Don't Sleep, There are Snakes

by Everett, Daniel L.

  But this thatch problem turned out to be the beginning of my entry into the real world of the Pirahãs, the jungle, where my evaluation of them would become more positive. I would come to see them as one of the most resourceful and clever groups of survivalists anywhere in the world. As I saw them in the jungle, I came to realize that the village was just their drawing room, a place to relax. And you can’t understand people just watching them at leisure. The jungle and the river are the Pirahãs’ office, their workshop, their atelier, and their playground.

  Upon seeing the condition of my roof, I asked the Pirahãs if they would help me gather more thatch for the roof and more paxiuba palm wood for patching holes in my floor (where holes had been burned by Pirahãs building cooking fires in our house). I had not been deep into the jungle yet, in spite of living for months among the Pirahãs. So I had unknowingly missed opportunities to get to know them much better than I currently did.

  To be a good linguist requires not only hours at the desk but also many hours with the people. I decided to go with the Pirahãs to the jungle for roof materials, in order to help them, learn from them, and participate in their activities.

  So I prepared to set out. I hooked two full, one-quart military surplus canteens to my military surplus gunbelt, as well as a long Mexican “Acapulco” machete. The five Pirahã men, carrying nothing but one ax and a few machetes among them, laughed at my long sleeves, long pants, boots, hat, canteens, and enormous machete. But off we went, down the path, my companions laughing and conversing, I clanging with every step, as canteens and machete banged into one another and I tried unsuccessfully not to jam the handle of the machete into my private parts as it bumped against tree trunks.

  After about thirty minutes, the jungle grew taller and darker, the brush less dense. The air became cooler. Mosquitoes began to buzz. And I heard more of my favorite Amazonian sound, the falsetto hwe hwioo of the screaming piha bird. Here I noticed a change in my traveling companions. The Pirahãs’ hands were folded across their chests, crossing each other like a large letter X, even as they walked at a pace that required me to jog occasionally. They wasted no space with their bodies. They walked lightly and surely.

  As we came to a stream, our way across was a lichen-covered log. The Pirahãs walked on it without a moment’s hesitation. I walked two feet out on the log, slipped, and fell into the stream. Coming out of it almost as fast as I had gone in (such streams have many dangerous creatures, such as stingrays, anacondas, and small caimans), scampering up the bank gracelessly, I found the trail and caught up. The Pirahãs acted as though they had barely noticed my fall—in any case it was my embarrassment and they were too kind to exacerbate it by offering to help. They laughed when I caught up, just to show me that it was no big deal, nothing to be ashamed of (of course, they would never have fallen, nor would any of their children, dogs, grandparents, or disabled). We came eventually to a stand of paxiuba. I helped chop the palm trunks. I noticed quickly that for all my size and strength, the Pirahãs cut more deeply with every swing. They were better with the ax, more efficient in their movements. I was soaking in perspiration and had already drained one of my canteens. The Pirahãs’ bodies were completely dry. They had drunk nothing at all.

  After the men agreed that we had all we could carry back in a single trip we tied the palm wood and thatch into bundles. We each then grabbed a bundle or two and began walking the several miles back to the village. The path had seemed obvious on the way out, but now I felt a bit uncertain of the direction and began to hold back, watching the Pirahãs carefully. They smiled and stopped. “You go at the head,” they snickered. “You take us back.” I tried. But I kept taking the wrong turn, getting us into exitless brush cul-de-sacs. This was very entertaining to the Pirahãs. In spite of the delays I was causing, they were quite happy to allow me to continue to lead. No one was in a hurry. As I found a more obvious main path, we settled into walking and my load began to weigh me down. With every step the palm wood on my back bumped against overhanging branches or tree trunks, and I tripped on exposed tree roots and slipped on slimy leaves in the path. I was winded and tired. I was surprised that the Pirahãs did not seem tired at all, however. In the village the Pirahã men avoided carrying heavy things. When I asked them for help in carrying boxes or barrels and such, they were always reluctant to respond. When they did help, they could barely lift things that I could carry with ease. I had just assumed that they were weak and lacked endurance. But I was wrong. They didn’t normally carry foreign objects and they didn’t like to display their ignorance of how to handle them. Nor did they particularly like me to ask them for help in what they considered my own work. Neither endurance nor energy had anything to do with it.

