Pirahã - (my informative speech for this year)

Ti gi xahoaisoogabagai (tee gee ah-hoa-ees-oh-oh-ga-ba-guy-ee)

I want to talk to you.

In the words of John Lennon, imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I’m a dreamer, but …the Pirahã (pee-duh-hon) are about 350 members strong, living in a handful of villages along the Maici and Marmelos Rivers in northwest Brazil. They are an endangered tribe with an endangered language according to Dr. Daniel Everett, in his book, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes. Despite contact with outsiders for over three centuries, the Pirahã have remained just who they are—hunter-gatherers who have no angst and no war. In fact, researchers from MIT called them the happiest people they had ever seen , and And, if one of these houses gets destroyed in a storm, a Pirahã laughs and moves into a new one.

Much of what makes them unique is evident in their language. So, today, we will first take a look at the utility of Pirahã language, then focus on two of their culturolingual ideas—xibipíio (ih-bi-pee-ee-oh) (experiential liminilality) and xahaigi (ah-ha-ee-gee)(brotherhood)—and then we will see what all this could mean for the rest of us.

First, let’s takes a look at the utility of Pirahã language.

Built around 11 phonemes, 8 consonants and 3 vowels, John Colapinto calls the Pirahã language one of the simplest sound systems known in The Interpreter, The New Yorker, 16 April 2007. Despite its simplicity, with changes in tone, stress or syllable length, Pirahã can sing, hum and even whistle conversations.

As far as vocabulary goes, they have no numbers, just words for small amount and larger amount. Celeste Biever suggests, in Language may shape human thought, New Scientist, 19 August 2004, under the hypothesis of linguistic determinism this would be just one example of how the Pirahã language would limit their way of thinking about the world.

They also have no color-specific terms, only relative phrases—blood-like for red—that are changeable, transient. They have no plurals, no quantifiers like all or some, no comparatives, no words for left or right—directions instead reference the nearby river, upriver, downriver, toward or away from the river.

They have no recursion—that is, the use of subordinate clauses, ideas within ideas—a notion that has created much controversy in the field of linguistics, as the lack thereof would violate one of Noam Chomsky’s key features of human language . According to Robert D Van Valin, Jr in Recursion and Human Thought, The Edge, June 2007, there must be recursion in the syntax for the expression of complex propositions to be possible .

They have no phatic communication—hello, goodbye, thank you, I’m sorry. Daniel Everett suggests these phrases don’t express or elicit new information about the world , and are thus hardly as useful as actions could be in expressing the same sentiment. The closest they have to what we might call a greeting translates as I have arrived. Thank you would be transaction acknowledged. They prefer action over words and experience over ideas… and this brings us to our second point, two concepts specific to the Pirahã, first xibipíio, experiential liminality. Translated roughly as going into or out of the limits of experience, xibipíio can be equally applied (as noun or verb) to a man going out of sight around a bend in the river or a candle flame going out. It is the reason they have no art and no fiction. Kate Douglas points out in A people lost for words, New Scientist, 18 March 2006, there is no creative storytelling and no oral history beyond two generations with the Pirahã. They define the value of information by that which matters here and now. Bruce Bower says in The Pirahã Challenge, Science News, 10 December 2005, that no Pirahã refers to abstract concepts or distant places and times. Life, for the Pirahã, is about the immediacy of experience, which is why they rejected Daniel Everett when he first came to them as a Christian missionary. In the aforementioned New Yorker article, The Interpreter, Everett describes for the author how he was asked by the Pirahã if he had met Christ. They wanted to know what he looked like. But, Everett hadn’t met him so they assumed his father had met Christ. When told that Christ had died 2000 years ago, they had no interest in hearing anymore about him.

