Image from the front page of my Profile Books edition.
I
I just finished Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes by Daniel Everett. The main title of the book was a little misleading, I thought. When I started reading it I was under the impression it was really about a tribe living a life of constant sleeplessness and hypervigilance, and how those people deal with it. As it turned out, there was really only one paragraph about the tribe’s particular sleeping pattern and a brief explanation for it.
Only later on whilst in the middle of reading the book I became really aware of how spot on the book’s subtitle Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle actually is, the significance, and even the presence of which until then escaped me. While I am interested in anthropology, by virtue of my own educational background which involved both philosophy and linguistics, the book’s focus on language made it in fact all the more interesting to me.
My somewhat misguided expectations aside, I quickly found the book intensely enjoyable. It is well written, and the anthropological observations are immensely interesting. But the real treasure for me lay in discovering its heavy focus on the language and worldview of the visited tribe of the Pirahã.
The author’s mission was namely to learn and study the language of the Pirahã, to then craft a Bible translation in that language. Interestingly enough - he didn’t succeed with doing that. The way the Pirahã language works and the worldview it is intertwined with seemed to make a translation impossible. But it also seems fair to me to say that the Pirahã were plainly not interested in the message of Jesus.
To the reader interested in either linguistics or anthropology goes my wholehearted recommendation to give the book a try. It has many fascinating anecdotes to offer.
II
Here I will concentrate on discussing merely two (related) themes brought up in the book which describe boundaries Pirahã draw in their world. They distinguish between blooded and non-blooded entities and between “Straight Head” and “Crooked Head.” The latter pair is made up of words standing for the Pirahã language and foreign languages, respectively. The blooded / non-blooded distinction separates humans from spirits, with the noteworthy caveat that amongst the humans the Pirahã only see themselves as unambiguously blooded, i.e. human.
Every culture draws these kinds of lines between entities in the world and draws circles around them. It identifies things and names them, and it identifies relationships between those things. The resulting hierarchy of a culture’s most important notions is what we think of as its worldview.
Consider the following - modern - worldview, which rests on evolutionary theory: The world of things can be subdivided into non-living (dead) and living (organic) matter. Organic matter (life) is, broadly speaking, animals and plants. Of the animals there is one subclass, mammals, of which there is subclass, monkeys, of which there is a subclass, apes, of which there is a subclass, humans.
Contrast that with this: First of all, there is man. Specifically, there is man and woman. And then there are all the other things that make up man’s environment. There are also animals and plants, which are part of that environment. This we quickly identify as a more religious outlook on things.
This should give us a sense (in familiar terms) of how important these notions for the self-understanding of a civilization are. Note, for example, that the man-woman distinction is something different than a male-female distinction. The latter is a statement of (biological) fact while the former is a statement of essence, which points at a proper order of things.
The reason why this all is interesting to me is because my blog will in good part be concerned with theoretical questions of modelling, and the representation of ‘knowledge’ in particular. Modelling as such always starts with identifiying and naming entities, and then, in a second step, establishing relationships between them, just like what we’ve said all cultures do (and as their languages reflect).
The difference seems to be that cultures’ worldviews (which is to say their ‘models’) represent truth claims, whereas models in all sorts of technological contexts (in the broadest sense) are geared towards specific uses. Cultures carve up the world in a certain way as an expression of what they believe is true, not least with regards to what things actually exist - in reality[1]. Technological models, in contrast, select a handful of entities which are relevant to describe some system, with the purpose of either predicting its behavior precisely or of building it.
It is my belief that there is more commonality than meets the eye between making general truth claims and choosing categories with a purpose in mind. This is relevant to modelling ‘knowledge’ because despite it falling into the realm of technology, there we make truth claims as well. I think one cannot ever fully separate truth from usefulness. This is obviously something which needs a lot more explanation, which to give is one of the objectives of my blog.
With respect to the usefulness / truth link, I found Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes enlightening in its repeated emphasis that the tribes’ language and worldview are tied to a specific way of living in a specific place - of acting in an environment with all the challenges living in that particular environment brings with it.
