Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (5 page)

Finally, the Pirahã language is notoriously difficult because it lacks things that many other languages have, especially in the way that it puts sentences together. For example, the language has no comparatives, so I couldn’t find expressions like
this is big/that is bigger.
I couldn’t find color words—no simple words for red, green, blue, and so on, only descriptive phrases, like
that is like blood
for red or
that is not ripe yet
for green. And I couldn’t find stories about the past. When you can’t find something, but you expect it to be there, you can waste months looking for something that doesn’t exist. Many of the things I had been taught to look for in field linguistics I could not find at all. This not only made things hard, but it also was at times downright discouraging. Still, I was optimistic that with enough time and effort, I would figure out this language.

But the future is not ours and our plans are only our wishes. It was folly to believe that I could just ignore where I was and focus strictly on linguistics. We were in the Amazon.

2                  The Amazon

O
nce you have made your peace with the Amazon, a Pirahã village is a relaxing place. The first step toward this peace is for you to learn to ignore, even enjoy, the heat. That is not as hard as it might sound. The human body, when clothed properly, can handle the 90 to 110F temperatures well, especially since the jungle provides plenty of shade and, in the case of the Pirahãs, the Maici River, which is always cool, wet, and relaxing. The humidity is harder to accept, though. Perspiration—that otherwise effective tool for lowering body temperature via evaporation in temperate climates—produces little more than athlete’s foot and crotch rot in the Amazon, unless your skin, like the Pirahãs’, is weather-beaten and usually dry because you rarely perspire.

Apart from such minor bodily discomforts, the Amazon region is not merely a place; it is an awe-inspiring force. The Amazonian rain forest covers nearly three million square miles: 2 percent of the total surface of the earth and 40 percent of the South American landmass. This forest is nearly the size of the continental United States. Fly from Porto Velho near the Bolivian border to the city of Belém at the mouth of the Amazon, a four-hour jet flight, and on a clear day you will see the jungle stretch out to the horizon in every direction: a green carpet, as far as the eye can see, with blue streaks of water from north to south, flowing toward the “moving sea,” as the Tupi Indians called the Amazon.

The Amazon flows over four thousand miles from Peru to the Atlantic. The river is over two hundred miles wide at its mouth, with a delta, the island of Marajó, which is larger than Switzerland. There is enough dark and unknown land in Amazonia to consume a million imaginations. In fact it almost has—there is a nearly endless list of books about it, on its ecology, its histories, its peoples, and its politics. It has aroused the wanderlust and the imagination of Europeans and their descendants since the Spaniards and Portuguese first beheld it at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Two of my favorite American writers, Mark Twain and William James, felt its pull.

Mark Twain left Ohio in 1857 hoping to depart from New Orleans for the Amazon River, apparently to try to get rich in the coca trade. One wonders what books or stories we have missed because he changed his plans and decided to train as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi. Might we have had a
Life on the Amazon,
as opposed to
Life on the Mississippi
?

William James actually made it to the Amazon and was able to explore a significant portion of the main river and its tributaries. While on a trip with the Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz in 1865 to collect zoological specimens, James traveled for some eight months through Brazil and along the Amazon and its tributaries. After his Amazonian experience, James abandoned his goal of becoming a naturalist—one might say that there is no place to go but down for a naturalist after the Amazon. (More than one-third of all species known on earth live in the Amazon.) He decided instead to focus on philosophy and psychology, eventually becoming the main force in the founding and development of the philosophical school known as American pragmatism.

The vast bulk of the Amazon rain forest, river basin, and river lie in Brazil. Brazil is the world’s fifth-largest country in landmass, larger than the forty-eight contiguous United States. Its population of nearly 190 million people is diverse, containing large groups of Portuguese, Germans, Italians, other Europeans, and Asians, including the largest population of Japanese outside of Japan. To the majority of Brazil’s urban-dwelling inhabitants, the Amazon sounds as distant and fantastic as it does to Europeans or North Americans. Though they pride themselves on the beauty of the Amazon and its attraction for the rest of the world, the majority of Brazilians have never seen anything that one could call jungle. The Amazon is two thousand miles from the major population areas of southeastern Brazil, where over 60 percent of Brazilians live. But this doesn’t prevent Brazilians from being somewhat umbrageous and defensive when anyone suggests that the governance of the Amazon (such as its preservation) follow rules or regulations of foreign provenance. As they say throughout Brazil,
“A

Amazônia é nossa”
—“The Amazon is ours!” Some Brazilians’ concern about foreign intervention in the Amazon can almost border on paranoia, as when some of my Brazilian colleagues insist to me that U.S. schoolchildren learn in their official textbooks that the Amazon belongs to the United States.

