Posted by Hemant Mehta in You definitely don’t hear this side of the story very often.
Daniel Everett was a missionary sent to meet the Pirahã tribe in the Brazilian Amazon, “translate the Bible for them, and ultimately bring them to Christ.”
There’s a slight twist to the story:
Instead, [the Pirahã] brought him to atheism. “The Pirahãs have shown me that there is dignity and deep satisfaction in facing life and death without the comfort of heaven or the fear of hell and in sailing toward the great abyss with a smile.”
Not that they have escaped religion entirely. Spirits live everywhere and may even caution or lecture them at times. But these spirits are visible to the Pirahãs, if not to Everett and his family, who spent 30 years, on and off, living with the tribe.
Everett wrote a book about his experience: Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes. In one review of it, the atheism bit is put this way:
[The Pirahã] pointed out that Everett simply had no proof for the supernatural world he described, and in the end he found himself agreeing with them. He left the church, choosing a world that more honestly integrated his goals as a scholar with the world view of his Pirahã friends — one where evidence matters.
It’s not exactly atheism as we know it if they still believe in spirits, is it? But still, it’s good to know that some tribes are impervious to missionaries.
Maybe we can get the Pirahã tribe to visit Christian churches — I’m sure the churches would love a taste of their own medicine.
(Thanks to Tony and Yuri for the link!)
At one point in my life I planned on becoming a minister. My designs were foiled by the inability of anyone to prove to me that my faith was the one true faith and that all others were wrong. After all, I didn’t want to join the “wrong” religion. And even worse, I didn’t want to make a career of convincing other people to join a religion that I couldn’t prove was the “right” one.
I think, like Daniel Everett, I would have been ripe for deconversion.
FINALLY! I’m sick to death of white people traveling to far off lands to enlighten the poor, ignorant savages - but who aren’t medical doctors. Advanced medical knowledge and a thorough debunking of harmful superstitions are the only things of any use to people in these cases. Sedentary life is overrated other than those great advantages.
When I think of the opportunities that travel offers to broaden one’s OWN vistas…and then I see missionaries bringing their bullshit with them…what a waste!
Does it ever occur to missionaries that maybe others have minds and hearts and maybe even have insights of their own in other parts of the world? Good for the Piraha for seeing through the same baloney that’s being peddled and accepted around the world.
There’s a funny subtext of sorts to this–the Pirahã also deconverted Everett from Chomskyan linguistics.
Anyways, I’d just like to say, I’m not sure how accurate this paradigm of “seeing through” the bullshit is. I mean, I’m as atheist as the next commenter (assuming they’re not a fundy), but the Pirahã didn’t really see through Everett’s proselytizing as not care about it. Their culture has a very here-and-now orientation, and IIRC I remember reading last year about Everett running into a number of problems when trying to convert the natives, among them skepticism that someone could have even lived 2000 years ago. This isn’t terribly surprising, given that they have no oral history to speak of, and aren’t terribly interested in kinship relations. I’ll try to find the article about that.
I’m skeptical the journalist who wrote the article accurately describes the Pirahã language. “No word for X” is a common claim, but, according to my reading of Language Log, is often (always?) false, just as “Eskimos have 56 words for snow!!” I’d like a more expert take on their language, and what it supposedly says about their culture.
It’s too bad journalism sucks so bad, but I’d like an article written by an anthropologist or linguist much more.
I’m as amused as Ryan is by the subtext.
For those who aren’t familiar with academic squabbles, imagine for a moment if Everett were to travel to the Vatican, and explain to an audience including some very powerful cardinals about how the Piraha had convinced him that Christianity was wrong.
This is about how it looked when Everett came to MIT to explain that the Pirahã do not use recursion in their language.
I think the jury is still out on whether Pirahã is actually a counterexample to Chomskyan linguistics — actually, the science has gotten so lost under the academic politics that it’s more like a mistrial at this point — but Dan Everett sure has found a niche of being a professional apostate.
I heard about this guy’s work before. Always happy to see people presenting the problems with Chomskyan linguistics. Too many linguists fall over themselves to fall in line with generative grammar, even with its growing mountain of problems. (Sorry, linguistics rant, I’ll stop…)
I had no idea this work also brought him to atheism, very cool indeed. Forget creationism, the fundies should start teaching the Tower of Babel theory of linguistics!
Mathew, I follow LanguageLog pretty regularly, and totally agree that the “No word for X” snowclone is abused pretty badly by the media. However, in this case they’re at least (partly) right. Pirahã has no words for integers, according to (what I believe is) the current consensus of scholars who have studied the language. They’ve got words for quantities (a couple, a few, and many), and in the realm of colors, their only irreducible words for colors are “light” and “dark,” though this of course doesn’t prevent them from coming up with compounds to express the larger spectrum of colors. If you’re interested, I believe Everett has a number of his papers up on his website.
Jeff, you bring up an interesting point. How exactly do creationists explain the various similarities apparent in languages as different and geographically dispersed as English, Romanian, Lithuanian, Persian, and Hindi? I suppose this does presuppose an assumption that they’re aware of them…
I had no idea there were so many linguists here, let alone linguists who were skeptical of universal generative grammar.
Then again, it makes sense for the skeptics to be overrepresented here.
Fuck computational linguistics, eh?
It’s an interesting question, whether it’s a good thing that they don’t believe him for the wrong reasons.
Hemant, this is amazing. I have been “lurking,” enjoying your blogs for a month or two, and I have enjoyed every post, more or less. [That post about geometry was hilarious!]
I had heard that native cultures still support a naturalistic view of the world, but I had no evidence.
Thanks!
–Gus
Yay, other linguists! The name Pirahã must have caught you guys’ eyes like it did mine. Hmm, linguistics -> athiesm? Curiouser and curiouser!
I read about this last month and was more fascinated with the linguistics aspect than the atheism.
I don’t know nearly enough to have a side in the debate, but I find his claims about Piraha intriguing. I’m a mite skeptical.
I posted some links to a very in-depth New Yorker article, and one that includes a sample of him reading from the Piraha bible.
http://zeroanaphora.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/godless-linguist/
Would someone care to explain universal generative grammar in somewhat simple terms? I read a few related wikipedia articles and to me the theory seemed presumptuous.
Not a linguist, obviously, but I’m highly sceptical of anything described as innate.
Even colour, for example. I’ve never seen any reason why you and I should have the same image in our minds when we see something that is pink. I don’t see how we have to model any information the same, visual or otherwise, and these differences are what makes some people artists and others mathematicians. Likewise, people who “see” auras. I don’t see why they couldn’t just be picking up on visual clues and then modelling that information subconsciously as a colour around the person in question.
So this tribe is doubly interesting for me if they perceive colour differently.