I could never have proved to the Pirahas that the beach was empty. It will take him some time to come to terms with the fact that “two cultures … could see reality so differently. “Even though I didn’t know the Pirahas, I thought that I could and should change them.” That this plan may not succeed is indicated in the prologue, where he is woken by Pirahas anxious about the presence of an evil spirit on the beach. One did not panic in the face of life, however hard.” The stoicism that he finds suggests that these are a people satisfied with life as it is, without a need for a new world view.Įverett went to the Pirahas as a linguist, to study what he believed to be a language isolate (one that is “not demonstrably related to any living language”), and as a missionary. “The hardship that I was experiencing, so out of the ordinary for me, was just everyday misfortune to all the passengers on this ship. (It doesn’t help that the ship then takes a detour for the entire crew to disembark and play a game of football for two hours.) All this, if Everett had been able to pay attention at the time, would have told him much that was relevant to his work with the Pirahas. Everett pleads with the captain of the boat they’ve hitched a lift on, to hurry to the port where they can get to hospital.įernando replied, “Look, comrade, if your wife is supposed to die, she will die. There are hairy moments, such as when his wife and daughter contract malaria. His wife and children accompany him, and bear up well under the pressure, though perhaps not so very well given that it’s a different wife to whom he dedicates the book in 2008. Initially I thought Everett had spent three decades with the Piraha uninterrupted – so that I was, absurdly, disappointed when it turned out he ‘merely’ lived there for periods up to five years at a time. In 1977 Everett, as a linguist and Christian missionary, travelled to live with the Pirahas (which number about 300 people, spread along 250 miles of the Micai river in Brazil) to translate the Bible into their language. (If you really were hoping for a comic travelogue, sorry to disappoint.)ĭaniel Everett’s Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes covers 30 years’ work in under 300 pages. Here, in fact, is a book about the relationship between language and culture embedded within it comes the story of a missionary who went to convert the natives and ended up losing his faith. But the subtitle, Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, tells the truth. Hell, the man even has the Bryson-issue red beard. Here is a book, with quirky title and quirkier cover image, which looks like the most annoying kind of comic travelogue.
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