As the curators of the world’s largest natural history preserve, Brazilians are by and large in favor of conserving the diversity of minerals, water, flora, and fauna in the Amazon. But they don’t want to be preached at by the United States or Europe—who themselves destroyed much greater forest areas than have yet been destroyed in the Amazon. Local conflicts concerning preservation of the Amazon among Brazilians are well known and generally draw significant press coverage. (One well-known case is that of Chico Mendes. Mendes was murdered for organizing rubber tappers to use the Amazon’s commercial resources in an ecologically friendly way that was ultimately at odds with their employers’ view of how they should work.) But such stories can be misleading. In reality, these conflicts are less significant than the widespread agreement among Brazilians that the Amazon should be preserved.

Perhaps the best evidence for Brazilian interest in conservation is the Brazilian agency IBAMA, the Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renováveis (Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources). IBAMA is ubiquitous in the Amazon, well equipped, with a professional staff and a genuine and keen concern for the preservation of the Amazon’s natural beauty and resources.

The Amazon River system has two types of land and two types of rivers, broadly speaking: white (or muddy) rivers or dark-water rivers. Both types in the Amazon are “old” rivers; that is, they meander along with slow-flowing currents, because their headwaters are only slightly more elevated than their mouths. Unlike dark-water rivers, muddy-water rivers, such as the Amazon and the Madeira (the Mississippi and the Mekong are others), are rich in flora and fauna and have higher concentrations of nutrients for fish and other forms of river life. They are also rich in insect life though insects are found on all rivers.

During my first days among the Pirahãs I discovered the curse of little flies with V-shaped wings that land on your exposed skin during the day. These flies,
mutucas,
suck your blood and leave you with intense itching at the point of their bite, along with respectable welts if your skin is very sensitive, as mine is. You must not hate the
mutucas,
though, nor even the various types of horseflies that bite and welt the tender skin of your inner thigh, your outer ear, your cheeks, and your ass. You must not hate them even when you notice their deviousness—always flying to shaded parts of the body—exactly those parts you are not paying any attention to. Why not hate them? Because the frustration will kill you faster than the bug bites. I will admit that I have often wished that these insects had better-developed nervous systems so that I could torture them. But the feeling passes—most of the time.

There are insects at night too. If you spend a night unprotected by a mosquito net on the banks of one of these rivers, as I have on the Madeira, it will be one of the longest and most miserable nights of your life, as black clouds of mosquitoes swarm around you, flying up your nostrils, into your ears, biting you through your clothes, your hammock, and even your heavy jeans, in every imaginable spot. And, heaven forbid, if you have to relieve yourself during the night, they will swarm around any exposed flesh.

The river system traditionally dominated by the Pirahãs and the closely related tribe known as the Muras (who no longer speak their original language) is the Madeira River. The Madeira possesses the fifth-largest water flow in the world. It is the second-longest tributary in the world (after the Missouri). The Madeira River basin is three times the size of France. Among the hundreds of tributaries of the Madeira is the dark-water river, the Rio dos Marmelos, about eight hundred yards across at its mouth, averaging a width of perhaps four hundred yards and a depth of fifteen yards in August. The major tributary of the Marmelos is the Maici, the home of the Pirahãs. No one else lives on the Maici. At its mouth the Maici is more than two hundred yards wide. For most of its length it averages perhaps thirty yards in width. It varies in depth from six inches in some places just before the onslaught of the rainy season to perhaps eighty feet by the end of the rainy season.

