What is Reddit's opinion of Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle (Vintage Departures)?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Don't Sleep There are Snakes by Daniel Everett

Dr. Everett went to the Amazon jungle in the 1970's to learn the language of the Piraha people in order to put their language into writing and then translate the Bible into that language. He eventually got his PhD in linguistics.

The Piraha people have so sense of time - no past or future. They only use "within our senses" or "not within our senses". If something is not within their sight or sound or smell, it doesn't exist for all intents and purposes.

Dr. Everett may be a good place to find more information for your research.

edit: spelling

And there was also a US Christian missionary who renounced his religion after seeing an Amazon hunting party suffocate a newborn child cause they didn't have enough food for him, making him question what is moral and what not (he thought in this case he couldn't use his Christian morality for example).

that's one of the many books I have read for my hypothesis.. the guy's name is Daniel Everett: https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386120

I'm also from the Comp. Sci. guild & studied Chomsky Normal Form during my automata & grammar course. I also find natural languages fascinating. I've also read a book that inadvertently destabilizes Chomsky's Universal Grammar theory.

Besides for Hebrew have you studied any other languages?

No its not. Your cynicism is blinding you to the value cultures like these have, that our modern cultures are desperately lacking. Of course they had their shortcomings and some were even violent by our standards, but their cultural pathos pale in comparison to ours. You should check out "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes" by Daniel Everett. It's a first hand account of a missionary in the Amazon who ends up abandoning his Western beliefs for a much simpler way of life. It's a fascinating story and in this ever advancing world, one that is becoming harder and harder to tell. Please don't throw what we could learn from them under the bus because of their shortcomings.

http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386120 - Here's the Amazon link, its a great book, you won't regret it!

Great question! I haven't seen it come up as an answer yet, so I hope I'm providing new information here.

There is indeed a peculiar tribe in the Amazon that is known for its almost total lack of rituals or traditions.

This is the only source I could find real quick on the Pirahas and burials.

With that said, I'll give my two-cents on them and hope that someone here can back me up.

Throughout the 70s and 80s, a Christian missionary was assigned to the Pirahas to (1) convert them to Christianity, and (2) learn their language and culture.

He wasn't successful with (1) BECAUSE of (2). During his time with the Pirahas, he came to the conclusion that they are a people without rituals, gods, myths, and therefore could not be converted.

I'd highly recommend his book if you're looking for something about peoples with "non-cultures." It has the perfect mix of linguistics, anthropology and personal accounts of his time with the Pirahas.

Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes

Yes, if I remember correctly, this is noticeable in the Pirahã community, which you can read about through Daniel Everett's research. The following book is a good entry point, but you'll have to search around for the bit where he discusses how the community treats children as independent adults, with little to no protective behaviour.

https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386120

Daniel Everett also wrote a book, not an academic study, more of a memoir. Amazon

And here is a talk he gave to the FFRF (Freedon from religion foundation) on the subject.

Thanks for the response - and sounds like you have thought about this alot. Without really getting too much into the legal side of things i'm pretty sure most countries enforce a de-facto relationship status anyway which is legally identical to a civil marriage. But yes i agree that marriage does simplify things a bit by making things official which can be good. I think you both just need to find out what works for you.

As far as the social construct - don't think you think the whole concept of financial assets and ownerships is part of that? There are still remote tribes today in the Amazon for example that have no concept of financial ownership or inheritance - their languages lack the words to even have a conversation about such things including numbers and quantities...
https://www.amazon.com.au/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386120
As an aside there's a book about this subject from a former missionary who visited tribes in the Amazon but later deconverted when he realised his christian belief system offered nothing to the people he was trying to convert.

Daniel Everett arrived among the Pirahã with his wife and three young children hoping to convert the tribe to Christianity. Everett quickly became obsessed with their language and its cultural and linguistic implications. The Pirahã have no counting system, no fixed terms for color, no concept of war, and no personal property. Everett was so impressed with their peaceful way of life that he eventually lost faith in the God he'd hoped to introduce to them, and instead devoted his life to the science of linguistics.

Our society is very much based on the idea of growing and accumulating wealth and that is something that also existed in Roman times - christianity was a just a religion that grew up in that environment and 'borrowed' that framework. So yes marriage is definitely a system that is designed to secure and transfer wealth. I just wanted to point that out because a lot of people on this forum who are still 'deconstructing' religion are grappling with things they've been taught their entire life so I'm not saying you need to be a hippy or a Piraha but personally for me I find it fascinating to think about how we inherit ideas and values from our culture :D

​

As for your father being an alcoholic and a religious fanatic - sorry to hear and that is a difficult circumstance to be in. Some of the others here might have more insight into handling that then me; I know some people swear by the 'gray rock' method as a way of slowly disengaging from a toxic relationship.

