Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (13 page)

The first time I saw a dance I was impressed by how much everyone enjoyed themselves singing, talking, and walking around in a circle. Kóhoi invited me to dance with them.

“Dan, you want to dance with us tonight?”

“I don’t know how to dance like Pirahãs,” I said, hoping to get out of this. I am a terrible dancer.

“Steve and Arlo danced with us. Don’t you want to dance like a Pirahã?” Kóhoi insisted.

“I’ll try. But don’t laugh.”

During the dance, a Pirahã woman asked me, “Do you only lie on top of one woman? Or do you want to lie on others?”

“I just lie on one. I don’t want others.”

“He doesn’t want other women,” she announced.

“Does Keren like other men?”

“No, she just wants me,” I responded as a good Christian husband.

Sexual relations are relatively free between unmarried individuals and even between individuals married to other partners during village dancing and singing, usually during full moons. Aggression is observed from time to time, from mild to severe (Keren witnessed a gang rape of a young unmarried girl by most of the village men). But aggression is never condoned and it is very rare.

Pirahãs have told me about a dance in which live venomous snakes are used, though I have never seen one of these (such dances were corroborated, however, by the eyewitness account of the Apurinã inhabitants of Ponto Sete, before the Pirahãs dispersed them). In this dance, the regular dancing is preceded by the appearance of a man wearing only a headband of
buriti
palm and a waistband, with streamers, made entirely of narrow, yellow
paxiuba
palm leaves. The Pirahã man so dressed claims to be Xaítoii, a (usually) evil spirit whose name means “long tooth.” The man comes out of the jungle into the clearing where the others are gathered to dance and tells his audience that he is strong, unafraid of snakes, and then tells them about where he lives in the jungle, and what he has been doing that day. This is all sung. As he sings, he tosses snakes at the feet of the audience, who all scramble away quickly.

These spirits appear in dances in which the man playing the role of the spirit claims to have encountered that spirit and claims to be possessed by that spirit. Pirahã spirits all have names and personalities, and their behavior is somewhat predictable. Such dances might be classified as a weak form of ritual, in the sense that they are witnessed and imitated and clearly have value and meaning to the community. As rituals they are intended to teach the people to be strong, to know their environment, and so on.

The relative lack of ritual among the Pirahãs is predicted by the immediacy of experience principle. This principle states that formulaic language and actions (rituals) that involve reference to nonwitnessed events are avoided. So a ritual where the principal character could not claim to have seen what he or she was enacting would be prohibited. Beyond this prohibitive feature, however, the idea behind the principle is that the Pirahãs avoid formulaic encodings of values and instead transmit values and information via actions and words that are original in composition with the person acting or speaking, that have been witnessed by this person, or that have been told to this person by a witness. So traditional oral literature and rituals have no place.

6                  Families and Community

P
irahãs laugh about everything. They laugh at their own misfortune: when someone’s hut blows over in a rainstorm, the occupants laugh more loudly than anyone. They laugh when they catch a lot of fish. They laugh when they catch no fish. They laugh when they’re full and they laugh when they’re hungry. When they’re sober, they are never demanding or rude. Since my first night among them I have been impressed with their patience, their happiness, and their kindness. This pervasive happiness is hard to explain, though I believe that the Pirahãs are so confident and secure in their ability to handle anything that their environment throws at them that they can enjoy whatever comes their way. This is not at all because their lives are easy, but because they are good at what they do.

They like to touch to show affection. Although I have never seen kissing among the Pirahãs, there is a word for it, so they must do it. But they all touch one another frequently. In the evenings, as it got dark, they loved to touch me too, especially little children, who would stroke my arms, hair, and back. I didn’t look at them when they did this, because that would have embarrassed them.

Pirahãs are patient with me. They are stoic with themselves. They are caring for the elderly and the handicapped. I noticed an old man in the village, Kaxaxái (Alligator), who walked funny and was unable to fish or hunt. He gathered a little firewood each evening for the people. I asked a man why he gave food to Kaxaxái, who never gave him anything in return. “He fed me when I was young. Now I feed him.”

The first time the Pirahãs brought me something to eat, roasted fish, they asked me,
“Gíxai soxóá xobáaxáaí. Kohoaipi?”
(Do you already know how to eat this?) It is a great phrase, because if you really don’t want something, it gives you a way out without causing offense. All you have to say is “No, I don’t know how to eat this.”

The Pirahãs seemed peaceful. I felt no aggression toward me or other outsiders, unlike in so many other new cultures I had entered over the years. And I saw no aggression internal to the group. Although, as in all societies, there were exceptions to the rule, this is still my impression of the Pirahãs after all these years. The peaceful people.

