Don't Sleep, There are Snakes

by Everett, Daniel L.

  Anyway, I felt the weight of the Bible and so I told Shannon, “OK, no spanking here. Meet me at the end of the airstrip and pick another switch along the way. I will meet you there in five minutes!”

  As Shannon started out of the house, Pirahãs asked her where she was going.

  “My dad is going to hit me on the airstrip,” she replied with a mix of irritation and glee, knowing what the effect of her words would be.

  Pirahã children and adults came running behind me when I left. I was defeated. No more spankings around the Pirahãs. Pirahã mores won out. Shannon was smug and delighted with her victory.

  What effect does a Pirahã upbringing have on a child? Pirahã teenagers, like all teenagers, are giggly and can be very squirrelly and rude. They commented that my ass was wide. They farted close to the table as soon as we were sitting down to eat, then laughed like Jerry Lewis. Apparently the profound weirdness of teenagers is universal.

  But I did not see Pirahã teenagers moping, sleeping in late, refusing to accept responsibility for their own actions, or trying out what they considered to be radically new approaches to life. They in fact are highly productive and conformist members of their community in the Pirahã sense of productivity (good fishermen, contributing generally to the security, food needs, and other aspects of the physical survival of the community). One gets no sense of teenage angst, depression, or insecurity among the Pirahã youth. They do not seem to be searching for answers. They have them. And new questions rarely arise.

  Of course, this homeostasis can stifle creativity and individuality, two important Western values. If one considers cultural evolution to be a good thing, then this may not be something to emulate, since cultural evolution likely requires conflict, angst, and challenge. But if your life is unthreatened (so far as you know) and everyone in your society is satisfied, why would you desire change? How could things be improved? Especially if the outsiders you came into contact with seemed more irritable and less satisfied with life than you. I asked the Pirahãs once during my early missionary years if they knew why I was there. “You are here because this is a beautiful place. The water is pretty. There are good things to eat here. The Pirahãs are nice people.” That was and is the Pirahãs’ perspective. Life is good. Their upbringing, everyone learning early on to pull their own weight, produces a society of satisfied members. That is hard to argue against.

  It is interesting to me that in spite of a strong sense of community, there is almost no community-approved coercion of village members. It is unusual for a Pirahã to order another Pirahã about, even for a parent to order about a child. This happens occasionally, but it is generally frowned upon or discouraged, as indicated by the remarks, expressions, and gestures of others watching. I cannot recall having seen an adult intervene to stop another adult from violating community norms.

  One day I decided to ask one of my main language teachers, Kaaboogí, if he would work with me. I walked to his house. Coming up the path, I noticed that Kaaboogí’s brother Kaapási had been drinking cachaça. I heard Kaapási yell for Kaaboogí’s little white dog to stop barking. A few steps later, only fifty feet from Kaapási’s hut, I saw him raise his shotgun and shoot his brother’s dog in the stomach. The dog yelped and jumped, bleeding profusely, its intestines hanging from the hole torn in its abdomen. It fell to the ground twitching and whimpering. Kaaboogí ran to it and picked it up. His eyes watered as the dog died in his arms. I feared that he would shoot one of Kaapási’s dogs or attack Kaapási himself.

  The village stared at Kaapási and Kaaboogí—quiet except for the yelping of dogs. Kaaboogí just sat holding his dog, tears in his eyes.

  “Are you going to do anything to Kaapási?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” said Kaaboogí, puzzled.

  “I mean, what are you going to do to him for shooting your dog?”

  “I will do nothing. I won’t hurt my brother. He acted like a child. He did a bad thing. But he is drunk and his head is not working well. He should not have hurt my dog. It is like my child.”

  Even when provoked, as Kaaboogí was now, the Pirahãs were able to respond with patience, love, and understanding, in ways rarely matched in any other culture I have encountered. The Pirahãs are not pacifists. They are by no means perfect. But peace is valued among them, at least peace with other Pirahãs. They see themselves as a family—a family in which every member feels obliged to protect and care for every other member. This is not to say that they never violate their own norms. All groups do. But this simply highlights the norm of helping one another and its relative rarity cross-culturally.

