Don't Sleep, There are Snakes

by Everett, Daniel L.

  27. Xigíxai xí koabáobáátaío. Xaí koabáobíigá.

  OK, then, it thus came to die. Then it was coming to die.

  28. Xaí Kaapási, xigía xapáobísáihí.

  Then Kaapási, OK, he shot it.

  29. Xaí sagía koábáobáí. Xisagía sitoáopáó kahápitá.

  Then the animal thus changed and was dying. The animal stood up. It went away again.

  30. Koábáobáísaí.

  Its dying was lingering.

  31. Ti xagíá kapaígáobítahaí. Xitoíhió xíáihíxaí.

  I therefore shot it again, breaking its elbow.

  32. Ti í kapaígáobítahaí. Xaí ti giá kapáobíso.

  Then I shot it again. I then shot it again then.

  33. Koabái. Koabáigáobihaá xaí. Xisaitaógi.

  It came to die. It came to die. It had thick fur [a Pirahã way of saying that it was tough].

  34. Xí koaií. Hi abaátaíogíisai. Xisaitaógi.

  It intended thus to die. He did not move. It is really tough.

  35. Koaí hi abikwí. Gái xáowíí, xáowí gíxai, kobaihiabikwí.

  He had not died. [I said] “That foreigner, you [Dan] the foreigner, have not seen [a jaguar] dead.”

  36. Xaí pixái xí kaapíkwí pixáixííga.

  Then right away, [I] moved it, right then.

  37. Xaí báóhoipaí so Xisaitaógi sowá kobai.

  Then cats, Xisaitaógi [Steve Sheldon] has already seen.

  38. Xakí kagáíhiáí, so kopaíai, Xisaitaógi hi í kobaihiabiigá.

  Here jaguars [he has seen], only panthers Steve Sheldon has not yet seen.

  39. Pixái soxóá hiaitíihí kapíkwí pixáixííga.

  Now, the Pirahãs have just now shot [a jaguar], right now.

  40. Xaí hiaitíihí baaiowí. Baóhoipaí Kopaíaihi. Xigíai.

  Then the Pirahãs are intensely afraid of panthers. OK, I’m done.

  This story about the panther that Kaaboogí killed is interesting in many respects. We know that it is a complete story because it starts by introducing the principal character immediately, the jaguar. And it ends with xigíai, a Pirahã word meaning literally “it is combined,” and used generally for “OK.” In this situation it means that the story is finished.

  To non-Pirahã ears, the story can seem massively repetitive in many places, as in the number of lines at the beginning that repeat that the panther killed the dog. This repetition has a rhetorical purpose, however. First, it expresses excitement. But it also serves to ensure that the hearer can tell what is going on in spite of the fact that there is a lot of noise in the background, including many other Pirahãs talking simultaneously. And the repetition is also “stylish” for the Pirahãs—they like stories that have lots of repetition.

  “Killing the Panther” is a typical text in that it is about immediate experience. This is a crucial parameter circumscribing all Pirahã stories. After noticing that Pirahã stories are always about immediate experience, I learned a new word that turned out to be the key to understanding many of the facts that were so puzzling about the Pirahãs.

  The word is xibipíío (i-bi-PEE-o). The first time I remember hearing this word was in descriptions of the arrival of a hunter back from the jungle. As Xipoógi, perhaps the best Pirahã hunter, walked out of the jungle into the village, several Pirahãs exclaimed, “Xipoógi hi xibipíío xaboópai” (Xipoógi he xibipíío arrives).

  I next noticed the word when Kóhoibiíihíai arrived home in his canoe from a fishing trip downriver, just outside the mouth of the Maici, on the Marmelos River. Upon seeing him round the bend in the river and come into sight, a child yelled excitedly, “Kóhoibiíihíai is xibipíío arriving!”

