There is one small nation in the world - only 300-400 people - for several decades causing headaches and at the same time admiration of anthropologists and linguists for their primitiveness. We are talking about the Pirah people - the most primitive people in the world. They live in the Amazon, on the banks of the Maisi River, they are engaged in hunting and gathering and know nothing about God. Their language is the last piece of the once flourishing Murano family of languages.
Let me explain right away that the piraha confirm the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that a person's thinking is conditioned by his language. In other words - “The boundaries of my language are the boundaries of my world” (L. Wittgenstein).
Writer and former missionary Daniel Everett has lived among the piraha for 30 years!
They cannot count - even to one. They live here and now and do not make plans for the future. The past is irrelevant to them. They know neither the hours, nor the days, nor the morning, nor the night, and even more so, the daily routine. They eat when they are hungry, and sleep only in fits and starts for half an hour, believing that long sleep takes away strength.
They do not know private property and do not care deeply about everything that is valuable for a modern civilized person. They are unaware of the anxieties, fears and prejudices that plague 99 percent of the world's population.
People who do not sleep
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What do people say to each other when they go to bed? In different cultures, wishes sound, of course, differently, but everywhere they express the speaker's hope that his opponent will sleep sweetly, see pink butterflies in a dream and wake up in the morning fresh and full of energy. In Pirah style, "Good night" sounds like "Just don't try to sleep! There are snakes everywhere!"
Piraha believe that sleep is harmful. First, sleep makes you weak. Secondly, in a dream you seem to die and wake up as a slightly different person. And the problem is not that you don't like this new person - you just stop being yourself if you sleep too long and often. And, thirdly, the snakes here are really in bulk. So the piraha do not sleep at night. They doze in fits and starts, for 20-30 minutes, leaning against the wall of a palm hut or snoozing under a tree. And the rest of the time they chat, laugh, make something, dance by the fires and play with children and dogs. Nevertheless, the dream is slowly modifying the piraha - any of them remembers that before there were some other people instead.
“They were much smaller, did not know how to have sex and even ate milk from their breasts. And then those people all disappeared somewhere, and now instead of them - me. And if I do not sleep for a long time, then perhaps I will not disappear. Finding out that the trick did not work out and I changed again, I take a different name for myself …”On average, Pirahah change their name every 6-7 years, and for each age they have their own suitable names, so you can always say by name, we are talking about a child, adolescent, youth, man or old man.
People without tomorrow
Perhaps it was this arrangement of life, in which the night's sleep does not separate the days with the inevitability of the metronome, that allowed Pirah to establish a very strange relationship with the category of time. They do not know what is "tomorrow" and what is "today", and also poorly orient the concepts of "past" and "future". So the pirah do not know any calendars, time counting and other conventions. Therefore, they never think about the future, because they simply do not know how to do this.
Everett first visited the Pirah in 1976, when nothing was known about the Pirah. And the linguist-missionary-ethnographer experienced the first shock when he saw that the pirahah did not store food. At all. So that the tribe, leading a virtually primitive lifestyle, does not care about the day to come - this is impossible according to all canons. But the fact remains: the piraha do not store food, they simply catch it and eat it (or do not catch it and do not eat it, if the hunting and fishing happiness changes them).
When the pirah has no food, they are phlegmatic about it. He generally does not understand why there is every day, and even several times. They eat no more than twice a day and often arrange fasting days for themselves, even when there is a lot of food in the village.
People without numbers
For a long time, missionary organizations suffered a fiasco, trying to enlighten the hearts of the pirah and direct them to the Lord. No, the Pirahah warmly greeted the representatives of Catholic and Protestant missionary organizations, gladly covered their nakedness with beautiful donated shorts and ate canned compote with interest. But the communication actually ended there.
No one has ever been able to understand the language of Pirah. So the US Evangelical Church did a smart thing: they sent a young but talented linguist there. Everett was prepared for the language to be difficult, but he was wrong: “This language was not difficult, it was unique. Nothing like this is found on Earth anymore"
It has only seven consonants and three vowels. More vocabulary problems. Piraha pronouns do not know and if they need to show in speech the difference between "I", "you" and "they" Piraha clumsily use the pronouns that their neighbors Tupi Indians use (the only people with whom Piraha somehow contacted)
They do not particularly separate verbs and nouns, and in general the linguistic norms we are used to here seem to be drowned out as unnecessary. For example, the Piraha do not understand the meaning of the concept "one". Badgers, crows, dogs understand, but piraha does not. For them, this is such a complex philosophical category that anyone who tries to tell Piraha what it is can at the same time retell the theory of relativity.