  As we walked, I realized that I was getting very tired and again perspiring profusely. I was wondering if I could make it back to the village with this load. My thoughts were interrupted by Kóxoí, who came up alongside of me, smiled, and then reached and took my bundle of palm wood onto his shoulder, adding it to his own load. “You don’t know how to carry this” was all he said. He was taking onto his shoulder perhaps fifty pounds extra. Fifty pounds is a heavy load when walking several miles down a narrow, jungle path surrounded by low-hanging vegetation. But he now carried at least one hundred pounds. And I knew he felt the weight. By working and sweating together, laughing at our own difficulties and errors, the Pirahãs and I cemented friendships through these jungle trips.

  Another aspect of Pirahã culture that I wanted to understand in my initial attempt to sketch their principal cultural values was coercion—how the Pirahã society got its members to do what it thought they should do.

  A widespread belief is that most American Indians have chiefs or other kinds of indigenous authority figures. This is incorrect. Many American Indian societies are by tradition egalitarian. The day-to-day lives of people in such societies, many more than is usually realized, are free of the influence of any leaders. There are various reasons for the misinformed notion that most indigenous peoples of the Americas naturally have monarchical structures.

  First, we tend to project the values and mechanisms of our own societies and ways of doing things onto other societies. Since it is difficult for us to imagine our own society without leaders of one sort or another, especially people with the power to enforce societal rules, perhaps it is also difficult for us to imagine that there are old and well-functioning societies without such rules.

  Second, the views of many Westerners are heavily influenced by Hollywood and other fictional depictions of these societies. Movies rarely portray Indian societies without the dynamic personalities of chiefs.

  Finally, and perhaps most important, Western societies prefer that American Indians have leaders that they can do business with. It is nearly impossible, for example, to gain access to Indian lands or even to cede lands to them legally without a representative. What has often happened, as in the Xingu region of Brazssil and elsewhere in the Americas, is that chiefs have been invented and vested with, in many cases, the artificial power to be the legal representatives of “their” people, in order to facilitate economic access to Indian possessions.

  One reason for the idea that all tribes have chiefs is the universal fact that societies entail control—and centralized control is easier for most people to understand than the kind of diffuse control and power that is found in many American Indian communities. Émile Durkheim, the French pioneer of sociology straddling the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wrote convincingly that coercion is fundamental to the constitution of society. The members of any society are bound together by group values and limits and the majority of a society’s members stay within the boundaries of their values (criminals and the insane being two of the more obvious counterexamples—the marginalized members of society, the transgressors).

  Well, the Pirahãs do constitute a society. Therefore, if Durkheim and other sociologists—indeed, common sense—are on the right track, then there has to be a way
to keep people in line, some way to assure uniformity of behavior. Such behavior, after all, is beneficial to society and to the individuals that constitute the society. It brings, among other things, security of expectations. So how does Pirahã society manifest coercion?

  There is no “official” coercion in Pirahã society—no police, courts, or chiefs. But it exists nonetheless. The principal forms I have observed are ostracism and spirits. If someone’s behavior is abnormal in a way that bothers the majority, he or she will be ostracized by degrees. An older man, Hoaaípi, whom I met at the beginning of my career among the Pirahãs, was unusual in that he and his wife lived alone, separated from the other Pirahãs by a considerable distance. When he paddled down to see me the first of the two times I ever saw him, he came without Western goods, in a kagahóí rather than a Brazilian canoe, wearing only a loincloth. This meant that he was outside the normal relationships of trade and social intercourse that almost all Pirahãs participate in with one another. When he arrived, he was stared at more than I was. And he had a fresh arrow wound from another Pirahã, Tíigíi. He didn’t want medicine for the arrow wound, but he did want some coffee and sugar, which I happily gave him, as a fair exchange for being able to meet him. Although he seemed like a sweet old man to me, the Pirahãs did not want him around. They said that he was mean. I have no idea to this day what they meant exactly, but I do know that he was the first, but not the last, Pirahã I saw who had been ostracized.

