Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (14 page)

This story is, once again, interesting at various levels. From the linguistic perspective, the most relevant property is the simplicity of the sentence structure. On the other hand, this Pirahã story, like all others, does show relatively complex relationships between ideas in sentences. Some ideas of the story occur inside of other ideas, even though neither the sentences nor the grammar proper show this. So, for example, there are four broad divisions of subtopics in the text. Lines one through five introduce the story and the participants. Lines six through fourteen discuss the neglect of responsibility of the dead woman’s husband. Lines fifteen through nineteen repeat neglect of responsibility by others. And another round of lamentation of neglect is given in lines twenty until the end. And of course all of the lines form a single story in which every line plays its part. So all sentences in the story are found
within
the story in both the sense of their appearance on the page and in their cognitive grouping—that is, the speaker thinks that they all belong and structures the story to reflect this perception.

These groupings of sentences are not grammatical groupings in the sense that syntacticians would accept, but they are rather groupings of ideas. They reveal thinking processes. This central device of placing thoughts inside other thoughts mirrors one that many linguists consider to be part of grammar—recursion. And yet the Pirahã text groupings are not part of grammar, even though they are found in all Pirahã stories. So the device in question, putting things inside of other things, such as phrases in phrases or sentences in sentences, is independent of grammar, contrary to what many, but by no means all, linguists have thought.

While to many nonlinguists this may seem like an arcane theoretical point, it is at the heart of one of the biggest rifts in modern linguistics. If recursion is not found in the grammar of all languages, but it is found in the thought processes of all humans, then it is part of general human intelligence and not part of a “language instinct” or “universal grammar,” as Noam Chomsky has claimed.

Culturally the story is interesting because the speaker seems to be attempting to come across as guiltless. The neglect of the woman is presented as though it were bad, as many Westerners would think as well, and yet neither the teller of the story nor anyone else went to her aid. This suggests that the value of letting everyone pull their own weight, even in very dangerous circumstances, is shown in overt behavior even when it is not supported in words. Like members of other cultures, the Pirahãs often make a distinction between values in speech and values in practice.

An experience of my own was even more shocking to me. A young mother named Pokó gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. Pokó and the baby were doing very well. My family and I left the village to rest in Porto Velho, returning two months later. When we arrived back in the village, Pokó and some other Pirahãs, as usual, were living in our house. But Pokó was emaciated. She clearly had some illness, but we didn’t know what. She was close to death, nearly skeletal. Her cheeks were sunken, her legs and arms were bone-thin, and she was so weak that she could barely move. Since she had no milk her baby was also very ill. Other mothers would not nurse Pokó’s baby since they needed the milk, they said, for their own babies. Pokó died just a couple of days after our return. Since we had no radio, we had no way of calling for help for her. But her baby survived.

We asked who would care for Pokó’s daughter.

“The baby will die. There is no mother to nurse her,” we were told.

“Keren and I will take care of the baby,” I volunteered.

“OK,” the Pirahãs responded, “but the baby will die.”

The Pirahãs know death and dying when they see it. I understand this now. But I was committed to helping that baby.

Our first problem was to feed the child. We made some diapers for the baby out of old sheets and towels. We tried to give it a bottle (we always kept baby bottles in the village for possible infant sicknesses), but it would not suck. It was almost comatose. I determined not to let this baby die. I thought of a way to get milk into it. We mixed up some powdered milk with sugar and a bit of salt and warmed it. I had a couple of squeeze bottles of Right Guard deodorant (deodorant is commonly sold in plastic squeeze bottles in Brazil). I emptied them and washed them out. I pulled out the plastic tubes from each and washed those out too. Then I filled a Right Guard bottle with some of our baby “formula.” I connected two of the tubes, wrapping them in medical tape where they were joined. Then I inserted one of them into the Right Guard bottle with the milk. Carefully and slowly we then worked the other tube down the baby’s throat. The baby showed only slight discomfort. With equal care I squeezed slowly on the Right Guard bottle and got quite a bit of milk into the baby’s stomach.

Within an hour the baby seemed more energetic. We fed it every four hours, day and night. For three days we got almost no sleep, working to save this baby. It seemed to be coming around. With each feeding, the baby moved more energetically, cried more loudly, and even had a bowel movement. We were ecstatic. One afternoon we felt we could leave the baby and go jogging on the airstrip. So I asked the father of the baby if he could watch the baby until we got back from the airstrip. We went and jogged, feeling that we were making a tangible and important contribution to at least one Pirahã’s well-being.

