11/14/2023 0 Comments Dont sleep there are snakes![]() ![]() As Everett learned more of their language, he found that the Pirahas believe absolutely nothing that they haven’t seen with their own eyes (or is related to them by an actual eyewitness), which makes faith in the story of a man who lived 2000 years ago hard to impart. The second was for him possibly more profound. In order to convert people to religion, they must be convinced that their lives are empty and they need salvation, which Pirahas most emphatically do not. They live, as he repeatedly states, very much in the present. The first was that the Piraha have little concept of time, personal property, or any method of counting (which makes passage of days and exchange of money conceptually difficult at best). The fact that the Pirahas’ worldview ends up “converting the missionary” - Everett loses his Christian faith as a result of his contact with the Piraha - is treated as a bit of by-the-way towards the end of the book, but its meaning is powerful.Įverett went to the Amazon hoping to teach a native people how Jesus Christ could give them salvation. The book that results from his total of seven years among his Piraha friends is an honest, sensitive, and often intellectual account of a people with a very different worldview from his own, and the implications this worldview has on our understandings not only of linguistics, but grammar, anthropology, psychology, and the formation of culture. He spent the next 30 years living on and off with the Piraha, delving into their culture and language, and finding himself faced finally with some startling conclusions in both his personal and professional life. A linguist and missionary employed by a Christian organization to learn the Piraha language and then translate the Bible into it, he went up the Amazon with his wife and three small children to live in a hut and learn what he could about these supposedly simple people. It’s packed, like many great travel books, in the Nature/Science department, and classified as linguistics/anthropology.Īnd yet, anyone wanting to learn about some of the most remote parts of the Brazilian Amazon and the native tribes that maintain traditional lifestyles there would be hard-pressed to find a better resource than Everett’s Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes.Įverett went to live among the Piraha people in 1977. Because you won’t find Daniel Everett’s book in the travel literature section. (Please note that the people and language referred to here, Piraha, has a tilde - a little squiggle - over the final ‘a,’ but said squiggle is nowhere to be found in my word program.)ĭon’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle (published 2008, US and UK) proves the contention that some of the most enlightening “travel” books are written not by travel writers, but by researchers and explorers. ![]()
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