Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (3 page)

I knew that the Pirahãs would name me, because Don had told me that they name all foreigners, since they don’t like to say foreign names. I later learned that the names are based on a similarity that the Pirahãs perceive between the foreigner and some Pirahã. Among the men there that day was a young man named Xoogiái, and I had to admit that I could see some resemblance. Xoogiái would be my name for the next ten years, until the very same Kaaboogí, now called Xahóápati, told me that my name was now too old and that my new name was Xaíbigaí. (About six years after that my name was changed again to what it is today, Paóxaisi—the name of a very old man.) As I learned, the Pirahãs change names from time to time, usually when individual Pirahãs trade names with spirits they encounter in the jungle.

I learned the names of the other men there—Kaapási, Xahoábisi, Xoogiái, Baitigií, Xaíkáibaí, Xaaxái. The women stood outside the house looking in, refusing to speak, but giggling if I spoke to them directly. I was writing down phrases like
I drop the pencil, I write on paper, I stand up, My name is Xoogiái,
and so on.

Then Don got the boat motor started and all the men ran out immediately to ride with him as he did a few circles in the river in front of the house. Looking around at the village, I suddenly found myself alone, and I noticed that there was no central village clearing, just two or three huts together, nearly hidden by the jungle, connected to other houses in the village by narrow paths. I could smell smoke from the fires burning in each hut. Dogs were barking. Babies were crying. It was very hot at this time of the afternoon. And very humid.

Now that I was working among the Pirahãs, I was determined to record language data as quickly and carefully as I was able. But each time I asked an individual Pirahã if I could “mark paper” (study
—kapiiga kaga-kai
) with them, although they would happily study with me, they would also tell me about another Pirahã I should work with, saying,
“Kóhoibiíihíai hi obáaxáí. Kapiiga kaagakaáíbaaí.”
I began to understand. There was some guy named Kóhoibiíihíai who would teach me to speak Pirahã. I asked my missionary colleague if he knew someone by this name.

“Yes, the Brazilians call him Bernardo.”

“Why Bernardo?” I asked.

“The Brazilians give all the Pirahãs Portuguese names because they can’t pronounce the Pirahã names.” He went on, “This is the same reason, I suppose, that the Pirahãs give all outsiders Pirahã names.”

So I waited all day for Bernardo/Kóhoibiíihíai to return from hunting. As the sun began to set, the Pirahãs started talking loudly and pointing to the farthest bend downriver. In the fading twilight, I could just make out the silhouette of a canoe and paddler coming toward the village, hugging the bank to avoid the strong current of the main stream of the Maici. Pirahãs from the village were yelling to the man in the canoe, and he was replying. People were laughing and excited, though I had no idea why. As the man tied his canoe at the bank, I could see the reason for the excitement: a pile of fish, two dead monkeys, and a large curassow on the floor of the canoe.

I walked down the muddy bank to the canoe and spoke to the arriving hunter, practicing a phrase I had learned that afternoon:
“Tii kasaagá Xoogiái”
(My name is Xoogiái). Kóhoi (Pirahãs shorten their names much as we do in English) looked up at me, his arms crossed over his chest, and grunted without emotion. Kóhoi’s features were more African than the Asiatic features of so many Pirahãs, such as Kaaboogí, who looked Cambodian to me. Kóhoi had kinky hair, light black skin, and chin stubble. He was reclining in the canoe, yet the tautness of his muscles made it clear that he was ready to move quickly as he eyed me subtly. He appeared stronger than other Pirahãs, though he was no taller or heavier than any other man in the village, so far as I could tell. The squareness of his jaw and the firmness of his eye contact gave him a look of confidence and control. As other Pirahãs came running to get food, he handed out parts of animals with instructions as to who should receive what part. He had on orange pants but no shoes and no shirt.

On my second day I began to work with Kóhoi in the mornings at a table in the front room of the Sheldons’ large jungle house. I spent the afternoons walking about the village, querying various Pirahãs about their language. I continued to follow the standard linguistic mono lingual method for gathering data when no language is spoken in common: pointing, asking for words in the native language, and then writing down whatever response the native speaker gives, hoping it is the right one. Then practicing that immediately with other native speakers.

