I had heard about the Pirahã last year when some of the implications of the study started circulating (especially to do with their counting abilities) but new discussion on them has highlighted their lack of creation myths and thrown up a lot of interesting questions about what it means to be human. They have been extensively studied by Dan Everett at Manchester University who has visited them at least once a year since 1977 and spent 6 years living amongst them. His paper was a counter to Peter Gordon's (who did his work in cooperation with Everett) which suggested that language actually constrained the way you can think.

Last year, when the news broke, George Monbiot had this to say about them:

Is this not better than the awful lottery of judgment? Is a future we can predict not more comforting than one committed to the whims of inscrutable authority? Is eternal death not a happier prospect than eternal life? The atoms of which we are composed, which we have borrowed momentarily from the ecosphere, will be recycled until the universe collapses. This is our continuity, our eternity. Why should anyone want more?

A few days ago I would have claimed that the demand for more was universal - that every society has or had its creation story and, as Joseph Campbell put it, "it will always be the one shape-shifting yet marvellously constant story that we find". But then I read a study by the anthropologist Daniel Everett of the language of the Piraha people of the Brazilian Amazon, published in the latest edition of Current Anthropology. Its findings could scarcely be more disturbing, or more profound.

The Piraha, Everett reveals, possess "the most complex verbal morphology I am aware of [and] are some of the brightest, pleasantest, most fun-loving people that I know". Yet they have no numbers of any kind, no terms for quantification (such as all, each, every, most and some), no colour terms and no perfect tense. They appear to have borrowed their pronouns from another language, having previously possessed none. They have no "individual or collective memory of more than two generations past", no drawing or other art, no fiction and "no creation stories or myths".

All this, Everett believes, can be explained by a single characteristic: "Piraha culture constrains communication to non-abstract subjects which fall within the immediate experience of [the speaker]." What can be discussed, in other words, is what has been seen. When it can no longer be perceived, it ceases, in this realm at least, to exist. After struggling with one grammatical curiosity, he realised that the Piraha were "talking about liminality - situations in which an item goes in and out of the boundaries of their experience. [Their] excitement at seeing a canoe go around a river bend is hard to describe; they see this almost as travelling into another dimension". The Piraha, still living, watch the sparrow flit in and out of the banqueting hall.

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This last part is intriguingly as the idea that language, in some ways, structures our view of reality is touched on in The Invisibles (Counting to None):

We're able to do these things to your mind because we have the keys to a wider world which you have not been educated to comprehend.

We have been taught the full 64 letters of the alphabet.

We have words and concepts for things you aren't even able to imagine in the rudimentary vocabulary of your slave language.

There are... things all around. Things you never see because you don't have the words, you don't even have the names. You only learned the 26-letter alphabet.

This is fascinating (recalling the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) but a new report by Dan Everett on the Pirahã has appeared in the New Scientist suggesting the answer might be simpler:

For Professor Dan Everett, of Manchester University, is claiming the language was shaped by the Pirahas' lifestyle, rather than a "universal grammar" that all humans were said to possess in a long-accepted theory developed by the renowned United States academic Noam Chomsky.

"They confine their talk to subjects that fall within their immediate experience," said Prof Everett in a report in today's issue of New Scientist.

He once attempted to teach the Piraha to count, but after several months, gave up. No-one learned to count to ten or add one plus one.

They tried reading, but found the idea amusing and eventually stopped the lessons, saying they went along simply because it was "fun to be together and I made popcorn", Prof Everett said.

However, anyone thinking they are stupid should think again. An anthropologist, who refused to believe they did not have a creation myth, tried to quiz them on it. Unable to speak their language, he spoke through a translator and came back with what he thought was their story on tape.

He presented the tape to Prof Everett. The recording was of a stilted exchange, with the Piraha answering the anthropologist's questions with replies such as "the world is created" and "all things are made".

Then one Piraha realised that the tape would be taken to Prof Everett to be translated. The excited banter that followed, which the anthropologist took for the creation myth, was actually a group of Piraha saying: "Hi Dan", "How are you?", "When will we see you?", "When

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The New Scientist article picks up the story:

Until recently, the Pirahã were best known among linguists because of debates over whether their language has any words for colours, and the fact that it has no number terms. Now, though, they have hit the scientific big time with the publication last year of a controversial paper by Everett. In it he takes issue with some of the most influential ideas in linguistics. In particular, he argues that the Pirahã's peculiar language is shaped not by some innate language instinct, as many linguists attest, but by their extraordinary culture. What's more, he says that Pirahã language and culture hold fundamental lessons in what it means to be human (Current Anthropology, vol 46, p 621).

There are around 350 Pirahã people, living along a 300-kilometre stretch of the Maici river in the south-west of Brazil's Amazonas state. Their lifestyle has much in common with other indigenous Amazonian hunter-gatherers, but what really marks out the Pirahã is their attitude to life. They are very laid-back, accepting things as they are, not fretting about the future, and taking great pleasure in life. Above all, these are a people who live for the moment.

For the Pirahã this is not simply an "alternative" philosophy, it is deeply ingrained in their culture, and - Everett argues - in their language. "They confine their talk to subjects that fall within their own immediate experience," he says. And this here-and-now approach is reflected in their vocabulary and grammar, which largely inhibits talk of abstract concepts and generalisations (see "Sing it to me").

