, “breaking Brazil nuts”). This is because of the work required to break open the pods. Occasionally, traders want to get their nuts to the market first, so they ask men, such as the Pirahãs, to climb up the 160-foot tree to shake or cut the pods loose, ignoring the danger. There are no branches on the trunk of a Brazil nut tree to get a foot or handhold on. A climber will usually use a strap of bark tied around his ankles to shimmy up the tree with, holding on for dear life. One Pirahã man, Kaxaxái, fell from the top of the tree and bounced like a ball (in the vivid descriptions of Pirahã witnesses) off the jungle floor. A missionary, Steve Sheldon, took him out right away by plane. After surgery and months of recuperation, he returned, largely recovered, but never quite the same mentally or physically afterward. The Pirahãs took special care of him. Stories like this underscore the difficulty and occasional danger of Brazil nut gathering in the Amazon and help us understand why the people expect compensation for their dangerous efforts. Also, Brazil nuts are harvested in the rainy season—the absolutely most dangerous period of the year for snakes and other dangerous animals, since their holes, dens, and nests are often flooded by the rainwater and they must come out onto the forest floor, buried under dead leaves, or in puddles along the path (I once saw a baby bushmaster strike at a friend of mine from out of a brown puddle in the middle of the path, just missing its intended victim. What looked like an innocuous puddle harbored death.)
On the other hand, the location of Brazil nut groves along the Maici is now known to all of the regular river traders; these traders also know of the risks and are more than able to gather the nuts themselves, bypassing the Pirahãs entirely. These caboclos believe that they have paid the Pirahãs for permanent access to the Brazil nut groves, though they do offer the Pirahãs liquor and small things as they are able, but they are too poor to pay the amounts of trade goods that the Pirahãs want. Moreover, the price of Brazil nuts can fall dramatically in a year, hardly making it worth the cost of the fuel for the boat to come up the river after them. These economic realities are in the background and conscious knowledge of the traders but by their very nature fall outside the scope of Pirahã knowledge, involving numbers, economy, and so on. Thus some of the traders’ activities are understandable to the Pirahãs, while others are not. On the other hand, given that the traders think the Pirahãs are irresponsible and lazy—or to some, even subhuman—most of them see no need to deprive themselves of full profits in order to pay people who do not even (in the traders’ minds) understand payment. But the traders miss the fact that the Pirahãs do understand volume of payment, that they do want things from the outside world, and that the land is under their control.
But the traders do no better in understanding the Pirahãs. This story would make no sense to a caboclo trader without understanding the Pirahãs’ dark matter perspective—namely, that permanent land possession is inconceivable. So the first question, again, is: Why is the speaker telling me [Dan] this story? Because he wants me to help him and the Pirahãs. It is fascinating that he introduces (as all Pirahãs do in all texts) proper names of people with no further description, even those (at that time, all the names) I have never met. Interestingly, the effect on me, tacitly, w
as that when I actually did meet these men, it was something like meeting a celebrity. I had come to think of them as celebrity pirates because of Pirahã stories (though, as I later learned, “pirate” fit some of them well and others not at all—I had my own life threatened seriously by a couple of them.)
Line 2 tells us that this person did not pay the Pirahãs. Notice that because Pirahã lacks plural nouns or number of any kind, this sentence is ambiguous between a reading in which there is only one Pirahã, Xoágaii, and a reading in which all Pirahãs are intended. Which reading is correct? If the latter, then this means that Pirahãs have collective control of all their land. If the former, then individual Pirahãs have control of specific Brazil nut groves. This is clearly an ambiguity that requires understanding of Pirahã culture. Yet this understanding would be very hard to get at merely by asking the Pirahãs (I tried), because they would likely either answer both or neither. This is because there simply is no place for ownership as we know it—the lines blur between Pirahãs but are stark between Pirahãs and outsiders.
Notice also that in lines 1 and 2 of this story, the speaker is setting up these broad topics. There will be several specific points, but the general thrust is that Brazilians are using Pirahã Brazil nut groves without payment.
Lines 3 and 4 begin to narrow things to specific incidents. We learn that the Brazilians—in this case Chico (Alecrim)—have their own names for the Brazil nut groves they use most.
Line 5 is very interesting in its use of the kinship term baíi, “parent” (báí is a shortened form of baí?i.), to refer to Chico. The Pirahãs themselves translate this into Portuguese when directly addressing a trader, referring to the ones they know best as papai, “father.” The traders think that by the use of this term, the Pirahãs intend to communicate that they are children and the Brazilian is a deeply beloved adult. But this is not what it means at all. The Pirahãs can refer to either parent or to anyone who has control over the speaker or an addressee the speaker wants something from. This subtle point leads to great misunderstandings, interpreting even anger as goodwill because of the improper translation of a term. Of course, the Pirahãs do not know that their usage of the Portuguese term does not match the Brazilian usage of the word, nor vice versa (more dark matter–based misunderstanding).
Dark Matter of the Mind Page 26