>so apparently he's in contact with another never-a-JW who is also working on your JW's critical thinking skills? That's GREAT news!

Well, as I said before, I know he knows other non-JW people, mainly fellow artists, even though most probably not too close. So I'm not surprised he knows this guy, too. But it's so strange that he writes that kind of stuff now. It seems more like provocation to me, at the moment. He recently still wrote about that "serving God" stuff (and God won't judge him for his personality disorder, because it's not his fault etc.), while at the same time criticizing a few things the WT teaches. It was in that context when he was offended when I suspected him of having used a certain situation to "preach" (and report the time) and said, he's not the JWs' idiot. So my impression is rather that he tries to demonstrate how open-minded and free and independent he is, while still being a JW.

(this is the book he says he read: https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386120/ref=sr_1_2?__mk_de_DE=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&crid=2PPSB0VSY4AWS&keywords=Daniel+Everett&qid=1644007474&sprefix=daniel+everett%2Caps%2C168&sr=8-2)

I don't know...

Check out Don't sleep, there are snakes by Daniel Everett , a fascinating look at another culture with a language so different to what we consider the norm.

Here is a video snippet

Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes

"Don't sleep there are snakes" by Dan Everett. Non fiction story of how he learns the language and culture of a Brazilian forest people. Fascinating. http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386120

interesting book on the subject:http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386120

> But it does just demonstrate to me that he was a terrible evangelist and missionary worker, and had a very weak faith himself if he couldn't relate their lives and desires to the gospel message.

Well his entire talk was precisely about how not only he but other, previous, missionaries couldn't relate to these people because they are very much empirical, skeptical people without traditions of creation myths, or strong beliefs in the supernatural. That's entirely the point.

Everett's goal was to find that Trojan horse that God supposedly has placed in every culture to allow missionaries to spread the good news as it were, but because these people are consummate empiricists, no such thing seems to exist. Everett also made the point that he doesn't think these people are unique, which is precisely why I shared the video.

I don't think the strength of his faith had anything to do with his failure to convert these people. He became an expert in understanding this culture and the language and realised that they were simply not open to being taught stories about people no modern person or anyone in recent memory had ever met. I would argue that it takes quite a strong and determined faith to keep a missionary away from his extended family and friends for years at a time in pursuit of converting these people.

> In what he explained I can see expressions of the gospel already, it was just a matter of showing them how they correlated, and the value of being mindful of Jesus.

I hope you watched the whole video, because it becomes abundantly clear that these people really didn't take to any stories about people they didn't know or their previous generation didn't know. Simply saying he didn't try hard enough is to completely underestimate and misunderstand the interesting and seemingly unique qualities of the Pirahã.

For you or for anyone else reading this comment, I'll point out that Everett recounts his stories in his book Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes.

I would love a Daniel Everett AMA. I also recommend that book to anyone.

Apparently the idea of universal grammar has been around since the 13th century, when Roger Bacon observed that (supposedly) all languages are built on a common grammar. (Whereas, the Piraha probably still live like they did in the 13th century, or the 1st century, or even similarly to 40 centuries ago, etc. At the very least, Everett has said "the way that they live today was the way that they were living in the 1700s."). Later, speculative grammarians postulated universal rules underlying all grammars. Apparently the concept of universal grammar became notable in linguistics due to Noam Chomsky and Richard Montague in the Linguistics Wars of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. But Geoffrey Sampson claims that universal grammar theories are not falsifiable, and are therefore pseudoscientific theory. That such theories don't make predictions, and that the "rules" are simply post-hoc observations about existing languages. Interestingly, regarding science, Chomsky wrote, "On the ordinary problems of human life, science tells us very little, and scientists as people are surely no guide. In fact they are often the worst guide, because they often tend to focus, laser-like, on their professional interests and know very little about the world." Which reminds me of the Chomskyan linguists attacking Everett who's actually done decades of fieldwork. Roger Bacon and Chomsky and Montague were certainly unaware of the grammar of the Piraha. Roger Bacon was a Roman Catholic friar who lived in England, whereas the Piraha have no concept of God and live along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon river. Incidentally, Nietzsche said "I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar."

John Zerzan is an anarcho-primitivist, but Noam Chomsky has described himself politically as an anarcho-syndicalist. Chomsky was influenced by Rudolf Rocker, and regarding anarcho-syndicalism Chomsky wrote, "it seems to me that this is the appropriate form of social organization for an advanced technological society in which human beings do not have to be forced into the position of tools, of cogs in the machine. There is no longer any social necessity for human beings to be treated as mechanical elements in the productive process; that can be overcome and we must overcome it to be a society of freedom and free association, in which the creative urge that I consider intrinsic to human nature will in fact be able to realize itself in whatever way it will." I suppose Zerzan might say that the Piraha already and continue to live in a society of freedom, they have no need to overcome the negative consequences of an advanced technological society, because they actively resist advanced technological societies that come into contact with them. Zerzan might also say that the inevitable consequence of an advanced technological society is humans being treated like cogs in a machine.