With all that in mind, in the following I want to give the reader a brief exposition of two fundamental distinctions the Pirahã make, as promised above.
III
Let’s look at the first distinction between blooded and non-blooded first, and tackle the other funny-sounding one between “Crooked Heads” and “Straight Heads” later.
The kaoáíbógí belong to one of the two sets of animate, humanoid creatures that populate the Pirahãs’ world. The first type are the xíbiisi (bloods), entities that have blood—like the Pirahãs themselves, or foreigners, though the Pirahãs are not always sure that all Americans have blood, because they are so white. But all spirits, including the kaoáíbógí, are beings xíbiisihiaba (without blood; literally, “no blood”).[2]
So of the beings that are ‘like humans’, there are spirits, which are definitely not-living (“no blood”); they are just similar in shape to actual humans.
To give a little background here. Pirahãs consider the experience of dreams equally real as a run through the jungle in broad daylight. We can imagine that they mean this in the sense that both can be experienced ‘from within,’ as a stageplay before our mind’s eye. And spirits inhabit dreams, or are played by Pirahãs in certain circumstances which we would perhaps categorize as schamanistic rituals. These events can be seen, I think, as something of a mix between waking state and dream.
Now, spirits are generally seen as pale, “light-skinned and blonde,”[3] the reason for which is that no blood is running through their veins. Pirahã on the other hand see their own dark skin as a sign that blood is running through their veins. They themselves, in contrast to the spirits, are therefore ‘really’ alive (or human). As for foreigners, though, things are not so clear. We learn that
dark-skinned peoples are humans and light-skinned peoples are traditionally not humans, though the Pirahãs will concede that some white people may in fact be [blooded]-mainly because they have seen me and a couple of other white people bleed.
But there are lingering doubts that surface occasionally[,][4]
Everett continues.
After I had worked with them for over twenty-five years, one night a group of Pirahã men, sipping coffee with me in the evening, asked out of the blue, “Hey Dan, do Americans die?”
I answered them in the affirmative and hoped that no one would seek empirical verification. The reason for the question seemed to be that Americans’ life expectancy is much longer than the Pirahãs’.[5]
So Americans in Pirahãs’ estimate might not ‘really’ be human, that is, alive and therefore able to die, in the way the Pirahã themselves are. Both the lightness of the skin as an indicator of a lack of blood as well as an unrealistic seeming lifespan seem to them to point to the fact that a different set of rules applies to other humanoids, in relation to their lives on this earth, as it does for the Pirahã.
Towards the end of the book, there is a passage in which Everett recalls a situation in which he is conversing with some members of the Pirahã. They address him directly in one moment, only to talk amongst themselves about him in the third person a moment later, despite him still standing next to them, just as before. Where he is dumbfounded at first, upon reflection he finds:
Their language, in their view, emerges from their lives as Pirahãs and from their relationships to other Pirahãs. If I could utter appropriate responses to their questions, this was no more evidence that I spoke their language than a recorded message is to me evidence that my telephone is a native speaker of English. I was like one of the bright macaws or parrots […]. My “speaking” was just some cute trick to some of them. It was not really speaking.[6]
In the minds of the Pirahãs, we see, there is some fundamental distinction between the Pirahãs themselves and all other people (or humanoids, as is the term used in the book).
This now brings us to the second fundamental distinction, the one between “Straight Head” and “Crooked Head.” Those terms are what Pirahã say (when translated literally) to designate their own language vs. all other peoples’ languages. To my mind what this implies is that they clearly think that their own way of thinking is what we would call “reasonable.” So they seem to think their own thinking (and probably behavior) makes total sense, while everyone else’s thinking and behaviour makes … less sense (is less reasonable).
The following passage captures their general attitude towards other cultures.
The Pirahãs’ isolation is due to their very strong sense of superiority to and disdain for other cultures. Far from thinking of themselves as inferior because they lack anything found in other languages and cultures, they consider their way of life the best possible way of life.[7]
Having already found the best way to live, they seem to simply feel no strong need to embrace new technology.
“Dan, can you buy us a canoe? Our canoes are rotten,” the men said to me one day out of the blue, as they sat in my house drinking coffee.