They do not know numbers and counts, dispensing with only two concepts: “several” and “many”. Two, three and four piranhas are a few, but six are obviously a lot. What is one piranha? It's just a piranha. It is easier for a Russian to explain why articles are needed before words, than to explain why a piranha is considered a piranha, if it is a piranha that does not need to be counted. Therefore, the Piraha will never believe that they are a small people. There are 300 of them, which is certainly a lot. It is useless to talk to them about 7 billion: 7 billion is also a lot. There are many of you, and many of us, this is just wonderful.
People without politeness
“Hello”, “how are you?”, “Thank you”, “goodbye”, “excuse me”, “please” - people of the big world use a lot of words to show how well they treat each other. None of the above are used. They love each other even without this and do not doubt that everyone around them is a priori happy to see them. Politeness is a by-product of mutual distrust, a feeling that Piraha, according to Everett, is completely devoid of.
People without shame
Piraha do not understand what shame, guilt or resentment are. If Haaiohaaa dropped the fish into the water, that's bad. No fish, no dinner. But where does Haaiohaaa? He just dropped the fish into the water. If little Kiihioa pushed Okiohkiaa, then this is bad, because Okiohkiaa broke his leg and needs to be treated. But it happened because it happened, that's all.
Even small children are not scolded or shamed here. They can be told that it is stupid to grab coals from a fire, they will hold the child playing on the bank so that he does not fall into the river, but they do not know how to scold piraha.
If a nursing baby does not take the mother's breast, then no one will force feed him: he knows better why he does not eat. If a woman, who has gone to the river to give birth, cannot give birth and for the third day screams the forest, it means that she does not really want to give birth, but wants to die. There is no point in going there and discouraging her from doing it. Well, the husband can still go there - suddenly he has strong arguments. But why is there a white man with strange iron pieces in a box trying to run there?
People who see different
Pirah has surprisingly few rituals and religious performances. Piraha know that they, like all living things, are children of the forest. The forest is full of secrets … not even, the forest is a universe devoid of laws, logic and order. There are many spirits in the forest. All the dead go there. Therefore, the forest is scary.
But the fear of pirah is not the fear of a European. When we are afraid, we feel bad. Piraha, however, consider fear to be just a very strong feeling, not devoid of a certain charm. We can say that they love are afraid.
One morning Everett woke up in the morning and saw that the whole village was crowded on the shore. It turned out that a spirit had come there, wishing to warn the pirah about something. On reaching the beach, Everett found that the crowd was standing around the empty space and chatting in frightened but lively with this empty space. To the words: “There's no one there! I don't see anything”- Everett was told that he was not supposed to see, since the spirit came precisely to the pirah. And if he needs Everett, then a personal spirit will be sent to him.
People without god
All of the above made Piraha an impossible object for missionary work. The idea of a single god, for example, slipped among them for the reason that, as already mentioned, they are not friends with the concept of “one”. The messages that someone had created them were also perceived by the Pirah as bewildered. Wow, such a big and intelligent man, but he doesn't know how people are made.
The story of Jesus Christ, translated into Pirah, also did not look very convincing. The concept of "century", "time" and "history" is an empty phrase for piraha. Hearing about a very kind person who was nailed to a tree by evil people, Piraha asked Eferet if he had seen it himself. Not? Did Eferett see the person who saw this Christ? Also no? Then how can he know what was there?
Living among these little, half-starved, never sleeping, not in a hurry, constantly laughing, he came to the conclusion that man is a much more complex being than the Bible tells us, and religion does not make us either better or happier. Only years later did he realize that he needed to learn from the Pirah, and not vice versa.
Piraha - the happiest people on the planet
(How a Christian missionary became an atheist in the jungle of the Brazilian Amazon)
White people have an amazing "talent" - to brazenly invade supposedly undeveloped territories and enforce their own rules, customs and religion. The world history of colonization is a vivid confirmation of this. But nevertheless, one day, somewhere on the edge of the earth, a tribe was discovered, whose people did not succumb to missionary and educational activities, because this activity seemed to them useless and extremely unconvincing.
American preacher, ethnographer and linguist Daniel Everett arrived in the Amazon jungle in 1977 to carry the word of God. His goal was to tell about the Bible to those who did not know anything about it - to instruct savages and atheists on the true path. But instead, the missionary met people living in such harmony with the world around them that they themselves converted it to their faith, and not vice versa.