One of the things about Pirahã that immediately fascinated me was the lack of what linguists call “phatic” communication—communication that primarily functions to maintain social and interpersonal channels, to recognize or stroke, as some refer to it, one’s interlocutor. Expressions like
hello, goodbye, how are you?, I’m sorry, you’re welcome,
and
thank you
don’t express or elicit new information about the world so much as they maintain goodwill and mutual respect. The Pirahã culture does not require this kind of communication. Pirahã sentences are either requests for information (questions), assertions of new information (declarations), or commands, by and large. There are no words for
thanks, I’m sorry,
and so on. I have become used to this over the years and forget most of the time how surprising this can be to outsiders. Anytime someone visits the Pirahãs with me, they ask how to say these things. And they stare suspiciously at me when I say that the Pirahãs have no such forms of communication.

When a Pirahã arrives in the village, he or she might say, “I have arrived.” But by and large, no one says anything. If you give someone something, they might occasionally say, “That’s right,” or “It is OK,” but they use these to mean something more like “Transaction acknowledged,” rather than “Thank you.” The expression of gratitude can come later, with a reciprocal gift, or some unexpected act of kindness, such as helping you carry something. The same goes when someone has done something offensive or hurtful. They have no words for
I’m sorry.
They can say, “I was bad,” or some such, but do so rarely. The way to express penitence is not by words but by actions. Even in Western societies, there is considerable variation in how much we use phatic communication. Brazilians used to tell me when I was learning Portuguese, “Americans say ‘thank you’ way too much.”

O
n my second afternoon in the Pirahã village, after a long day of language learning, I got myself a hot cup of strong black instant coffee and sat down at the edge of a steep bank to gaze at the Maici. Several Pirahã men had gone fishing with Don in the boat, so the village was quieter. It was about 5:45, the most beautiful time of day, when the sun glows orange and the river’s reflective darkness stands out against the rusty color of the sky and the luxuriant spinach green of the jungle. As I sat idly watching and sipping my coffee, I was startled by the sight of two small gray porpoises jumping in sync out of the river. I had no idea that there were freshwater porpoises. Almost immediately, from around the bend came two Pirahã canoes, their riders paddling for all they were worth, in pursuit of the porpoises, trying to touch them with their paddles. It was a game of tag, porpoise tag.

Apparently the porpoises also enjoyed this because they continually came up just out of reach of the men in the canoes. This went on for half an hour, until darkness brought an end to the chase. The Pirahãs in the canoes and on the banks (for by now a crowd had gathered) were laughing hysterically. As they stopped chasing the porpoises, the porpoises disappeared. (In all my years watching this contest between mammals, no porpoise has ever been “tagged.”)

I thought about where I was, the privilege of being in this marvelous world of the Pirahãs and nature. In just these first two days I had already experienced a myriad of new things, such as hearing the screechy metallic sound of toucans and the raspy cry of macaws. I smelled scents from trees and plants I had never seen before.

O
n the following days among the Pirahãs I watched their daily routines, in between sessions working on the language. Pirahãs start their days early, usually about five o’clock, though for a people who sleep very little during the night, it isn’t clear if it’s better to say that they start their day or simply never end it. In any case, I was usually awakened by various women of the village talking in their huts. They would begin speaking loudly to no one in particular about the day’s events. One woman would announce that so-and-so was going hunting or fishing, then say what kind of meat she wanted. Other women would echo her from other huts or shout out their own culinary preferences.

Once the day has begun, fishing is the most common activity for men. Most of them leave before light, to favorite fishing spots hours downriver or upriver. If a fishing trip is expected to last overnight, the men take their families with them. But normally men go fishing alone or with one or two friends. If a pond has formed from receding river water, several men will be found in that single location, because it will be full of fish that cannot escape. Fishing is mainly by bow and arrow, but line and hook are also used if they can get some through trading. The men usually paddle off into the morning darkness, laughing loudly and challenging one another to canoe races. At least one man remains in the village to watch over things.

