![]() ![]() And as for the book, know what you’re getting into, and maybe even skip around. It’s long, but it “boils things down” quite well. The New Yorker article is wonderful though. These details paint a nice story to follow, but if you wanted to read a pure ethnology or pure linguistic study, this book isn’t it. He actually started in the Amazon as a missionary, but lost his faith and became an atheist. The only downside worth mentioning is that a third of the book is about Everett himself. But also, the least interesting class I ever took as an undergraduate was anthropology-maybe I’ve changed? Or Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes is worth a read. I teach English, and I’m fascinated by linguistics. Now it goes without saying that everything in the book, being as controversial as it is, shouldn’t be taken at face value. So despite heavy contact with missionaries for over a century, no Piraha has ever converted to Christianity. And oh, how the two have had words for each other! This is an a notable theme throughout the book (academic disagreement), though also are just facts about the Piraha, such as how they don’t believe in anything which they can’t witness. He says the two cannot be separated, which flies in the face of what Noam Chomsky has theorized about language. Pretty much the heart of the AmazonĪ lot of these cultural attributes have intersections worth reading about, which go beyond sleeping and eating, and how culture and language fundamentally influence each other is Everett’s main thesis. And they hardly make any tools and they have no art-something that really sets them apart from seemingly other similar tribes. They also eat and drink immediately after getting any consumable, so they have no set meal times, which fits with their lack of set sleeping times. Their language and culture seems to have many properties that make them unique: the Piraha don’t use numbers, they don’t have words for colors, they don’t consider the future, they barely recognize the past, they believe in sleeping as little as possible and they don’t sleep at any set time. Everett is the foremost expert on a very small Amazonian tribe called the Piraha. If you click here, you can read the article, which is great. And for the first time in my life I bought a book that I heard about on the radio. So the broadcast was kind of three-ways-removed from the subject at hand, yet it was also fascinating and I enjoyed its breadth. As these things sometimes go, the New Yorker article was a partial review of Everett’s book Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes, and a partial overview of Everett’s life and the controversy he’s generated in the field of linguistics. ![]() Last year I listened to NPR cover a story written in The New Yorker about translator-professor-ethnographer Daniel Everett. ![]()
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