“Why don’t you make a canoe?” I asked.
“Pirahãs don’t make canoes. We don’t know how.”
“But I know you can make a bark canoe; I have seen you do that,” I rejoined.
“Bark canoes don’t carry weight. One man, some fish, no more. Only Brazilian canoes are good. Pirahã canoes are no good.”
“Who makes canoes around here?” I asked them.
“At Pau Queimado they make canoes,” the men answered, nearly in unison.
It appeared that they didn’t make dugout canoes because they didn’t know how, so I decided to help them learn. Since the best canoe masters in the area lived at the village of Pau Queimado, several hours away by motorboat on the Marmelos River, I decided to try to contract one of these men to spend about a week with the Pirahãs to teach them how to make canoes the Brazilian way. The main canoe builder at Pau Queimado, Simprício, agreed to teach them.
When he arrived, the Pirahãs all gathered (enthusiastically) to learn from him. As per our agreement, Simprício let the Pirahãs do the labor, supervising rather than building the canoe directly and instructing them carefully as they worked. After about five days of intense effort, they made a beautiful dugout canoe and showed it off proudly to me. I bought the tools for them to make more. Then a few days after Simprício left, the Pirahãs asked me for another canoe. I told them that they could make their own now. They said, “Pirahãs don’t make canoes” and walked away. No Pirahã has ever made another xagaoa to my knowledge. This taught me that Pirahãs don’t import foreign knowledge or adopt foreign work habits easily, if at all, no matter how useful one might think that the knowledge is to them.[8]
So foreign technology often seems to be at best a nice amenity to them, but nothing necessary. The reason, following the argumentation of the book, is found in their already perfect attunement to their environment - their “best possible way of life.” That attunement seems at times to be directly encoded in their language. Take fishing, for example.
Piraha verbs for fishing mean literally “to spear fish” and “to pull out fish by hand.” There is no word for pulling out fish with a pole.[9]
They have no way to directly and precisely talk about other methods of fishing.
Neither would they need to, it seems.
Like Americans, Pirahãs restrict their conversation to conform to their cultural experiences and values.
One of these values is the nonimportation of outside subject matter for conversations. The Pirahãs, for example, will not discuss how to build a house out of bricks, because Pirahãs do not build brick houses. They might well describe a brick house that they have seen, in response to a question from an outsider or to a question from another Pirahã just after their arrival back from the city. But after that a brick house wouldn’t arise spontaneously in their conversation.[10]
The drawbacks of having a language and worldview seemingly so attuned to a specific environment only become apparent where members of the Pirahã confront other environments. When they travel abroad, the first thing they ask is “Where is the river?” Without knowing this, they are without orientation. The reason is the following: The way the language works with regards to orientation in space is not in relation to their own body. So they don’t have words for left and right. Every direction they do express is in relation to “the” river. So they say things like “Turn upriver!” (or “downriver”).[11]
So what I think “thinking right” vs “thinking oddly” means to the Pirahã, the difference they make between “straight heads” vs. “crooked heads,” is that they are perfectly aligned with their environment and do the right things to live in it - in the best possible way imaginable. Foreigners seem odd to them because their thinking seems wrong-headed to them.
For the Pirahã the word foreigner means literally “fork,” as in “fork in the tree branch.”[12] And it separates their way of thinking from that one of everyone else.
Perhaps when talking to them they would acknowledge that foreigners are simply more attuned to their own respective environments and are not really wrong-thinking. But on a deeper, more intuitive psychological level, that which is imprinted into the language, more balanced assessments of such sort cannot be found, for reasons that I suspect evolutionary biology would tell us that they simply play no role. It goes so deep that Pirahãs see themselves as indubitably human, wheras other people may or may not be human, but it also doesn’t matter too much. When they are not fully living the Pirahã life, they are not taken 100% seriously; remember that “‘speaking’ was just some cute trick to some of them. [The foreigner] was not really speaking” (see above).
