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Note: these excerpt threads are
subject to continual revision and updating as opportunity and priority
permits
Daniel L. Everett: "I came eventually to understand that xaipipai is dreaming, but with a twist: it is classified as a real experience. You are an eyewitness to your dreams. Dreams are not fiction to the Pirahas. You see one way awake and another way while asleep, but both ways of seeing are real experiences... the Pirahas only make statements that are anchored to the moment when they are speaking, rather than to any other point in time... This means that they will use the simple present tense, the past tense, and the future tense, since these are all defined relative to the moment of speech, but not so-called perfect tenses and no sentences that fail to make assertions, such as embedded sentences... Therefore, by the immediacy of experience principle, the Pirahas do not have tenses like this, the perfect tenses of our grammar school days... This principle also explains the absence of history, creation, and folklore in Piraha. Anthropologists often assume that all cultures have stories about where they and the rest of the world come from, known as creation myths. I thus believed that the Pirahas would have stories about who created the trees, the Pirahas, the water, other living creatures, and so on... The Pirahas do have myths in the sense that they tell stories that help bind their society together, since they tell stories about witnessed events from their particular vantage point almost every day. Repititions of the stories recorded in this book ... count as myths in this sense. But the Pirahas lack folktales. So 'everyday stories' and coversations play a vital binding role. They lack any form of fiction. And their myths lack a property common to myths of most societies, namely, they do not involve events for which there is no living eyewitness..." [131-134] DON'T SLEEP THERE ARE SNAKES "The difficulty at the core of my reason for being among the Pirahas was that the message that I had staked my life and career on did not fit the Pirahas' culture. At the very least, one lesson to draw here was that my confidence in the universal appeal of the spiritual message I was bringing was ill-founded. The Pirahas were not in the market for a new worldview. And they could defend their own just fine. Had I taken the time to read about the Pirahas before visiting them the first time, I would have learned that missionaries had been trying to convert them for over two hundred years... Like all new missionaries, I was prepared to sweep aside mere facts and believe that my faith would ultimately overcome any obstacles. But the Pirahas did not feel lost, so they didn't feel a need to be saved either. The immediacy of experience principle means that if you haven't experienced something directly, your stories about it are largely irrelevant... All the doctrines and faith I held dear were a glaring irrelevancy in this culture. They were superstition to the Pirahas. And they began to seem more and more like superstition to me... [their] values of immediacy of experience and demand for evidence made all this seem deeply dubious. Their own beliefs were not in the fantastic and miraculous but in spirits that were in fact creatures of their environment, creatures that did normal kinds of things... There was no sense of sin amoung the Pirahas, no need to fix mankind or even themselves. There was acceptance for things the way they are..." [269-271] DON'T SLEEP THERE ARE SNAKES "When I reached the place where I was finally prepared to take the consequences and let someone else know about my deconversion, some two decades had elapsed since my initial doubts. And, as I expected, when I finally announced my change of belief, it had severe consequences for me personally. It's a difficult decision for anyone to tell his closest friends and family that he no longer shares their foundational beliefs -- the beliefs that make them who they are. It must be something like coming out as gay to unsuspecting close friends and family... Is it possible to live a life without the crutches of religion and truth? The Pirahas do so live. They share some of our concerns ... but they live most of their lives outside of these concerns because they have independently discovered the usefulness of living one day at a time. The Pirahas simply make the immediate their focus of concentration, and thereby, at a single stroke, they eliminate huge sources of worry, fear, and despair that plague so many of us in Western societies. They have no craving for truth as a transcendal reality. Indeed, the concept has no place in their values. Truth to the Pirahas is catching a fish, rowing a canoe, laughing with your children, loving your brother, dying of malaria... The Pirahas have built their culture around what is useful to their survival. They don't worry about what they don't know, nor do they think they can or do know it all. Likewise, they do not crave the products of other's knowledge or solutions. Their views, not so much as I summarize them dryly here, but as they are lived out in the Pirahas' daily lives, have been extremely helpful to me and persuasive as I have looked at my own life and the beliefs I held, many of them without warrant. Much of what I am today, including my nontheistic view of the world, I owe at least in part to the Pirahas." [271-273] DON'T SLEEP THERE ARE SNAKES |