The Pirahãs can make canoes out of bark—called kagahóí—but they rarely do, preferring to steal or trade for the sturdier dugout and board canoes made by Brazilians, called xagaoas. Inasmuch as the Pirahãs depend on these sturdier canoes for their fishing, transportation, and recreation on the river, it has always fascinated me that they do not make them. And they never have enough to go around for all the families in the village. Although canoes are said to be possessed by individuals of the village and hence are not, properly speaking, community property, in practice each canoe owner loans out his canoe either to a son or son-in-law or to someone else in the village. Using someone’s canoe carries the expectation that any fish caught while using that canoe will be shared with the canoe’s owner. Acquiring new canoes for the village is always difficult for the Pirahãs, so it didn’t surprise me when one day they turned to me for help.
“Dan, can you buy us a canoe? Our canoes are rotten,” the men said to me one day out of the blue, as they sat in my house drinking coffee.
“Why don’t you make a canoe?” I asked.
“Pirahãs don’t make canoes. We don’t know how.”
“But I know you can make a bark canoe; I have seen you do that,” I rejoined.
“Bark canoes don’t carry weight. One man, some fish, no more. Only Brazilian canoes are good. Pirahã canoes are no good.”
“Who makes canoes around here?” I asked them.
“At Pau Queimado they make canoes,” the men answered, nearly in unison.
It appeared that they didn’t make dugout canoes because they didn’t know how, so I decided to help them learn. Since the best canoe masters in the area lived at the village of Pau Queimado, several hours away by motorboat on the Marmelos River, I decided to try to contract one of these men to spend about a week with the Pirahãs to teach them how to make canoes the Brazilian way. The main canoe builder at Pau Queimado, Simprício, agreed to teach them.
When he arrived, the Pirahãs all gathered (enthusiastically) to learn from him. As per our agreement, Simprício let the Pirahãs do the labor, supervising rather than building the canoe directly and instructing them carefully as they worked. After about five days of intense effort, they made a beautiful dugout canoe and showed it off proudly to me. I bought the tools for them to make more. Then a few days after Simprício left, the Pirahãs asked me for another canoe. I told them that they could make their own now. They said, “Pirahãs don’t make canoes” and walked away. No Pirahã has ever made another xagaoa to my knowledge. This taught me that Pirahãs don’t import foreign knowledge or adopt foreign work habits easily, if at all, no matter how useful one might think that the knowledge is to them.
Pirahãs have the knowledge to preserve meat—when they are about to embark for a place where they expect to encounter Brazilians, they salt meat (if they have salt) or smoke it, to preserve it. But among themselves they never preserve meat. I haven’t seen another Amazonian group that doesn’t salt or smoke meat routinely. The Pirahãs consume everything as soon as it is hunted or gathered. They preserve nothing for themselves (leftovers are eaten until they are gone, even if the meat begins to turn rancid). Baskets and food are short-term projects.
One reason I find Pirahã views of food interesting is that the subject seems less important in some sense to them than it is in my own culture. Obviously they have to eat to live. And they enjoy eating. Whenever there is food available in the village, they eat it all. But life is full of priorities for all of us, and food is ranked differently by different peoples and different societies. The Pirahãs have talked to me about why they don’t hunt or fish some days when they are hungry. Instead, they might play tag or play with my wheelbarrow, or lie around and talk.
“Why aren’t you fishing?” I asked.
“Today we will just stay home,” someone answered.
“Aren’t you hungry?”
“Pirahãs aren’t eating every day. Hiatíihí hi tigisáaikoí” (Pirahãs are hard). “Americano kóhoibaai. Hiaitiihi hi kohoaihiaba” (Americans eat a lot. Pirahãs eat little).
Pirahãs consider hunger a useful way to toughen themselves. Missing a meal or two, or even going without eating for a day, is taken in stride. I have seen people dance for three days with only brief breaks, not hunting, fishing, or gathering—and without any stockpiled food.
How much non-Pirahãs eat relative to Pirahãs is made obvious by Pirahã reactions to food consumption when they visit the city. Pirahãs in the city for the first time are always surprised by Western eating habits, especially the custom of eating three meals a day.
For their first meal outside of the village, most Pirahãs eat greedily—large quantities of proteins and starch. For the second meal they eat the same. By the third meal they begin to show frustration. They look puzzled. Often they ask, “Are we eating again?” Their own practice of eating food when it is available until it is gone now conflicts with the circumstances in which food is always available and never gone. Often after a visit to the city of three to six weeks, a Pirahã will return as much as thirty pounds overweight to the village, rolls of fat on their belly and thighs. But within a month or less, they’re back to normal weight. The average Pirahã man or woman weighs between 100 and 125 pounds and stands five feet to five feet four inches tall. They are lean and tough. Some of the men remind me of Tour de France cyclists in their fitness. The women tend to carry a bit more weight than men, but are also fit and strong.
