The Language of the Piraha

April 19, 2007

The article entitled "The Interpreter" in the April 16 edition of the New Yorker grabbed my attention. It recounts the linguistic work of Dan Everett among a tribe inhabiting the Amazon.. the Piraha. Everett had a background I could immediately recognize. At seventeen he became a born-again Christian and attended Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. In 1976 he attended the Summer Institute in Linguistics (SIL).. training to translate the Bible into another language.

Representatives from SIL visited Prairie often.. looking for recruits to the summer seminar (who would go on to become missionaries). I remember a demonstration in which an SIL representative found someone from the audience who spoke a language he did not know and demonstrated to us the tools for picking up a language from scratch. The article describes Everett's use of this same demonstration:

...Everett regularly impresses academic audiences with a demonstration in which he picks from among the crowd a speaker of a language that he has never heard. "Within twenty minutes, he can tell you the basic structure of the language and how it works," Gordon said... [121]

It was impressive to see. But alas.. although missionary work did appeal to me, Bible translation was just not going to be my thing. (This was not true for some friends of mine.. Leigh and Barbara Labrecque went to SIL and then on to an island in the Pacific to translate the Bible.. here is their story).

Everett ended up working with the Piraha in the Amazon. It is not the kind of tribe that one might expect from reading Gates of Splendor.. they were not particularly dangerous.. but their language was unique: "The Piraha... have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for "all," "each," "every," "most," or "few"" (120). Even more importantly for the field of linguistics, they have no recursion.. the property by which linguistic expressions can be expanded indefinitely.

Those may sound like facts of strictly academic interest.. but the implications for religion are hard to overstate. Everett notes that the Piraha have no collective memory and no creation myths:

...he hypothesized that the tribe embodies a living-in-the-present ethos so powerful that it has affected every aspect of the people's lives. Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Piraha do not think, or speak, in abstractions—and thus do not use color terms, quantifiers, numbers, or myths. [130]

If this were true, the Piraha could not have a religion as we recognize it. If one can only speak of what is here and observable, then obviously talk of God and the afterlife.. not to mention belief in sacred events of the past.. are not possible.

The Piraha seem to have had an influence on Everett's faith. His faith waned as he became "convinced that the Piraha assigned no spiritual meaning to the Bible..." (126). A religion such as Christianity that makes universal claims cannot abide by the idea that human cognition could be so different.

This makes me think back to promotional videos for groups such as New Tribes Missions.. which sends missionaries to Papua New Guinea. I have an image in my head of some middle-aged couple pointing to handy illustrations of the six days of creation and the nature of Jesus' sacrifice. I found the following tribal testimony on their website:

“This has been a good time for us now to see what Christ has really done for us. He died and his blood spilled out for our sins and then He rose and stomped on Satan’s head and crushed it. Now I am not afraid any more and my insides are no longer heavy. I am so happy.

“Before I understood that Jesus died for me, my sin – it was like I was carrying a huge string bag not full of sweet potatoes, but full of stones. I was hunched over under all the weight, staggering around walking on all fours like a pig because of the heaviness I was carrying. But Jesus just took the bag off of my back side, and now I can stand up straight and walk with ease like a woman and not a pig.”

I read these things now.. (just like I did back in the day when I was at Prairie) and think: hmm.. I am just not so sure that this is all what it seems. I mean, the externals may be there.. but does it all really mean the same thing?

It's not just religion that has an issue with cognitive difference.. my critique of the film Babel rested on the fact that Hollywood seems unable to think of human beings as different in any way beyond language and hygiene. The unspoken assumption is that if only we had a perfect voice-recognition electronic gizmo, we would see that we are all the same. The implication of this article about the Piraha is that this is not true. Commenting on the attempts of another linguist to do field work with the Piraha, Everett comments: "Just because we're sitting in the same room doesn't mean we're sitting in the same century" (134).