  At the same time, the Pirahãs are individualistic with regard to their own and their family’s survival. They and their family come first. They won’t let another Pirahã starve to death or suffer if they can help, but the person receiving help has to obviously need it—to be suffering from some physical ailment or to be too young or old to care for himself and to be able to be helped (not considered too far gone to help, for example). Otherwise, each one carries his own load. If a man cannot provide food and shelter for his wife and children, his family will likely abandon him for a better provider. If a woman is lazy and won’t get firewood, manioc from the jungle garden, or nuts from the forest, she will be left, at least as soon as her age begins to erase her beauty or fertility.

  But there is still a sense of belonging that permeates the values of all Pirahãs. The Pirahãs see immediately that outsiders lack this quality. They see Brazilians cheat and mistreat other Brazilians. They see American parents spank their children. Most puzzling to them, they have heard that Americans fight huge battles to kill large numbers of other peoples and that Americans and Brazilians even kill other Americans and Brazilians.

  Kóhoi once said, “My father told me that he saw his father go to kill other Indians. But we do not do this now. It is bad.” There are other interesting concepts in Pirahã culture, though some are less momentous than their view of violence and war.

  For example, marriage and other relations in Pirahã are partially subsumed to the concept of kagi. This term was very hard for me to nail down. If a Pirahã sees a plate of rice and beans (that either I or a Brazilian trader or government worker has brought into the village, since they do not grow these themselves), they might call it rice with kagi. If I showed up in a Pirahã village with my children, the Pirahãs might say, “Here’s Dan with kagi.” Or the Pirahãs might use the same term if I had showed up with my wife: “Dan arrived with kagi.” If a person goes to hunt with their dogs, they would say, “He went hunting with kagi.” So what on earth does kagi mean? And how is it related to marriage? Well, although no easy translation works, it means something like “expected associate.” The expectation and the association are determined by cultural familiarity and cultural values. Your spouse is the person that by habit is expected to be with you. Like rice and beans, hunter and dog, parent and child, marriage is a correlation between culturally linked beings. There is no cultural pressure, however, to keep the same kagi.

  Again, couples initiate cohabitation and procreation without ceremony. If they are unattached at the time, they simply begin to live together in the same house. If they are married, they first disappear from the village for two to four days, while their former spouses call for and search for them. Upon their return, they begin a new household or, if it was just a “fling,” return to their previous spouses. There is almost never any retaliation from the cuckolded spouses against those with whom their spouses have affairs. Relations between men and women and boys and girls, whether married or not, are always cordial and often marked by light to heavy flirting.

  Sexually it is the same. So long as children are not forced or hurt, there is no prohibition against their participating in sex with adults. I remember once talking to Xisaoxoi, a Pirahã man in his late thirties, when a nine- or ten-year-old girl was standing beside him. As we talked, she rubbed her hands sensually over his chest and back and rubbed his crotch area through hi
s thin, worn nylon shorts. Both were enjoying themselves.

  “What’s she doing?” I asked superfluously.

  “Oh, she’s just playing. We play together. When she’s big she will be my wife” was his nonchalant reply—and, indeed, after the girl went through puberty, they were married.

  Marriage itself among the Pirahãs, like marriage in all cultures, comes with sets of mores that are enforced in different ways. People often ask me, for example, how the Pirahãs deal with infidelity in marriage. So how would this couple, the relatively old man and the young girl, deal with infidelity? They would deal with it like other Pirahãs, in what I take to be a very civilized fashion.

  The solution or response to infidelity can even be humorous. One morning I walked over to my friend Kóhoibiíihíai’s home to ask him to teach me more of his language. As I approached his hut, everything looked pretty normal. His wife, Xíbaihóíxoi, was sitting up and he was lying down with his head in her lap.

  “Hey, can you help me learn Pirahã words today?” I inquired.