  Another effective form of ostracism, much less dramatic but more common, is to exclude someone from food sharing for a while. Such exclusion can last for a day or a few days, but rarely longer. I had many men come to me to say that so-and-so was mad at them for one reason or another so they couldn’t use a canoe to fish, or that no one would share with them. They next either asked me to intervene, which I did not, or asked for food, which I often gave them, trying to avoid any impression of getting involved in a village dispute.

  Spirits can tell the village what it should not have done or what it should not do. Spirits can single out individuals or simply talk to the group as a whole. Pirahãs listen carefully and often follow the exhortations of the kaoáíbógí. A spirit might say something like “Don’t want Jesus. He is not Pirahã,” or “Don’t hunt downriver tomorrow,” or things that are commonly shared values, such as “Don’t eat snakes.” Through spirits, ostracism, food-sharing regulation, and so on, Pirahã society disciplines itself. It has very little coercion by the standards of many other societies, but it seems to have just enough to control its members’ aberrant behavior.

  My children’s experience living as a minority within an Amazonian culture taught them to “see” the world in a different way and contributed to their development. When they first saw the Pirahãs, all my children exclaimed that they were the ugliest people that they had ever seen. Pirahãs rarely bathe with soap (they don’t have any), the women don’t brush their hair (they lack brushes), and the average Pirahã child’s skin is encrusted with dirt, snot, and blood. But after they had come to know the Pirahãs, my children’s attitudes changed. Almost a year later, when a visiting Brazilian military officer commented that the Pirahãs were ugly, my children got furious. “How can anyone call the Pirahãs ugly?” they wondered. They had forgotten their own judgments and now thought of the Pirahãs as beautiful people. They learned to think simultaneously like Americans, Pirahãs, and Brazilians. Shannon and Kristene made friends quickly and began to leave early in the mornings with Pirahã girls their age, when they didn’t have study assignments, and canoe up or down the Maici, returning only in late afternoon with berries, nuts, and other jungle delicacies.

  My children also learned about the Pirahãs’ ability to cope with danger from nature. Shannon and I once went with the men to hunt an anaconda. Kóhoibiíihíai, a good friend as well as language instructor, asked us to travel with him and his brother, Poióí, to a spot about four minutes upriver in my motorboat. When we got there, he told me to cut the engine so he could paddle us near the bank. I did what he asked and Kóhoi and Poióí both paddled silently to a spot just beneath some overhanging trees on the right bank of the river. Kóhoi turned to me and Shannon and asked, “Do you see its hole there just under the water?”

  “No,” we replied. I didn’t see a thing.

  “Watch!” he said.

  At this, Kóhoi took his bow, like all Pirahã bows about two yards in length, and probed under the water for a few seconds.

  “That will make it mad.” He giggled. “See it?” he asked.

  “No,” I responded. Neither Shannon nor I could see a thing other than murky water, since it was still the rainy season.

  “See the dirt!” Kóhoi exclaimed. “It’s moving now.”

  I did see a small swirl of mud in the water. Before I could remark, Kóhoi had stood in the boat and drawn his bow. Thwang! Thwang! Two arrows were fired into the water within a second of each other.

  Almost immediately a ten-foot-long anaconda burst through the surface of the river, thrashing, with long Pirahã arrows through its head and body.

  “Help me pull it in,” Kóhoi said to me and Poióí, who was grinning widely.