As is the case at the village of Xagíopai, known to Brazilians as Forquilha Grande—“Big Fork”—because the Maici branches into a dead-end oxbow lake at that point, sisters will often bring their husbands to live around their parents. In other villages, though, such as the village of Pentecoste near the mouth of the Maici, men bring wives to their parents’ village. Thus one village can be matrilocal, but another patrilocal. Or neither—in some villages no pattern is discernible. This flexibility is probably based on the laissez-faire nature of Pirahã society as well as the Pirahãs’ minimalist kinship system.

The Pirahãs have only the following kinship terms, constituting one of the simplest kinship systems in the world:

baíxi
—parent, grandparent, or someone to whom you wish to express submission temporarily or permanently. Pirahã call me
baíxi
when they want something from me; they sometimes refer to river traders as
baíxi;
adults can call other adults
baíxi
if they want something, such as fish, from them. Young children can call other children
baíxi
if they want something from them. This term is gender-neutral. Sometimes the expression
ti xogií
(my big) is used instead of
baíxi.
It can also be used as a term of affection for the elderly. If it becomes necessary to distinguish a woman or a male parent, one can say
ti baíxi xipóihií
(my female parent) and so on. Context will often determine whether biological parents are being referred to. When it doesn’t, it probably isn’t necessary to draw that distinction anyway.

xahaigí
—sibling (male or female). This can also refer to any Pirahã of the same generation and, in some contexts, to any Pirahã at all if he or she is being contrasted with outsiders, as in “What did the
xahaigí
say to the Brazilian?”

hoagí
or
hoísai
—son.
Hoagí
is the verb “to come” and
hoísai
means “the one that came.”

kai
—daughter.

There is one more term,
piihí,
which has a wider range of meanings, including “child with at least one deceased parent,” “stepchild,” and “favorite child.”

That’s it. Although some anthropologists who do not speak Pirahã have proposed additional terms, all those proposals that I am aware of result from the misanalysis of entire phrases. The most usual error is to analyze possessive forms of the terms above as though they were separate kinship terms. So, for example, one anthropologist proposed that the phrase
ti xahaigí
means “uncle,” but in fact it just means “my sibling.”

Anthropologists have long believed that the more complex the kinship system, the more likely it is that there will be kinship-based restrictions on whom to marry, which relative to live close to or with, and so on. But the inverse necessarily holds as well—the fewer the number of kinship terms, the smaller the number of kinship-related restrictions there will be in a society. This has an interesting effect in Pirahã. Since they lack any word for cousin, unsurprisingly there is no restriction against marrying a cousin. And, perhaps because
xahaigí
is ambiguous, I have even seen men marry their half sisters.

The effect of the apparently universal incest taboo prohibits only a small number of sexual couplings among the Pirahãs, such as full sibling with full sibling and grandparent or parent with child.

There is more to this kinship system than meets the eye, however. Some of the kinship terms label concepts that are broader than mere kinship. I mentioned already the use of
baíxi
to refer to either authority or kinship.

The concept of
xahaigí
is interesting as well. It seems to express more than kinship. It expresses a value of community. Because this word is genderless and numberless, it can refer to a man, a woman, women, men, or a mixed group. Although Pirahã mostly live in nuclear families, there is a strong sense of community and mutual responsibility for the well-being of other community members.
Xahaigí
names and strengthens this sense of community by labeling the community’s members.

The most important connotation of
xahaigí
is this sense of belonging, of family and brotherhood. This feeling is marked among the three hundred or so living Pirahãs. Even though they may be separated by miles of river, every person in every village follows the news of all other villages and individual Pirahãs. It is impressive how fast news travels the 240-plus miles of the Maici along which the Pirahãs are scattered. The crucial part of the
xahaigí
concept is that each Pirahã is important to every other Pirahã. A Pirahã will always defend or take the side of another Pirahã over any non-Pirahã, no matter how long he or she has known the latter. And no foreigner, not even I, can expect to be called
xahaigí
by all Pirahãs (some do now refer to me as
xahaigí,
but most do not, even some of my best Pirahã friends).

Another example of
xahaigí
is seen in the treatment of children and the elderly. A father of one family will feed or care for another child, at least temporarily, if that child is abandoned, even for a day. Once an older man got lost in the jungle. For three days the entire village searched for him, with little food or sleep. They were very emotional when they found him, safe but tired and hungry, carrying a sharpened pole for protection. They called him their
baíxi
and hugged him and smiled, giving him food as soon as they reached the village. This also illustrates their sense of community.

The Pirahãs all seem to be intimate friends, no matter what village they come from. Pirahãs talk as though they know every other Pirahã extremely well. I suspect that this may be related to their physical connections. Given the lack of stigma attached to and the relative frequency of divorce, promiscuousness associated with dancing and singing, and post- and prepubescent sexual experimentation, it isn’t far off the mark to conjecture that many Pirahãs have had sex with a high percentage of the other Pirahãs. This alone means that their relationships will be based on an intimacy unfamiliar to larger societies (the community that sleeps together stays together?). Imagine if you’d had sex with a sizable percentage of the residents of your neighborhood and that this fact was judged by the entire society as neither good nor bad, just a fact about life—like saying you’ve tasted many kinds of food.