They have no religion for themselves, though they do believe that animals and trees have something in them that translates roughly as spirits. They have no origin story for themselves or the world, and have no real concept of the universe, because such things would lie outside personal experience or the experience of, say, a parent or grandparent who could tell such tale. Their grammar and way of life is limited to experience seen or recounted as seen by a person alive at the time of telling , as Daniel Everett describes it in Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã, Current Anthropology, August-October 2005.

xibipíio defines everyday life for the Pirahã. When they have food, they eat it until it is gone. They hunt every day, but share the chore, no one person working more than 15 to 20 hours in a week. The men hunt, the women gather, working maybe 12 hours in a week for a typical Pirahã family of four. Rafaela von Bredow calls the Pirahã a carpe diem culture in Living without Numbers or Time, Spiegel, 3 May 2006. They do not have concern for the future. They do not store or dry food. And, they do not fear death, and find suicide to be such a foreign notion that they laughed when told about it. When a Pirahã does die, the body is buried for practical purposes… often buried in a sitting position as that involves less digging. There is no ritual to it. Ritual would imply—and result from—a more complex worldview.

That being said, the Pirahã worldview does include more than just themselves. They trade with Brazilians and other tribes living nearby. And, those who they deal with regularly get included under the title xahaigi, one of only a few kinship terms used by the Pirahã. And, this brings us to the Pirahã notion of brotherhood. Kate Douglas, in her aforementioned New Scientist article, calls the Pirahã kinship system the simplest yet recorded. They have baixi, for parent or grandparent or anyone to which you want to express submission. They have hoagi for son, kai for daughter, piihi for an orphan, stepchild, or favorite child. And, they have xahaigi, simply translated as sibling. But, the Pirahã do not use it to refer just to blood relatives. In fact, they do not use it to refer just to other Pirahã, but anyone with which they have peaceful relations (or, really, anyone with which they have relations, as war is unknown to them).

Everybody’s equal, even children by about 9 years old. And, before that, the children are, like the old adage, raised by the village. Well, they are raised by their parents, to an extent, but as the Pirahã do not have marriage as we know it, but a more open coupling system, it comes to everyone to look after a child… but, even in that, they aren’t as protective as we are in keeping kids out of trouble. They prefer children learn from their mistakes rather than be told what not to do. The Pirahã do not have Ten Commandments to follow; there is no strict set of laws, no mandated punishment. This brings us to our final point, except the Pirahã don’t have an implications section.

There IS something to be said for the Pirahã culture in what it means for the rest of us: a people with no need for an origin story, no need for ritual or religion… and resulting from this: no suicide, no angst, and no war. Anger is the cardinal sin among the Pirahã, says Daniel Everett in his book. But, even such a rarity would be responded to only by temporary disdain or, at most, ostracism.

In his aforementioned Current Anthropology article, Everett argues that this beautiful language and culture, fundamentally different from anything the Western world has produced, has much to teach us about linguistic theory, about culture, about human nature, about living for each day and letting the future take care of itself..

But, you don’t need it spelled out for you. You’re here reading this, you’re worried about the next round, about your grades, your job. The Pirahã have none of these things, none of these worries (they don’t even worry about their relationships; if a Pirahã wants out of a relationship, he simply leaves the village for a few days and returns without expectation of attachment).

Huston Smith, in his book, The World’s Religions, suggests that we might learn from them, for tribes may have retained insights and virtues that urbanized industrial civilization has allowed to fall to the wayside. While we are here, working a desk or retail for meager amounts of cash (or speaking in a classroom for trophies), a Pirahã might be playing tag with river dolphins, lazing about in the shade, or hunting and gathering for his next meal.

It would sound like some communal dream, going back to the garden, if it weren’t real. But, the Pirahã are real, and are still resistant to change, to the outside world, to much of what makes our modern reality the harsh one it is.

Now, I’m not suggesting we get rid of our art and our storytelling, but the Pirahã are pragmatic, utilitarian, and at peace, because they don’t have all the complications we have.

In my introduction, I wanted to translate a few lines of John Lennon’s Imagine. You know: Imagine all the people living for today—that’s the Pirahã. Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too—them again. No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man—this is xahaigi. But, as you might figure by now, the Pirahã do not have a word for imagine.

Today, we have looked at the Pirahã language. We have focused on xibipíio (experiential liminality) and xahaigi (brotherhood). And, we have explored what Pirahã culture could mean for ours.

There are only a small number of Pirahã remaining, and they are in danger from the encroachment of modern society. Imagine all the people living for today if you want, or look at the ones who do.

Xigiai.

The story is over.