After the men have gone, the women and children leave to forage or pull manioc—also called cassava, the tuber of life—out of their jungle gardens. This takes hours and is hard work, requiring a good deal of endurance, but women (like their men) head into the jungle joking and laughing. Women are usually back by early afternoon. If the men are not yet back, they gather firewood in preparation for cooking the fish they expect their husbands to catch.

T
his initial visit to the Pirahãs came to an end after just a few days. In December of 1977 the Brazilian government ordered all missionaries to leave Indian reservations. We had to pack up. But I hadn’t come to stay long in any case, just to get a feel for what the Pirahãs and their language were like. In those first ten days, I had learned a bit about the Pirahã language.

Leaving the village under these forced circumstances made me wonder whether I’d ever be able to return. The Summer Institute of Linguistics was concerned too and wanted to find a way around the government’s prohibition against missionaries. So SIL asked me to apply to the graduate linguistics program at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. It was hoped that UNICAMP would be able to secure government authorization for me to visit the Pirahãs for a prolonged period, in spite of the general ban against missionaries. But although I went there primarily to secure authorization to reenter the Pirahãs’ village, UNICAMP turned out to offer me the greatest academic and intellectual environment I have ever experienced.

My work at UNICAMP paid off as SIL hoped it would. The president of the Brazilian National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), General Ismarth de Araujo Oliveira, authorized me to return to the Pirahãs, with my family, for a six-month stay to gather data for my UNICAMP M.A. thesis. My wife, Keren; our oldest daughter, Shannon, then seven; our daughter Kris, four; our son Caleb, one; and I left São Paulo by bus for Porto Velho in December, for our first family visit to the Pirahãs. It took us three days to reach Porto Velho, where a group of SIL missionaries were stationed and would help us travel to the Pirahãs’ village. We spent a week there, preparing for the village and readying ourselves mentally for the upcoming adventure.

It is not easy for a Western family to prepare to live in an Amazonian village. Planning for our trip began weeks before we traveled. We purchased our supplies in PV, as missionaries call Porto Velho. There, Keren and I had to anticipate, buy for, and prepare for up to six months of family isolation in the jungle. Everything from laundry soap to birthday and Christmas presents had to be planned for months in advance of their actual usage. For most of our time with the Pirahãs, from 1977 through 2006, we were almost wholly responsible for all the medical needs of both our family and the Pirahãs, so we spent hundreds of dollars on medicine, from aspirin to snake antivenom, before each trip. Malaria treatments of all sorts—Daraprim, chloroquine, and quinine—topped our list.

We needed to take schoolbooks and school supplies so our children could study in the village. Each time we returned from the village to the SIL center in Porto Velho they would be tested by the SIL school, which was itself accredited by the state of California. The books (including an encyclopedia set and a dictionary) and other school materials added to the large inventory of goods for running our household—hundreds of liters of gasoline, kerosene, and propane, a propane-fueled refrigerator, dozens and dozens of cans of meat, dried milk, flour, rice, beans, toilet paper, trade items for the Pirahãs, and on and on.

After our buying and other preparations, I decided to fly in a week before my family, along with SIL missionary Dick Need, to prepare the house for the children’s arrival. Dick and I labored from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day, subsisting almost entirely on Brazil nuts (we could have gotten fish from the Pirahãs, but since I wasn’t familiar enough with the culture yet to know whether the Pirahãs would consider our requests an imposition, we decided to get by on Brazil nuts, which the Pirahãs offered to us freely). We lacked food because our tools weighed too much for us to bring any food on the plane. We repaired the roof and floor of Sheldon’s house and built a new kitchen counter. We also spent several days with machetes, assisted by a couple of Pirahãs, cutting the airstrip grass for the Cessna’s arrival. I knew that for my children, at least, the first impression of the house would be crucial to their desire to stay. I was asking so much of them, to leave their friends and city life to spend the next several months in the jungle, with a people they didn’t know, hearing a language none of us spoke.