The Maici is a dark-water river, a tea-colored flow carrying fish and leaves at a speed of twelve knots to the Marmelos. In the rainy season it is murky. In the dry season the color lightens and it becomes very clear and shallow, and its sandy bed is easily visible. Einstein proposed that the distance between two points following the course of an old river is roughly the distance of a straight line between those points times pi. The Maici conforms to this prediction. From the air it looks like an enormous snake slithering through the forest. Traveling it by boat after the rainy season, some of the curves are so tight that the wake generated by the boat travels between the flooded trees from one side of the loop to the other so quickly that the craft runs into its own wake as it comes around the corner. The Maici is startlingly beautiful. When floating on it, there are times I think it must be like Eden: gentle breezes, clear water, white sand, emerald trees, flaming macaws, awe-inspiring harpy eagles, monkey calls, toucan cries, and the occasional roar of jaguars.

The Pirahãs are settled along the Maici from its mouth to the point where the Transamazon Highway crosses it, roughly fifty miles. By motorboat, the distance is about 150 miles. The Pirahã village I have worked in the most, Forquilha Grande, is located on the Maici River near the Transamazon Highway. The Maici River intersects the Transamazon roughly fifty-six miles east of the town of Humaitá (Oo-my-TA), Amazonas. The initial serious purpose to which I put my first handheld GPS was to record the coordinates of the village where I lived. They are: S 7°21.642′ by W 62°16.313′.

There are two major views on how the Amazon was originally settled, represented by the work of archaeologists such as Betty Meggers and Anna Roosevelt. Some people, such as Meggers, believe that the agricultural potential of Amazonia’s soil, at least for prehistoric technology, was too low to sustain large civilizations and that, consequently, the Amazon has always been the home of small bands of hunter-gatherers. Consistent with this view is the idea of some linguists, especially the late Joseph Greenberg of Stanford University, that there were three waves of migration to the Americas across the land bridge of Beringia, which today lies beneath the waters of the Bering Strait. The first group to cross, some 11,000 years ago, were “pushed” southward by the second group to migrate, who were in their turn largely forced to the south by the final group to cross the land bridge—the Inuit, or Eskimos. The first group across Beringia settled South America and, aside from notable exceptions like the Incas, were mainly hunter-gatherers.

According to Greenberg, evidence for this migration can be found in the relationships among the languages of the Americas, both living and extinct. He claims, for example, that the languages of Mexico southward, by and large, are more closely related linguistically than those of central and northern North America. In Greenberg’s view, Pirahã would have to be more closely related to other South American languages than to any language anywhere else. However, the Pirahã language is not demonstrably related to any living language. Greenberg’s claims that it is related to languages belonging to the family that he calls Macro-Chibcha are nearly impossible to evaluate, and the evidence that I have been able to uncover over the years suggests that Pirahã and the now extinct related dialect, Mura, form a single language isolate, unrelated to any other known language. However, it is impossible to prove that Pirahã was not related to any other Amazonian languages in the distant past. Historical linguistics methods, used for classifying and reconstructing the history of languages, simply do not allow us to look back far enough to say certainly that two languages never developed from a common source language.

An alternative to Meggers’s and Greenberg’s views has been developed by Roosevelt and her colleagues, including my own former Ph.D. student Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida. According to Roosevelt, the Amazon was and is capable of sustaining large settlements and civilizations, including, if Roosevelt is correct, the Mara-joara civilization of the island of Marajó. According to Roosevelt,
Homo sapiens
has been in South America much longer than the Greenberg Meggers set of ideas would allow.

The existence of language isolates like Pirahã and Mura (known by early explorers, when the Mura language was still spoken, simply as Mura-Pirahã, two very similar dialects of a single language) might be understood as supporting Roosevelt’s ideas, because large amounts of time are required to sufficiently “erase” the similarity between languages to produce a language isolate. On the other hand, if the Pirahãs had been separated from other languages and peoples very early on in the peopling of the Americas, this could explain their linguistic and cultural uniqueness by either the Meggers or Roosevelt theories. The likelihood is that we will never know where the Pirahãs or their language came from—not unless a cache of early documents is discovered that record extinct but related languages. In that case, we could use the standard methodology of comparative and historical linguistics to recreate something of the Pirahãs’ past.