Pirahãs eat fish, bananas, wild game, grubs, Brazil nuts, electric eels, otters, caimans, insects, rats—any sort of protein, oil, starch, sugar, or other foodstuff they can hunt, fish, or gather from their environment—though they avoid reptiles and amphibians, for the most part. Their diet is perhaps 70 percent fish, fresh from the Maici, often mixed with farinha (which the Pirahãs have learned to make over the years from contact with outsiders) and washed down with clear Maici River water.
Because different fish can be caught at different times of the day and night, Pirahã men can be found out fishing at any time. This means that there is less differentiation between day and night, aside from visibility. A Pirahã man is as likely to be found fishing at 3 a.m. as at 3 p.m. or 6 a.m. I have many times traveled the river at night and shined my spotlight at favorite fishing spots to see Pirahã men sitting in their canoes catching fish. One method of fishing at night is to shine a flashlight into the water to attract fish and then arrow them. Four to six hours per day will usually supply a family with enough protein for the twenty-four-hour period. But if there are sons in the family of sufficient age, then the males will rotate the fishing responsibilities on different days. If someone catches fish at 3 a.m., then that is when it will be eaten. Everyone will get up to eat as soon as it is brought in.
Gathering, which is mainly the women’s job, takes perhaps twelve hours per week for a family of four, a fairly typical family size among the Pirahãs. Gathering and fishing together, then, takes about fifty-two hours per week, divided among father, mother, and children (and grandparents on occasion), so that no one needs to spend more than fifteen to twenty hours per week “working”—though these activities are enjoyable to the Pirahãs and hardly fit any Western concept of labor.
The people also rely on imported machetes for butchering, building, making bows and arrows, digging manioc out of the ground, and so on. They trade for these when possible. They gather machetes, files, hoes, and axes at the beginning of each dry season so that they can clear and plant their fields with manioc. Manioc, one of the most widely consumed foods in the world, is indigenous to the Amazon and is an ideal source of starch. It grows as long as it is in the ground, meaning that an abandoned field a couple of years old can harbor manioc tubers in excess of three feet in length. Manioc contains cyanide, so consuming the raw tuber is fatal, and bugs and animals avoid it. Only humans can eat it because it requires an elaborate process of soaking, draining, and straining to get rid of most of the cyanide.
Preparing and planting fields is a rela
tively new development, one that Steve Sheldon worked hard to introduce. But tilling the fields relies on the possession of foreign tools, which the Pirahãs have no way of acquiring in most villages. I noticed that in spite of how important these tools are to them, the Pirahãs do not take good care of them. Children throw new tools in the river; people leave the tools in the fields; and often they trade tools away for manioc meal when outside traders make their way in.
A pattern was emerging: they had no method for food preservation, neglected tools, and made only disposable baskets. This seemed to indicate that lack of concern for the future was a cultural value. It certainly wasn’t laziness, because the Pirahãs work very hard.
I was fascinated that things as important and difficult to come by as tools were treated so cavalierly by the Pirahãs. After all, the only way for them to acquire goods from the outside world is by collecting jungle produce and bartering with the riverboat traders. Only a few villages are able to do this, because no traders travel very far up the Maici—there are too few natural products to make it worth their while. So other Pirahã groups trade with the Pirahãs with the tools and these implements make their way eventually to all the villages along the Maici.
There were many other aspects of Pirahã material culture that supported my growing belief that planning for the future is less important for the Pirahãs than enjoying each day as it comes. As a result they invest no more effort in something than is necessary for minimal function.
Pirahãs take naps (fifteen minutes to two hours at the extremes) during the day and night. There is loud talking in the village all night long. Consequently, it is often very difficult for outsiders to sleep well among the Pirahãs. I believe that the Pirahãs’ advice not to sleep because there are snakes is advice that they literally follow—sleeping too soundly in the jungle can be dangerous. The Pirahãs warned me about snoring, for example. “Jaguars will think a pig is nearby and come to eat you,” they told me cheerfully.
When I tell people about the simplicity of the Pirahãs’ material culture, they often become curiously concerned. After all, we define success in industrialized cultures at least partially as the ongoing improvement of our technology. But the Pirahãs show no such improvement, nor a desire for it.
How does it happen that Pirahã culture is so materially simple? Some people have suggested to me that their culture may be the result of the trauma of contact with European cultures in the eighteenth century. It is true that European contact with native peoples of the Americas, whether indirect (as with the transmission of disease or the acquisition of trade items) or direct (face-to-face), was traumatic for most indigenous peoples. In many cases this trauma led to cultural disintegration and loss of knowledge and cultural specializations and marginalization of whole populations. It would be a serious error to suppose that a cultural trait produced by this sort of “contact trauma” fairly reflected a natural state of the culture.