  But I heard this expression most frequently when planes landed and took off from the village. The first time I heard it in this context, I woke up in the morning, excited to see the plane after several weeks with my family in the village. I yelled to Kóhoibiíihíai, “Hey Ko! The plane will be here when the sun is straight above us!” He shouted back from his hut, upriver from mine, “I like to see the plane!” Then he turned and bellowed out to the other Pirahãs of the village, “Dan says that the plane is coming today.” As noon approached, all the Pirahãs in the village began to listen. There were several false reports of the plane coming, mainly from children. “There it is!” they shouted, only to start giggling and admit that they hadn’t seen or heard anything. Finally, minutes before I heard the plane, a shout went up from almost the entire village simultaneously: “Gahióo, hi soxóá xaboópai” (The plane already comes). Then people ran to the nearest clearing and strained their eyes to try to be the first to see the plane as it appeared in the clouds. Everyone shouted almost simultaneously, “Here comes the plane! Gahióo xibipíío xaboópai.”

  When the plane left, they shouted a similar expression, “Gahióo xibipíío xopitaha,” as it disappeared over the horizon, heading back to Porto Velho.

  Such observations gave me an initial guess as to the word’s meaning. It meant something like “just now,” as in “He is just now arriving,” or “The plane is just now leaving.” This guess seemed to work pretty well, and I began to use the word in my own speech. Pirahãs appeared to understand what I was saying whenever I used the word.

  Then one night Xaikáibaí and Xabagi, an old man who had recently moved to our village from an upriver Pirahã village, came to my house. I had just extinguished my kerosene lamp a few minutes before their visit and didn’t want to bother with it again. So instead I switched on my flashlight. But while we were talking, the batteries of my flashlight began to go out. I went to the kitchen and got some matches, just as the batteries bit the dust. In the pitch-black night, I continued talking to Xaikáibaí and Xabagi. Xabagi suddenly dropped a couple of fishhooks that I had just given them. I used my matches to help us search for the precious fishhooks on the floor. The match began to flicker. The men commented, “The match is xibipíío-ing.” I heard this word used this way on another night about the flames of a campfire that were beginning to go out. In these contexts, the Pirahãs were not using the word as an adverb.

  Whoa! It doesn’t mean “just now,” I realized one afternoon. It is used to describe the situation in which an entity comes into sight or goes out of sight! So, I thought, when someone comes around a bend in the river, they are just coming into sight. And this explains why the Pirahãs use the word when things go out of sight too, like the plane disappearing on the horizon.

  I still felt that I was missing something, though. There must be a more general cultural concept that includes both coming into sight and its opposite, going out of sight. I recalled that xibipíío could be used to describe someone talking when he or she just became audible or just left audibility, as when I talked mornings on my two-way radio with SIL members in Porto Velho, letting them know that my family was all right, ordering supplies, and so on.

  Pirahãs overhearing me talking might say of a man’s voice coming over the radio for the first time that morning, “The foreign man is xibipíío talking.”

  When a canoe came around a bend in the river, whatever Pirahãs happened to be around the village at the time came running out to the edge of the bank to see who it was. This just seemed like natural curiosity to me about who might be coming to their village. But one morning as Kóhoibiíihíai was leaving to fish, I noticed that a group of children were giggling and staring at him as he paddled. At the precise moment that he disappeared around the bend, they all shouted in unison “Kóhoi xibipíío!” (Kóhoi disappeared!) This scene was repeated every time someone came or left—at least some Pirahãs would comment, “He disappeared!” And the same when they returned around the bend. The disappearing and appearing, not the identity of the person traveling, were what interested the Pirahãs.

  The word xibipíío seemed to be related to a cultural concept or value that had no clear English equivalent. Of course, any English speaker can say, “John disappeared,” or “Billy appeared just now,” but this
is not the same. First, we use different words, hence different concepts, for appearing and disappearing. More important, we English speakers are mainly focused on the identity of the person coming or going, not the fact that he or she has just left or come into our perception.

  Eventually, I realized that this term referred to what I call experiential liminality, the act of just entering or leaving perception, that is, a being on the boundaries of experience. A flickering flame is a flame that repeatedly comes and goes out of experience or perception.

  This translation “worked”—it successfully explained to me when it was appropriate to use the word xibipíío (and a useful working translation is the best a researcher can hope for in this type of monolingual situation).

  The word xibipíío therefore reinforced and gave a positive face to the pervasive Pirahã value I had been working on independently. That value seemed to be to limit most talk to what you had seen or heard from an eyewitness.