  He started to raise his head to answer. Then I noticed that Xíbaihóíxoi was holding him by the hair of his head. As he tried to raise his head, she jerked his head back by the hair, picked up a stick at her side and started whacking him irregularly on the top of his head, occasionally hitting him in the face. He laughed hard, but not too hard, because she jerked his hair every time he moved.

  “My wife won’t let me go anywhere,” he said, giggling.

  His wife was smirking but the grin disappeared right away and she struck him harder. Some of those whacks looked pretty painful to me. Kóhoi wasn’t in the best position to talk, so I left and found Xahoábisi, another good language teacher. He could work with me, he said.

  As we walked back to my house together, I asked, “So what is going on with Kóhoibiíihíai? Xíbaihóíxoi is holding down his head and hitting him with a stick.”

  “Oh, he was playing with another woman last night,” Xahoábisi chortled. “So this morning his woman is mad at him. He can’t go anywhere today.”

  The fact that Kóhoi, a strong man and a fearless hunter, would lie like that all day and allow his wife to whack him at will (three hours later I revisited them and they were in the same position) was clearly partly voluntary penance. But it was partly a culturally prescribed remedy. I have since seen other men endure the same treatment.

  By the next day, all seemed well. I didn’t hear of Kóhoi playing around with women again for quite a while after that. A nifty way to solve marital problems, I thought. It doesn’t always work, of course. There are divorces (without ceremony) among the Pirahãs. But this form of punishment for straying is effective. The woman can express her anger tangibly and the husband can show her he is sorry by letting her bang away on his head at will for a day. It is important to note that this involves no shouting or overt anger. The giggling, smirking, and laughter are all necessary components of the process, since anger is the cardinal sin among the Pirahãs. Female infidelity is also fairly common. When this happens the man looks for his wife. He may say something mean or threatening to the male who cuckolded him. But violence against anyone, children or adults, is unacceptable to the Pirahãs.

  Other observations of Pirahã sexuality were a bit more shocking to my Christian sensibilities, especially when they involved clashes between our culture and Pirahã values. One afternoon during our second family stay among the Pirahãs, I walked out of the back room of our split-wood and thatched-roof home on the Maici into the central area of the house, which had no walls and in practice belonged more to the Pirahãs than to us. Shannon was staring at two Pirahã men lying on the floor in front of her. They were laughing, with their shorts pulled down around their ankles, each grabbing the other’s genitals and slapping each other on the back, rolling about the floor. Shannon grinned at me when I walked in. As a product of sexophobic American culture, I was shocked. “Hey, don’t do that in front of my daughter!” I yelled indignantly.

  They stopped giggling and looked up at me. “Don’t do what?”

  “That, what you’re doing, grabbing each other by the penis.”

  “Oh,” they said, looking rather puzzled. “He doesn’t like to see us have fun with each other.” They pulled their pants up and, ever adaptable to new circumstances, changed the subject and asked me if I had any candy.

  I never really needed to tell Shannon or her siblings much about human reproduction, death, or other biological processes. They got a pretty good idea of all that from watching the Pirahãs.

  Pirahã families are more familiar territory for Westerners. Parents and children are openly affectionate—hugging, touching, smiling, playing, chatting, and laughing with one another. This is one of the most immediately perceivable traits of Pirahã culture. I have always been challenged to be a more patient person, watching the Pirahãs. Parents do not strike their children or order them about, except under duress. Infants and toddlers (until about four years of age or the time they are weaned—when active life begins) are pampered and given much open affection.

  Mothers wean their children when a new child is born—usually when the previous offspring is three or four years old. Weaning is traumatic for the child for at least three reasons: loss of adult attention, hunger, and work. Everyone must work; everyone must contribute to the life of the village. The child recently stopped from nursing will have to enter this adult world of work. In addition to talking and laughter, one frequently hears the sound of children screaming and crying at night. This is almost always caused by weaning. Once when a visiting doctor was with me among the Pirahãs, he woke me up.