M
y entire family noticed daily the striking differences between the Pirahãs’ and our own concepts of family. One morning I watched a toddler walk unsteadily toward the fire. As he got closer, his mother, two feet away, grunted at him. But she made no effort to pull him away. He teetered and then fell, just beside the hot coals. He blistered his leg and butt and howled with pain. His mother jerked him up by one arm and scolded him.

I watched this and wondered why this mother, whom I knew to be loving with her children, would scold her toddler for hurting himself, especially since she had not warned him about the hot coals, so far as I knew. This in turn raised a larger issue: how did the Pirahãs view childhood? What were their goals for child raising? I began a deeper reflection on this by recalling my observation that the Pirahãs don’t talk baby talk to their children. Children are just human beings in Pirahã society, as worthy of respect as any fully grown human adult. They are not seen as in need of coddling or special protections. They are treated fairly and allowance is made for their size and relative physical weakness, but by and large they are not considered qualitatively different from adults. This can lead to scenes that to Western eyes can seem strange or even harsh. Since I find myself predisposed to agree with much of the Pirahãs’ view of parenting, I often don’t even notice child-rearing behavior that other outsiders find shocking.

As an example, I recall how a colleague of mine was surprised by the adult treatment of Pirahã children. Peter Gordon, a psychologist at Columbia University, and I were in a Pirahã village together in 1990 interviewing a man about the spirit world. While we were talking we had set up a video camera to record our interactions with the people. That evening as we watched bits of the video, we noticed that a toddler about two years old was sitting in the hut behind the man we were interviewing. The child was playing with a sharp kitchen knife, about nine inches in length. He was swinging the knife blade around him, often coming close to his eyes, his chest, his arm, and other body parts one would not like to slice off or perforate. What really got our attention, though, was that when he dropped the knife, his mother—talking to someone else—reached backward nonchalantly without interrupting her conversation, picked up the knife, and handed it back to the toddler. No one told him not to cut himself or hurt himself with the knife. And he didn’t. But I have seen other Pirahã children cut themselves severely with knives. Many times Keren or I had to put sulfa powder on cuts to reduce the chances of infection.

Any baby who cuts, burns, or otherwise hurts itself gets scolded (and cared for too). And a mother will often answer a baby’s cry of pain in such circumstances with a growl of disgust, a low guttural “
Ummm!
” She might pick it up by an arm and angrily (but not violently) set it down abruptly away from the danger. But parents do not hug the child or say things like “Poor baby, I’m so sorry, let Mommy kiss it and make the boo-boo better.” The Pirahãs stare with surprise when they see non Pirahã mothers do this. They even think it is funny. “Don’t they want their children to learn to take care of themselves?” the Pirahãs ask me.

But there is more to it than wanting children to become autonomous adults. The Pirahãs have an undercurrent of Darwinism running through their parenting philosophy. This style of parenting has the result of producing very tough and resilient adults who do not believe that anyone owes them anything. Citizens of the Pirahã nation know that each day’s survival depends on their individual skills and hardiness.

When a Pirahã woman gives birth, she may lie down in the shade near her field or wherever she happens to be and go into labor, very often by herself. In the dry season, when there are beaches along the Maici, the most common form of childbirth is for the woman to go alone, occasionally with a female relative, into the river up to her waist, then squat down and give birth, so that the baby is born directly into the river. This is cleaner and healthier, in their opinion, for the baby and the mother. Occasionally, women’s mothers or sisters accompany them. But if a woman has no female relatives in her village, she may be forced to give birth alone.

Steve Sheldon told me about a woman giving birth alone on a beach. Something went wrong. A breech birth. The woman was in agony. “Help me, please! The baby will not come,” she cried out. The Pirahãs sat passively, some looking tense, some talking normally. “I’m dying! This hurts. The baby will not come!” she screamed. No one answered. It was late afternoon. Steve started toward her. “No! She doesn’t want you. She wants her parents,” he was told, the implication clearly being that he was not to go to her. But her parents were not around and no one else was going to her aid. The evening came and her cries came regularly, but ever more weakly. Finally, they stopped. In the morning Steve learned that she and the baby had died on the beach, unassisted.

Steve recorded a story about this incident, repeated here. This text is valuable for two reasons. First, it recounts a tragic incident that provides insight into Pirahã culture. In particular it tells us that the Pirahãs let a young woman die, alone and without help, because of their belief that people must be strong and get through difficulties on their own.

Second, it is important for our understanding of Pirahã grammar. Note the relative simplicity of the structure (not the content) of the sentences, which lack any sign of one sentence or phrase appearing inside another.