  If my hypothesis was correct, then knowledge about bigí, beings in other layers, spirits, and so on, must come from information supplied by living eyewitnesses. As counterintuitive as it might sound initially, there are purported eyewitnesses to the layered universe. The layers themselves are visible to the naked eye—the earth and the sky. And the inhabitants of the layers are also seen, because these other beings traverse the upper boundary, that is, come down from the sky and walk about our jungle. The Pirahãs see their tracks from time to time. The Pirahãs even see the beings themselves, lurking as ghostly shadows in the jungle darkness, according to the eyewitness accounts.

  And the Pirahãs can traverse a bigí in their dreams. To the Pirahãs, dreams are a continuation of real and immediate experience. Perhaps these other beings travel in their dreams too. In any case, they do traverse the boundaries. Pirahãs have seen them.

  One morning at three o’clock a group of Pirahãs was sleeping, as usual, in the front room of our tribal house. Xisaabi, one of the group, suddenly sat up and started singing about things he had just seen in the jungle, in his dream. “TiI hiOxiaI kaHApiI. BAaxaIxAagaHA” (I went up high. It is pretty) and so on, recounting a trip to the upper ground, the sky, and beyond. The singing woke me up but I wasn’t bothered because it was hauntingly beautiful, echoing back from the opposite bank of the Maici, a full moon shining brightly, illuminating him clearly. I got up and walked to where Xisaabi was singing and sat down a few feet behind him. There were Pirahã men, women, and children, perhaps twenty or more, sleeping all around us on the paxiuba floor. No one was moving but Xisaabi. The moon was bright silver just above the silhouette of the trees, casting its pale light across the smooth surface of the Maici. Xisaabi faced the moon, looking across the water, and ignored me, though he clearly heard me sit down behind him. He had an old blanket gathered around him, covering his head, but not his face, and sang loudly, unconcerned that there were people sleeping, or at least pretending to be asleep, all around him.

  The next day I talked to Xisaabi about his dream. I began by asking him, “Why were you singing in the early morning?”

  “I xaipípai,” he answered.

  “What is xaipípai?”

  “Xaipípai is what is in your head when you sleep.”

  I came eventually to understand that xaipípai is dreaming, but with a twist: it is classified as a real experience. You are an eyewitness to your dreams. Dreams are not fiction to the Pirahãs. You see one way awake and another way while asleep, but both ways of seeing are real experiences. I also learned that Xisaabi had used musical speech to discuss his dream because it was a new experience and new experiences are often recounted with musical speech, which exploits the inherent tones of all Pirahã words.

  Dreams do not violate xibipíío, as I was beginning to refer to the cultural value of talking mainly about immediately experienced subjects. In fact, they confirm it. By treating dreaming and being awake as conforming to immediacy of experience, the Pirahãs could deal with problems and issues that to us would involve an explicitly fictitious or religious world of beliefs and spirits in terms of their direct and immediate experience. If I dream about a spirit that can solve my problems and my dreaming is no different from my conscious observations, then this spirit is within the bounds of my immediate experience, my xibipíío.

  As I tried to absorb the implications of all of this, I wondered if there might be other applications of xibipíío in the culture or the language. Specifically, I began to rethink some of the unusual aspects of Pirahã culture and asked myself if these could be explained by the concept of immediate experience represented by xibipíío. I thought first about the expression of quantities in Pirahã.

  I believed that immediacy of experience might explain the disparate gaps and unusual facts about Pirahã that had been accumulating in my thoughts and notebooks over the months. It would explain the lack of numerals and counting in Pirahã, because these are skills that are mainly applied in generalizations beyond immediate experience. Numbers and counting are by definition abstractions, because they entail classifying objects in general terms. Since abstractions that extend beyond experience could violate the cultural immediacy of experience principle, however, these would be prohibited in the language. But although this hypothesis seemed promising, it still needed to be refined.

  In the meantime, I remembered other facts that seemed to support the value of immediate experience. For example, I recalled that the Pirahãs don’t store food, they don’t plan more than one day at a time, they don’t talk about the distant future or the distant past—they seem to focus on now, on their immediate experience.

