|
Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle | 
 enlarge | Author: Daniel L. Everett
Publisher: Pantheon
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
Buy New: $15.35
You Save: $11.60 (43%)
New (31) Used (8) from $15.35
Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 6010
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 304
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6 x 1.3
ISBN: 0375425020
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.8989
EAN: 9780375425028
ASIN: 0375425020
Publication Date: November 11, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new item. Over 4 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: B20090107232017T
| |
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
A riveting account of the astonishing experiences and discoveries made by linguist Daniel Everett while he lived with the Piraha, a small tribe of Amazonian Indians in central Brazil.
Everett, then a Christian missionary, arrived among the Piraha in 1977–with his wife and three young children–intending to convert them. What he found was a language that defies all existing linguistic theories and reflects a way of life that evades contemporary understanding: The Piraha have no counting system and no fixed terms for color. They have no concept of war or of personal property. They live entirely in the present. Everett became obsessed with their language and its cultural and linguistic implications, and with the remarkable contentment with which they live–so much so that he eventually lost his faith in the God he’d hoped to introduce to them.
Over three decades, Everett spent a total of seven years among the Piraha, and his account of this lasting sojourn is an engrossing exploration of language that questions modern linguistic theory. It is also an anthropological investigation, an adventure story, and a riveting memoir of a life profoundly affected by exposure to a different culture. Written with extraordinary acuity, sensitivity, and openness, it is fascinating from first to last, rich with unparalleled insight into the nature of language, thought, and life itself.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 Life, Language, and the Myopia of Intellectual Pride January 8, 2009
T. Schrock (Dallas)
If you are interested in linguistics, anthropology, ethnography, philosophy of language, adventure stories, autobiographies, Brazil, or Amazonia in general, this book will not disappoint. It is a personal account of Daniel Everett's career and philosophy, much anticipated after an article about him in The New Yorker (April 16, 2007). In the past decade controversy has surrounded the name and claims of Everett, who purports to handle data that refutes much modern linguistic orthodoxy (especially of the Chomskyan variety). In this book, the public finally gets to witness the early existential and scholarly experiences that induced Everett's philosophical rebirth. For those interested in language and its relation to reality, the contents of this book will lodge like a splinter in the psyche.
The structure of the book mirrors the subtitle which reads Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle. In the first section Everett narrates how he and his family ended up working among the Piraha people of Brazil. With vivid ethnographic snapshots and visceral personal anecdotes, Everett carries the reader back to the early years in the steaming jungle amidst a host of challenges and dangers. Everett's enthusiasm to do for the Piraha language what linguists before him failed to do is contagious.
Part 2 of the book presents several unique features of the Piraha language: only eleven phonemes (3 vowels and 8 consonants), no numbers, no color terms, no recursion. Piraha's small sound system works because of other `channels' like tone and intonation. Central to Everett's thesis is the claim that culture `constrains' language, such that major aspects of the Piraha worldview are reflected in the grammar and even phonology of Piraha. Everett advances what he calls `the immediacy of experience principle' whereby the Piraha avoid speaking about anything that is not immediately perceivable or verifiable, or that no longer has a living eye-witness. The Piraha's penchant for speaking in declarative sentences about immediately experience-able things supposedly is linked to the absence of recursion which builds a further level of abstraction into grammatical structure. The claim that Piraha lacks grammatical recursion strikes at the heart of Chomskyan theories (at least according to Everett) and has made Everett and the Piraha language a hot-topic in the relevant disciplines.
The Conclusion recounts how the Piraha `converted the missionary'. Having originally gone to the Piraha to translate the Bible into their language and persuade them to follow Jesus Christ, Everett found himself persuaded by the Piraha that neither they nor he needed Christ, or any god at all. Ten years after paddling down the Maici River for the first time, Everett became a closet atheist. In recent years he has gone public with his nontheistic philosophy, a move which unfortunately broke up his family.
As a Christian field linguist I have been intensely interested in Everett's life, especially since I share his passion for the language-culture-world nexus and for seeing what falls through the lattice-work of theoretical orthodoxy. Having recently gone through several `crises of faith', I read Everett's book essentially to learn how to not make what seems like a crucial mistake: putting one's faith and hope in a scientific epistemology which is inherently amoral. If I were to characterize this book with one word, it would be 'shallow'. For all his ethnolinguistic brilliance, Everett fails to say anything profound about what it means to be human, or about anything at all. This shallowness flows naturally from the Piraha worldview he's adopted, for which "Truth...is catching a fish, rowing a canoe, laughing with your children, loving your brother, dying of malaria" (273). His hollow claim that "God and truth are two sides of the same coin...Life and mental well-being are hindered by both, at least if the Piraha are right" (272) is utterly convincing given what his `well-being' has cost his family . But, to be fair, in the preface Everett warned: "These are my lessons. Someone else would no doubt have learned other lessons...In the end, we just do the best we can to talk straight and clear". For his sake, I hope he's right. For my sake, I hope he's not.
Fascinating; could use a bit of editing December 29, 2008
G. R. Lewis (Langley, WA USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
My introduction to linguistics came in the late 60's, in the heady early days of the Chomskyian revolution. I remain fascinated by human language, and this book was like intellectual candy. Everett's heroic efforts to understand the Piraha language and culture have touched off firestorms in several academic fields. It will be most interesting to see what's left when the dust settles. At the moment, it appears that Chomsky and his faithful are redefining some of their terms in an attempt to rescue their dogma.