On the other hand, even if such trauma were responsible for cultural change, after a certain amount of time we would have to describe the culture in its current state. England’s current state is undoubtedly a result of earlier stages, but it can no longer be described in terms of the code of chivalry. The evidence from records of the Mura and Pirahã for nearly three hundred years since contact was first made in 1714 strongly supports the conclusion that Pirahã culture has changed little since contact with Europeans. Curt Nimuendaju, for example, in his paper “The Mura and Pirahã,” concludes:
[The Pirahã tribe] has evidently always occupied its present habitat between lat. 6°25′ and 7°10′ S., along the lower Maicy river. . . . The Pirahã have remained the least acculturated Mura tribe, but they are known only through a short word list and unpublished notes obtained by the author during several brief contacts in 1922, when efforts were being made to pacify the Parintintin. (Handbook of South American Indians [U.S. Department of State and Cooper Square Publishers, 1963], pp. 266–67)
Nimuendaju goes on to discuss several aspects of Pirahã material culture, citing older sources as well, all of which corroborate his contemporary findings, which are identical for the most part to my own.
Not everything needs to be linked to specific cultural values, though. Pirahã clothes—or lack thereof—are also simple, but of course in the Amazonian heat, not much commentary is needed to explain why people use minimal covering on their bodies.
In addition to the possessions and artifacts mentioned, a Pirahã family will usually have an aluminum pot or two for cooking, perhaps a spoon, a couple of knives, one or two other small artifacts from the outside world, and an indigenous handheld cotton spinner.
This book could have been called The Water People, since the river is so vital to their social and physical lives. Pirahã villages are as close to the river as they can build them. In the dry season (piiáiso, “shallow water”), when large beaches of soft white sand emerge from the receding Maici River, they move their settlements to the largest of the beaches, where they sleep directly on the sand with little or no shelter at all, except for an xaitaíi-ií or two for infants during the day. At this time of year, when food is plentiful and the nights are for the most part colder than in the rainy season, the entire community (swelling to fifty to one hundred people on a single beach) sleeps and eats together, although family members sleep near one another at night.
Pirahã villages can sustain greater numbers in the dry season because there is less water and hence a higher concentration of fish in what remains of the river. For Indians who live deeper in the jungle, the dry season is a time of hunger because the game leave the central forest in search of water. For Indians like the Pirahãs who live on the banks of major rivers, the dry season is a time of plenty.
I remember once coming upon a group of Pirahãs on a beach. Just downriver from the beach was a tree leaning over the water, anchored to the bank by a few roots that had not yet been torn loose. The trunk was perhaps one foot above the water. A Pirahã man, Xahoaogií, was nearby. I thought that the leaves on the tree looked as though something heavy had pressed on them. I had an idea.
“Who sleeps here?” I asked.
“I do,” he responded sheepishly.
Apparently he had no fear of falling into the river from a bed only eight inches wide. No fear of anacondas, caimans, or other animals that could easily have reached up and bitten him or pulled him off into the river.
In the rainy season (piioábaíso, “deep water”), villagers distribute themselves by nuclear families, each family occupying its own house. As I noticed during my first day in the village, the houses in the rainy season are built in a line along the river, well hidden in jungle growth, with houses usually ten to fifty paces apart. These rainy season villages are smaller than summer villages, usually consisting of one elderly couple and their adult sons or daughters, along with their spouses and children. Houses of a village need not be on the same side of the river and occasionally close relations build their houses on opposite banks.
Ritual is a set of prescribed actions with symbolic significance for the culture. Pirahã culture is remarkable to some Westerners, as indeed it was to me early on in my life among them, for its relative lack of ritual. There are areas where we might expect ritual behavior, but we do not find clear cases of it.
When someone dies, he or she is buried. The Pirahãs never abandon bodies of deceased Pirahãs to the elements, but always bury them. This is an area where we can expect some ritual, though there is little that we can describe with this term here. I have witnessed several deaths among them. There are some loosely followed traditions surrounding burial, but no ritual. Occasionally, the dead are buried in a sitting position with many of their belongings placed beside them (never more than a dozen or so small objects, since the Pirahãs accumulate so little materially in the course of their lives). Often they bury their dead in a prone position. Very rarely, if there are boards and nails (left by a river trader or by me), they might try to make a Western-style coffin. I
have only seen them try to make a coffin once, for a young baby, when a Brazilian river trader happened to be present when the baby died.
If the deceased is large, he or she will more likely be buried sitting because this requires less digging (according to the Pirahãs themselves). The dead are buried almost immediately. One or two close male relatives will usually dig the grave, preferring spots near the bank of the river, with the effect that in a couple of years the grave has been washed away by erosion. The corpse is placed in the hole. Then, after the possessions are added, green sticks are crisscrossed above the body, securely wedged into the hole. Over these are placed banana leaves or similar broad leaves. Then the grave is filled with dirt. Rarely, in imitation of Brazilian graves they have seen, they will place a cross, with carvings that imitate the writing they have observed on Brazilian crosses.
Most aspects of burials are subject to variation, however, and I have not seen any two burials exactly alike. The ad hoc nature of the burials, plus the fact that they are a logical solution to the indelicacy of leaving a rotting corpse above ground, leads me to avoid interpreting them as ritualistic, though others might disagree.
Don't Sleep, There are Snakes Page 10