  That’s it! I thought one day. The Pirahã language and culture are connected by a cultural constraint on talking about anything beyond immediate experience. The constraint, as I have developed my conception of it, can be stated as follows:

  Declarative Pirahã utterances contain only assertions related directly to the moment of speech, either experienced by the speaker or witnessed by someone alive during the lifetime of the speaker.

  In other words, the Pirahãs only make statements that are anchored to the moment when they are speaking, rather than to any other point in time. This doesn’t mean that once someone dies, the Pirahãs who spoke to him will forget everything he reported to them. But they rarely talk about it. Occasionally they will talk to me about things that they have heard that were witnessed by someone now dead, but this is rare, and generally only the most experienced language teachers will do this, those who have developed an ability to abstract from the subjective use of their language and who are able to comment on it from an objective perspective—something rare among speakers of any language in the world. So this principle has occasional exceptions, but only in very rare circumstances. In the day-to-day life of the people it is almost never violated.

  This means that they will use the simple present tense, the past tense, and the future tense, since these are all defined relative to the moment of speech, but no so-called perfect tenses and no sentences that fail to make assertions, such as embedded sentences.

  In an English sentence like When you arrived, I had already eaten, the verb arrived is situated relative to the moment of speech—it precedes it. This type of tense is fully compatible with the immediacy of experience principle. But the verb had eaten is not defined relative to the moment of speech, but relative to arrived. It precedes an event that is itself located in time relative to the moment of speech. We could just as easily have said When you arrive tomorrow, I will have eaten, in which case eaten is still before your arrival, though you will arrive after the moment of speech, that is, after the time that we are talking. Therefore, by the immediacy of experience principle, the Pirahãs do not have tenses like this, the perfect tenses of our grammar school days.

  By the same token, neither will Pirahã allow sentences like The man who is tall is in the room, because who is tall makes no assertion and is not relative to the moment of speech per se.

  The immediacy of experience principle acco
unts as well for Pirahã’s simple kinship system. The kinship terms do not extend beyond the lifetime of any given speaker in their scope and are thus in principle witnessable—a grandparent can be seen in the normal Pirahã lifespan of forty-five years, but not a great-grandparent. Great-grandparents are seen, but they are not in everyone’s experience (every Pirahã sees at least someone’s grandparents, but not every Pirahã sees a great-grandparent), so the kinship system, to better mirror the average Pirahã’s experience, lacks terms for great-grandparents.

  This principle also explains the absence of history, creation, and folklore in Pirahã. Anthropologists often assume that all cultures have stories about where they and the rest of the world come from, known as creation myths. I thus believed that the Pirahãs would have stories about who created the trees, the Pirahãs, the water, other living creatures, and so on.

  So I would ask speakers questions like Who made the Maici River?Where did the Pirahãs come from? Who made trees? Where did the birds come from? and so on. I borrowed and purchased linguistic anthropology books on field methods and followed these very closely to attempt to record the kinds of tales and myths that I thought every culture had.

  But I never had any luck. I asked Steve and Arlo. I asked Keren. No one had ever collected or heard of a creation myth, a traditional story, a fictional tale, or in fact any narrative that went beyond the immediate experience of the speaker or someone who had seen the event and reported it to the speaker.

  This seemed to make sense to me in light of immediacy of experience. The Pirahãs do have myths in the sense that they tell stories that help bind their society together, since they tell stories about witnessed events from their particular vantage point almost every day. Repetitions of the stories recorded in this book, such as the jaguar story, the story of the woman who died in childbirth, and others count as myths in this sense. But the Pirahãs lack folktales. So “everyday stories” and conversations play a vital binding role. They lack any form of fiction. And their myths lack a property common to the myths of most societies, namely, they do not involve events for which there is no living eyewitness. The latter is at once a small and a profound difference. It is a small difference in the sense that the Pirahãs do have stories that bind their culture together, like all other human societies. But it is a profound difference because of the “evidentiary twist” imposed by the Pirahãs on their myths—theremust be an eyewitness alive at the time of the telling.