...

Some linguists have interpreted the Pirahã people's inability to learn to count as support for the idea that the language we speak shapes the way we think. This was proposed in the 1930s by Benjamin Whorf when he was at Yale University, and has become accepted by most linguists in recent years. Since the Pirahã language has no number words, they argue, its speakers are unable to learn how to count in another language.

Everett sees things differently. In his paper in Current Anthropology, he argues that it is their culture, not their language that constrains the Pirahã's ability to count. The language, says Everett, lack words for numbers - and indeed any abstract concept that involves quantification, such as colour and time - because of the culture's emphasis on referring only to immediate, personal experiences. It isn't that Pirahã are incapable of thinking in a way that allows counting; rather, argues Everett, they don't like to be coerced or to be told that there is only one correct way to do things. For example, they are perfectly capable of drawing a straight line when they want to make a spirit stick figure, but they could not learn to write the number 1 consistently. What's more, although they clearly like the camaraderie of lessons, they do not value western knowledge, and actively oppose its introduction to their lives. So while Whorfians say that language shapes cognition, Everett believes that Pirahã culture shapes their language and the way they think.

If that weren't enough, Everett also argues that the Pirahã language is the final nail in the coffin for Noam Chomsky's hugely influential theory of universal grammar. Although this has been modified considerably since its origins in the 1960s, most linguists still hold to its central idea, which is that the human mind has evolved an innate capacity for language and that all languages share certain universal forms that are constrained by the way that we think.

There are also some other interesting aspects - they have a rich cosmology it's just they don't have a creation myth (their belief in parallel worlds is interesting as seems to arise from the liminality mentioned in the article by George Monbiot at the top):

This immediate and literal way of seeing the world fits with the Pirahã's apparent lack of a creation myth, but it seems at odds with one of the most important aspects of their everyday life. They believe in an elaborate spirit world, which takes the form of something like parallel universes, with evil spirits inhabiting their own realms above and below the Earth. It may sound suspiciously mystical for a culture supposed to lack mythology, but Everett notes that the Pirahã's relationship with their spirit world is remarkably practical. They claim to have direct experience of some of the evil spirits - a notion made only too real to him during his early days in the Amazon when he was awoken one night and asked to ward off an evil spirit nearby. Marching manfully into the jungle, he soon heard the low growl of the "spirit": a prowling panther.

The Pirahã also use spirits to make sense of the bad things that happen to them. If someone inexplicably falls ill, for example, they might conclude that he has stepped on a "bad" leaf transported into the jungle by an evil spirit from its own world. Conversely, if a wound heals, they will say that the damaged limb has been exchanged with a spirit for a good one. "You get this picture of lots of mutilated spirits wandering around out there," says Everett.

This has launched discussion of why we need such creation myths:

The real reason creation myths are near universal was given by the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Hume observed that without an idea of cause and effect, we would be utterly incapable of making sense of the world around us. The problem, however, is that all we observe is one darn thing after another: we never actually see one thing causing something else. Nor do we have sound rational reasons for leaping from observations of regularity to the conclusion that two things are linked by some necessary connection.

Fortunately, nature has bridged this logical and empirical gap for us. The idea of a necessary connection between events is something the mind imposes on its perceptions. But because this is a deep-rooted and automatic instinct, we tend to think that the causal links have in fact been observed, not imposed by our minds.

Because our minds are thus busy imposing a causal order on our perceptions, we often end up seeing causes where there are none. For instance, we touch a lucky bunny before we buy our lottery tickets and if we win, we attribute the victory to the rabbit.

It is as though we are causation-greedy, preferring a bad explanation to none at all. So we naturally ask where the universe comes from, and in the absence of any reliable way of discovering the real answers, we make a best guess, which usually means describing cosmic creation in ways analogous to more familiar forms, such as a birth or the act of a purposive inventor.

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Which rather fits in with how I once defined magic(k):

I think magic(k) is a ritualised system for (re)configuring an individual's concepts of causality into a less impersonal world view, a tool for empowerment and means to channel one's energies towards goals.

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And also has broader implications for conspiracism. The idea that we prefer "a bad explanation to none at all" is one that Susan Clancy touches on at the end of her book Abducted (page 147) - just because an experience is unpleasant doesn't mean that it isn't transformative and provides a structure to the world:

All of the subjects reported that the most traumatic experiences in their lives were abduction-related. This was no suprise. But some of them also reported that their most positive life experiences were abduction-related too.

The Pirahã have a lot of interesting things to tell us about the way we construct language and much more. I'm sure I'll come back to this ocne I've chewed everything over for a while - I'm afraid the above is my throwing out a number of interesting points rather than forming some great overarching narrative.

From my own viewpoint I see a lot of people who don't like science because it can't provide certainty, just competing hypotheses, but the Pirahã are quite happy with such uncertainties. As am I!!

References:

Gordon, P. (2004) Numerical cognition without words: Evidence from Amazonia. Science. 306 (5695). 496–9.

Everett, D.L. (2005) Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language. Current Anthropology. 46 (4). 621-46.