There are a few minor inconsistencies in the book that Everett should fix in a second edition. For example, he states unequivocally that the Piraha have no number words, then later translates a passage as meaning "There were two pigs." I contacted him and he explained that this translation was done early in his research, when he believed the language did have number words; a more accurate translation would be "There were a larger quantity of pigs."
As I said, fascinating.
Don't Sleep, there Are Snakes: Life & Language in the Amazon December 27, 2008
Kathleen Casey (Chicago, IL)
I've only read a few chapters of the book but its what I expected. Its easy to read and interesting. Not for everybody, but what book is. If you're interested in different cultures, natives, indigenous people of
the world you'll like this book.
Kathleen
Life and language of the Piraha people December 16, 2008
Bookreporter.com (New York, New York)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Daniel L. Everett is a linguist who first visited the Piraha tribe as a family man and missionary. His experiences over the next 30 years broke up his family, put him at odds with the linguistic establishment, turned him into an atheist --- and have provided us with a fascinating book, which is part Boy Scout adventure, part reality TV, part crisis of faith, part anthropological study, and part linguistic treatise.
The Piraha (pronounced Pee-da-HAN) are a little known tribe of Amazonian Indians who live on the banks of two rivers in territory that, before Everett encountered them, had never been assigned officially to the tribe but that they defended, occasionally to the death. Largely peaceful, they have intermarried and retained a very primitive lifestyle that they consider to be in every way superior to that of outsiders, including Americans, for thousands of years. They are far less colorful than many Amazonian groups, with no decorative arts or inventions. They purchase some pots and axes and make their own bows and arrows. If a plane comes, boys will make models of the planes but will throw them away days later. They live in the crudest of rudimentary stick and leaf shelters and survive by eating manioc, which simply grows nearby without being cultivated, and by hunting and fishing. They have no special rituals, and apart from the occasional visit from a spirit to frighten or inform them, they have no religion.
When Everett took his family and went to live for shorter and longer periods of time with this strange tribe, he was expected to learn their language, make a translation of the Bible and then convert the natives. What he learned was that the language itself held the key to their culture. And discovering the essence of that culture, he realized that they would never be converted --- not as long as they remained as they are --- and he saw no reason to change them, just as they saw no reason to change themselves.
There is an illustrative story (among many) of Everett being approached by men in the tribe who wanted him to buy them a big canoe from a neighboring tribe. With all the right instincts as a missionary and development agent, he did everything needed to transfer the skill of canoe construction to them. He invited the neighbors to come in and demonstrate, and insisted that the Piraha men work alongside them. Not long afterwards, the same men came to him for money to buy another big boat. "I told them they could make their own now. They said, `Pirahans don't make canoes.'"
Everett came to understand that the Pirahans live entirely in the moment. They have no creation myths, no history past the living generations. Their language, which has only a few words, speaks primarily of immediacies, and is so dependent on tone that it can be hummed or whistled for clarification. All verbs have up to 65,000 combinations but only a handful of tenses. Everett is one of the few outsiders who ever learned to speak it, but he believes that after 30 years, the Piraha people still do not regard him as a speaker any more than we consider a computer to be an English speaker. The tribe does not theorize or plan. They just exchange chit-chat. Yet the typical Piraha is happier, Everett believes, "than any Christian or other religious person I have ever known."
The Pirahans did not accept Jesus because they had never met Him. Their simple view deeply affected Everett, who had been well trained as a missionary to confront and overcome almost any challenge --- superstition, malaria, filth, alligators. But this startling way of looking at life as entirely evidential shook his faith and eventually caused him to confess that he had lost it. Everett not only shocked his missionary peers and fractured his marriage; he sent ripples through the linguistic establishment with his claims about the construction of the Piraha language, saying it did not build upon itself and was not recursive, which challenged the theories of the great Noam Chomsky. Chomsky's linguistic doctrine postulates a universal grammar, ever-increasing, ever able to branch out and express ever more complex concepts. Everett was saying that, perhaps unique in the world, here in the Amazon was a group of people whose language did not grow, whose experience did not expand with increased contact with the outside, and who liked it that way.
As Chair of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Illinois State University, Everett has proven his points and earned his laurels. He still visits with the Piraha.
--- Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott
 Don't Sleep, You Aren't Done With This Book Yet December 9, 2008
Sacramento Book Review (Sacramento, CA)
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When Rome is a fairly small tribe called the Piraha, it means that Dan Everett has to give up numerous cultural and ideological foundations that are so second nature to him (and all of us) that he, for a time, no longer noticed that he exhibited them. Picture no counting, at all, ever. No names for colors.
No personal property. These are the hallmarks of the seemingly alien Piraha, and as one could imagine they led to nothing less than a jarring and sometimes terrifying culture shock. Originally venturing to the tribe in an attempt to convert them to Christianity, to try to teach them something, Everett found himself baffled and enticed by the Pirahan language and method of thinking and living, and ended up becoming a student of their way of life, as opposed to the other way around.
In an intense and deeply absorbing account, Everett opens up completely and lays his encounters with these mystifying people out for all to see. Taking on the Pirahan "The past is the past and does not matter. Only now matters." attitude, he includes all of the most gruesome, embarrassing, and enlightening details of his journey with no regard to how any of it may be perceived. What results is a genuine and engrossing book that is both sharp and intuitive; it closes around you and reaches inside of you, controlling your every thought and movement as you read it. You breathe when it breathes, you go where it goes, and after you're finished a large part of it remains behind, so that it is impossible to forget.
Reviewed by Jordan Dacayanan
|
|
|
SEO and Marketing TipsBETA RELEASE | |