But the Pirahãs were certain that the baby would die for three reasons. First, it was near death already. They believed that when a person gets emaciated to a certain point, a point this baby had passed, the person would not survive. Second, they also believed that for a baby this sick to survive it needed to be cared for by a Pirahã mother—one that would nurse it. And this was not going to happen, because the baby’s mother had died and no other mother would allow her own baby to go hungry in order to feed another woman’s baby. Finally, they did not believe that our medicine could compensate for these first two conditions, so my efforts to feed the baby were, to the Pirahãs, just prolonging its misery and causing it unnecessary pain.

When we returned from our jog, several Pirahãs were huddled in a corner of our house, and there was a strong smell of alcohol in the air. Those in the huddle looked conspiratorial and stared at us. Some seemed angry, others ashamed. Others just stared down at something on the ground that they were all surrounding. As I approached, they parted. Pokó’s baby was on the ground, dead. They had forced cachaça down its throat and killed it.

“What happened to the baby?” I asked, almost in tears.

“It died. It was in pain. It wanted to die,” they replied.

I just picked up the baby and held it, with tears now beginning to stream down my cheeks.

“Why would they kill a baby?” I asked myself in confusion and grief.

We made a small wooden coffin from some old crating I had brought in. Then the father and I dug a grave about one hundred yards upriver on the bank of the Maici, next to where Pokó was buried. We put the baby in the grave, threw dirt over it, in front of the three or four other Pirahãs who had come to see the burial. Then we bathed in the river, to remove the clay and dirt that had clung to us. I went back to my house and brooded.

The more I thought about this incident, though, the more I came to realize that the Pirahãs, from their perspective, did what they thought was best. They weren’t simply being cruel or thoughtless. Their views of life, death, and illness are radically different from my Western ideas. In a land without doctors, with the knowledge that you have to get tough or die, with much more firsthand direct experience with the dead and dying than I had ever had, the Pirahãs could see death in someone’s eyes and health before I could. They felt certain that this baby was going to die. They felt it was suffering terribly. And they believed that my clever milk tubes contraption was hurting the child and prolonging its suffering. So they euthanized the child. The father himself put the baby to death, by forcing alcohol down its throat. I knew of other babies that had survived their mother’s death, but they had all been in robust health when they were orphaned.

The Pirahãs’ view that children are equal citizens of society means that there is no prohibition that applies to children that does not equally apply to adults and vice versa. There certainly is no age-based prejudice that children should be “seen but not heard.” Pirahã children are noisy and rambunctious and can be as stubborn as they choose to be. They have to decide for themselves to do or not do what their society expects of them. Eventually they learn that it is in their best interests to listen to their parents a bit. One young boy, Paitá, whom I particularly liked, was the son of my good friend Kóxoí—a man so relaxed and laid-back that I found it hard to stay awake around him, a smiling man, never out of sorts, even when he was dying from what might have been tuberculosis. Kóxoí’s son illustrates well the general status of Pirahã children.

One afternoon I saw Paitá coming down the path. He was about three years old. Paitá was always filthy, reminding me of Pig-Pen from the
Peanuts
comic strip. He tilted his head when he looked at you, and grinned and laughed freely. His feet and legs were covered in mud, since the path was so wet. But what attracted my attention was that this little three-year-old was smoking a fat cigarette, hand-rolled. His father no doubt had rolled it for him—strong, hard tobacco rolled in notebook paper. And Paitá was wearing a dress.

As the father came along the path, not far behind Paitá, I asked, laughing, “What is your son doing?” I was referring to the cigarette.

Kóxoí responded, “Oh, I like to dress him in girl’s clothes.”

For Kóxoí, the unusual aspect of his son’s appearance had nothing to do with smoking. Even if the Pirahãs had known about the long-term health effects of tobacco use, it would not have affected whether they gave it to their children. First, no Pirahã smokes enough for it to present any significant health risk—they only have access to tobacco every couple of months and can never get more than about a day’s supply. Second, if an adult can take the “risk” of smoking, a child can too. Of course, the dress was evidence that children are treated somewhat differently from adults. But these differences do not include prohibitions against engaging in activities more commonly associated with adults in Western society.

Once a trader gave the tribe enough cachaça for everyone to get drunk. And that is what happened. Every man, woman, and child in the village got falling-down wasted. Now, it doesn’t take much alcohol for Pirahãs to get drunk. But to see six-year-olds staggering with slurred speech was a novel experience for me. To the Pirahãs, though, everyone must share in the hardships of life, and everyone is likewise entitled to share in the enjoyable things of life.