IV
Daniel Everett’s views have a clearly pragmatist bent as far as his conception of truth and language are concerned. He writes
The Pirahãs and pragmatism share the idea that the test of knowledge is not whether it is true but whether it is useful. They want to know what they need to know in order to act. And the knowledge to act is based mainly on cultural conceptions of useful actions […].[13]
On more than one occasion he points out that discourse within a culture mostly revolves around subjects relevant to that culture. Furthermore,
[t]hey have no craving for truth as a transcendental reality. Indeed, the concept has no place in their values. Truth to the Pirahãs is catching a fish, rowing a canoe, laughing with your children […].[14]
To Western ears that sounds romantic, but also cliché. While many people of whatever profession - including scientists - might strive to achieve the Pirahãs’ ability to live in the moment, we as a civilization believe that there is an objective truth that can be discovered (through scientific inquiry). Surely there exists a neutral (labeled “transcendental” above) way to describe objective reality from a standpoint that is not directly tied to action.
Modelling for a specific purpose, such as creating the designs for a point-of-sales software system or drawing up the construction plan for a bridge, is always a pragmatic affair, which is to say that the concepts used for solving the problem are precisely those which are relevant to it. They are the ones we want to act on.
Making purportedly universal truth claims like we do in science or when we create an encyclopedia is a completely different matter. By definition, considerations of relevance to a specific problem play no role here, as there is (ideally) no specific problem that needs to be solved (that is, acted on) - at the time of knowledge acquisition.
Everett’s critique of modern linguistics is its disproportionate focus on grammar. Concentrating in the abstract on a supposedly universal construct that underlies every language seemed very attractive to many linguists, and as a result, in recent decades more and more theoretical work has replaced the fieldwork that used to be so common. Informed by his experiences ‘on the ground’ with the Pirahãs, where many of the neatly constructed theories of grammar don’t seem to match the reality of spoken language, he advocates refocusing on an approach that begins with examining how languages emerge within cultures. Language exists to communicate meaning, and meaning comes from action in an environment. Grammar is an entirely secondary phenonomenon which should be treated as such.
To me, these thoughts are informative as the tension between bottom-up observation in the field and conducting theoretical work top-down in the lab reminds me a little bit of our two approaches to knowledge, the one which is focused on building things and solving problems in the here and now vs. the one which focuses on accumulating ‘objective’ knowledge - for later. The question with regards to whether the latter makes even sense is: Is there such a thing as objective knowledge which encompasses all of reality? For that would be necessary, it seems to me, if you want to gather knowledge now, but deploy it later. Between now and then the context is different, so you cannot see any particular piece of knowledge in isolation from all the others anymore - as would be the case when you focus only on a specific problem. In other words, local reasoning doesn’t cut it.
For me, sharing Everett’s pragmatist bias, the possibility of, let’s call it context-free, objective knowledge is an open question. Of course, reality itself is one, that is to mean self-consistent (or contradiction-free). Any ‘take’ on reality which can claim to have some truth to it must account for reality and make consistently above chance predictions. With common sense heuristics as they are part of every human’s life and language, we do this since the dawn of time. But these are always local to a certain extent. As we scaled up our societies to span the entire planet, with the help of technology, ranging across every climate zone and encompassing a multiplicity of world-views, the demand for objective, universally applicable truths rose to untie us progressively from local constraints.
The questions remains, though, if language, or even formal systems are powerful enough to _describe_[15] reality contradiction-free. I will explore this more in upcoming articles.
Footnotes
In Philosophy, the sub-discipline which is concerned with the question of what entities actually exist in reality is Ontology - the study of “being.” Information science, of which models are practical elements, borrows the term to describe relations between entities in more formal terms.
p.137 in my Profile Books paperback edition from 2009.
p.137
p.137
p.137
p.210
p.242
p.75-76
p.204
p.203
The corresponding page on which this is described is p.216. Later on, on p.250 we also find this rather heartwarming episode where Everett was taking some Pirahãs to the city where they kept insisting on walking single file, just like they would do in the jungle - to present a smaller target for predators; walking side by side in contrast is made for easier conversation in the city while walking.
p.20
p.247
p.273
To use a more formal term: re-present.