  “Dan, that baby sounds like it’s in pain and very ill.”

  “It’s all right,” I assured him, and tried to get back to sleep.

  “No, it’s not all right! It’s sick. If you won’t go with me, I’ll go alone,”he insisted.

  “Fine,” I said, “let’s go see it.” But I thought that this doctor was nosing around when he ought to be sleeping.

  We walked out to the hut where the baby was screaming. He shone his flashlight in. A little boy of about three was sitting up screaming, while his parents and siblings apparently slept.

  “How can they sleep through that racket?” the doctor asked.

  “They’re only pretending to be asleep,” I responded. “They don’t want to talk to us right now about this child.”

  “Well, I want to make sure he’s OK,” the doctor insisted. “Ask them if he is.”

  I called to Xooi, the father. “Xooi, is the child sick?”

  No answer.

  “They don’t want to talk,” I said.

  “Ask them, please!” the doctor demanded. He was pissing me off.

  “Xooi, is the child sick?” I repeated.

  With exasperation in every movement and syllable, Xooi looked up at me and said gruffly, “No, he wants to suck his mother’s tit.”

  I translated.

  “He’s not sick?” the doctor asked, unsure as to whether to believe Xooi or not.

  “No, he isn’t. Let’s go to bed.”

  We returned to our hammocks.

  The weaned child is no longer the baby, no longer treated as special compared to other children. Instead of sleeping next to Mom, the child stays with its siblings a few significant feet away from the parents on the sleeping platform. Newly weaned toddlers experience hunger, like all Pirahãs except nursing babies. But, again, minor hunger is not considered a hardship for the Pirahãs. When children first enter this adult world they are shocked.

  The child is no longer hand-fed and pampered by its parents. Within just a few years, boys are expected to fish while fathers, mothers, and daughters work in the field or go gathering or hunting.

  Children’s lives are not unpleasant. They play with toys if they have them and they especially like dolls and soccer balls (though no one in the village knows how to play soccer—they just like the balls). Kóxoí and Xiooitaóhoagí impressed me because they were the only pa
rents I knew who always asked for toys for their children when I asked if I could bring them something from the city. The people can make spinning tops, whistles, toy canoes, and carved dolls, but they never do unless asked by outsiders. It isn’t clear, therefore, that these objects are truly indigenous to the Pirahãs. They could be borrowed or merely the vestiges of older practices now fading out of current relevance.

  There is one exception to this, however. Frequently, after a plane has just visited the village, the Pirahã boys collect balsa wood and make model planes.

  Everyone loves the planes that visit them from time to time. They have seen three types that I am aware of in the history of the people: an amphibious floatplane, a pontoon floatplane, and a Cessna 206. The amphibious aircraft lands on its belly in the river and its single engine is placed above the cabin. The other two have single engines installed at the front of the aircraft. When the planes come the boys make balsa-wood models of them, carved handily with machetes and occasionally painted red with urucum dye (a seed pod with red seeds and red oil inside) or, more rarely, painted with the model maker’s blood, from a thumb or finger purposely punctured.

  I have observed boys from villages that did not actually see the plane show up a couple of days later with model planes, having learned of the visit from boys that did witness the plane’s visit and based their models on the models of the eyewitnesses. These models, usually twelve to twenty-four inches long and five or six inches high, are built according to an interesting accumulated experience. The models usually have two propellers, rather than the single propeller of the monomotor planes that are the only ones that have ever visited them. One propeller is placed above the cabin section and the other propeller at the nose of the model. This is an amalgam of the two types of planes that the Pirahãs have seen.

  My investigations into Pirahã culture required spending long periods of time among them. Perhaps our longest visit was in 1980, when we spent almost the entire year in the village. At the beginning of this period, I saw that the palm-thatched roof on our large hut and our palm-wood floor needed to be replaced. It was in bad shape because while we were away from the village the Pirahãs liked to sleep in the loft where I had my study. They enjoy stargazing, so they would push holes in the thatch, ruining the roof.