Everett said the Piraha are "not materialistic. They value being able to travel quickly and lightly. I've never met another group, not even another Amazonian group, that is so little concerned with material objects." Perhaps the Piraha cannot treat each other like cogs in a machine, because they see no use in machines. Perhaps they see no use for cogs because they see no use for clocks. In Europe, bells summoned monks to prayer 8 times a day. In Islam, the adhan is the call to mandatory prayer recited by a muezzin from a minaret of a mosque, called out five times a day, now using a loudspeaker. (If God does not exist, if there is no actual Allah to worship, then what do Muslims bow down and pray to daily except the concept of time itself?)

The Piraha supposedly have no concept of time. Some people have suggested that the concept of time is incoherent. The "passage of time" is the so-called passage of an event from "future" to "present" to "past", and then it stays "past" forever.

In 1908, J. M. E. McTaggart argued that time is unreal, because our descriptions of time are either contradictory, circular, or insufficient. He said the terms past, present, and future are mutually exclusive, and yet every event supposedly has all three of those properties. If each event "has been" future, is present, and "will be" past, that assumes time to explain time. He says time cannot be explained without assuming the existence of time itself.

In the book [The End of Time](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Time_(book)\), Julian Barbour argues that time is an illusion. He says if the universe is composed of timeless instants (temporary and impermanent configurations of matter), one could have the impression that time flows. He said, "Change merely creates an illusion of time, with each individual moment existing in its own right, complete and whole." Barbour argued that there is no evidence of the past other than our memory of it, and no evidence of the future other than our belief in it. It's been said that when the Piraha no longer see something, it has gone "out of experience", and they have no collective memory that extends back more than one or two generations. Everett has said, "this refusal of theirs to generalize beyond the present and their refusal to worry about the past or the future is, I believe, crucial to their happiness."

Chomsky is regarded as the "father of modern linguistics", but on the other hand, when Chomsky has spoken of politics, he has said that authority, unless justified, is inherently illegitimate, and that the burden of proof is on those in authority. If certain people view Chomsky as an "authority" on linguistics (or simply an "authority" who has written about linguistics, politics, mass media, psychology, science, religion), I could see how someone might try to defend Chomsky's writings on linguistics solely because they like his political views, like his criticisms of US foreign policy, or propaganda and mass media. I can imagine that Chomsky is not absolutely correct in every topic he writes about. And if someone was taught Chomskyan linguistics in college I suppose they might want to defend what they were taught.

Van Valin Jr wrote, "Everett's claim is a direct challenge to the "guru's" teachings, and second, Everett himself was once one of Chomsky "disciples" (he was once a leading figure in Chomskyan linguistics in Brazil and spent time at MIT) and is now apostate. A former true believer is always attacked in a way that those who were never believers are not." Van Valin Jr also wrote, "Chomsky is perhaps best known to non-linguists for his prolific political writings, and while he has always taken great pains to keep his political work separate from his linguistic work, many people take both of them as two parts of a single oeuvre, so that an attack on his linguistic work is also perceived as an attack on his political work."

In November 2008, Daniel Everett's book Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle was published. In 2012, the documentary The Grammar of Happiness was released and premiered on the Smithsonian Channel (and can be viewed on YouTube). In December 2012, Everett's book Language: The Cultural Tool was published.

I suppose a discussion of language and recursion could also include Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation.

Baudrillard wrote "Such would be the successive phases of the image:

it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum."

Supposedly the Piraha have no drawing ("The Pirahã are capable of, for example, drawing a straight line when they want to make a stick figure to ward off evil spirits, but find writing the number one almost impossible."), or art ("Grinning, he showed off a surprisingly accurate replica of the floatplane we had just landed in. Carved from balsa wood, the model was four feet long and had a tapering fuselage, wings, and pontoons, as well as propellers, which were affixed with small pieces of wire so that the boy could spin the blades with his finger. I asked Everett whether the model contradicted his claim that the Pirahã do not make art. Everett barely glanced up. “They make them every time a plane arrives,” he said. “They don’t keep them around when there aren’t any planes. It’s a chain reaction, and someone else will do it, but then eventually it will peter out.” Sure enough, I later saw the model lying broken and dirty in the weeds beside the river. No one made another one during the six days I spent in the village."), or writing ("Actively resistant to Western knowledge, they dropped out of Professor Everett's reading and writing classes when they realised he was trying to write down their language, which had remained purely verbal. "We don't write our language," they said.")