  “What are we going to do with this?” I asked him, even as I pulled on the snake’s body, trying to grab its tail to help hoist it aboard, while Shannon stared openmouthed. I knew that the Pirahãs don’t eat anacondas, so I couldn’t figure out why we were putting this writhing mass in my boat.

  “We’re going to take it to scare the women,” Kóhoi said, laughing.

  We took it back to the village. Once we got back, I noticed the snake start to move again. So I beat it over the head with a paddle to make sure it was dead, breaking the paddle in the process. This caused Kóhoi and Poióí to laugh out loud. Imagine worrying about a snake with an arrow in its head. Then, after removing the arrows, we placed the snake near the bank where the women went to bathe.

  “That will scare them!” Kóhoi and Poióí laughed as they ran up the bank.

  I moored the boat and removed the outboard, and Shannon and I climbed the bank to the village. Shannon ran ahead to tell her mother and siblings what we had seen.

  The attempt to scare the women didn’t work, though. They had seen us coming with the snake, and as soon as we got up the bank, the women ran down and pulled the snake out of the water, holding it up and laughing.

  Pirahã humor like this works because of their strong sense of community. They can show sarcasm, play practical jokes like the anaconda at the river’s edge, and so on, because they are knitted together tightly in a community of trust (not complete trust—there is, after all, stealing and unfaithfulness—but mainly trust that each member of the community will understand each other member of the community and share the same values).

  And this sense of community, xahaigí, is built on the nuclear family, where most values and the language are first learned. Families are central to Pirahã society. Every one of the Pirahãs is, in a sense, a brother or sister of all other Pirahãs. But their closest ties by far are with their nuclear family.

  7 Nature and the Immediacy of Experience

  The Pirahãs’ relationship to nature is fundamental to understanding them. Understanding this relationship is as important to gaining a full picture of their values and overall culture as understanding their material culture and their sense of community. As I began to study how the Pirahãs relate to nature in more detail, I discovered that concepts and words for the environment help to define their perspective on how nature fits together and how it is related to human beings. Two terms, bigí and xoí, are telling in this regard and help us comprehend the Pirahã worldview.

  I learned something about bigí one day just after a rain. First, I recorded the phrase bigí xihoíxaagá as a description of wet or muddy ground. Then I pointed up to the cloudy sky to get the phrase for cloudy sky. The speaker just repeated bigí xihoíxaagá—the same phrase he had just given me for muddy ground. I thought I must be missing something. Ground an
d sky are two very different things. So I tried again with several other speakers. Everyone gave me the same answer. It is possible, of course, that I was getting a nonresponsive answer from all my teachers, along the lines of “You are an idiot” or “You’re pointing.”But I was fairly confident that this was not the case.

  These concepts are important in various ways. Especially interesting is their contribution to our understanding of sickness among the Pirahãs. I learned this early on when Kóhoibiíihíai and I were talking about his daughter, Xíbií. I was trying to explain to him why she had malaria. I was starting to talk about mosquitoes and blood.

  “No, no,” Kóhoi stopped me in midsentence. “Xíbií is sick because she stepped on a leaf.”

  “What? I stepped on a leaf. I’m not sick,” I answered, puzzled by his account of Xíbií’s malaria.

  “A leaf from above,” he said, increasing the enigma for me.

  “What leaf from above?”

  “A bloodless one from the upper bigí came to the lower bigí and left a leaf. When the Pirahãs step on leaves from the upper bigí, it makes them sick. They are like our leaves. But they make you sick.”

  “How do you know it is a leaf from the upper bigí?” I inquired.

  “Because when you step on it you get sick.”

  I questioned Kóhoi further about this and then spoke with several other Pirahãs about it. It turns out that for the Pirahãs the universe is like a layer cake, each layer marked by a boundary called bigí. There are worlds above the sky and worlds beneath the ground. I recognized this as similar, though not identical, to the beliefs of the Yanomami, who also believe in a layered universe.