First discovered by Portuguese gold diggers 300 years ago, the Piraja tribe lives in four villages in the Maisi River, a tributary of the Amazon. And thanks to the American, who devoted years of his life to studying their way of life and language, it gained worldwide fame.
The story of Jesus Christ did not make any impression on the Piraha Indians. The idea that a missionary seriously believed stories about a man whom he himself had never seen seemed to them the height of absurdity.
Dan Everett: “I was only 25. Then I was an ardent believer. I was ready to die for the faith. I was ready to do whatever she required. Then I did not understand that imposing my beliefs on other people is the same colonization, only colonization at the level of beliefs and ideas. I came to tell them about God and about salvation so that these people could go to heaven, not hell. But I met special people there for whom most of the things that were important to me did not matter. They could not understand why I decided that I have the right to explain to them how to live."
“Their quality of life was in many ways better than that of most religious people I have known. I found the outlook of these Indians very inspiring and correct,”recalls Everett.
But it was not only the philosophy of life of Pirach that shook the system of values of the young scientist. The Aboriginal language turned out to be so different from all other known language groups that it literally turned the traditional view of the fundamental foundations of linguistics upside down. “Their language is not as complicated as it is unique. Nothing like this is found on Earth anymore. " Compared to the rest, the language of these people seems "more than strange" - it has only seven consonants and three vowels. But on Pirakh you can talk, hum, whistle and even communicate with birds.
One of their books, which Everett wrote under the impression of "incredible and completely different Indians", is called: "Don't sleep there are snakes!", Which literally translates: "Do not sleep, snakes are everywhere!" Indeed, among the Pirah it is not customary to sleep for a long time - only 20-30 minutes and only as needed. They are convinced that prolonged sleep can change a person, and if you sleep a lot, there is a risk of losing yourself, becoming completely different. They do not have a daily routine as a fact, and they simply do not need a regular eight-hour sleep. For this reason, they do not sleep at night, but only doze for a little bit where fatigue overtakes them. To stay awake, they rub their eyelids with the juice of one of the tropical plants.
Observing the changes in their body associated with the stages of growing up and aging, Piraha believe that it is a dream that is to blame. Gradually changing, each Indian takes on a new name - this happens on average once every six to eight years. For each age they have their own names, so knowing the name, you can always tell who they are talking about - a child, teenager, adult or old man.
Everett's 25 years of missionary work did not in any way affect Pirach's beliefs. But the scientist, in turn, once and for all tied with religion and immersed himself even more in scientific activity, becoming a professor of linguistics. Comprehending the worlds of the aborigines, Daniel now and then came across things that were difficult to fit into his head. One of these phenomena is the absolute absence of counting and numbers. The Indians of this tribe use only two appropriate words: "several" and "many".
“Piraha do not use numbers because they do not need them - they do just fine without it. Once I was asked: "It turns out that Pirakh's mothers do not know how many children they have?" I replied: “They do not know the exact number of their children, but they know them by their names and faces. They do not need to know the number of children in order to recognize and love them."
Even more supernatural is the lack of separate words for colors. It's hard to believe, but the Aboriginal people living in the middle of the tropical jungle filled with bright colors have only two words for the colors of this world - "light" and "dark". At the same time, all Pirahãs successfully pass the color separation test, distinguishing the silhouettes of birds and animals in a mixture of multi-colored strokes.
Unlike neighbors from other tribes, this people does not create decorative patterns on their bodies, which indicates a complete lack of art. Pirakh has no past and future tense forms. There are no myths and legends here either - collective memory is built only on the personal experience of the oldest living member of the tribe. Moreover, each of them has a truly encyclopedic knowledge about thousands of plants, insects and animals - remembering all the names, properties and characteristics.
Another phenomenon of these extraordinary inhabitants of the deaf Brazilian jungle is the complete lack of the idea of food accumulation. Anything that is taken while hunting or fishing is immediately eaten. And for a new portion, they go only being very hungry. If a foray for food does not bring results, they treat this philosophically - they say, it is often as harmful to eat as to sleep a lot. The idea of preparing food for future use seems to them as ridiculous as the tales of white-skinned people about a single God.
Piraha is eaten no more than twice a day, and sometimes even less. Watching how Everett and his family devoured their next lunch, dinner or supper, Piraha was sincerely perplexed, “How can you eat so much? You will die like that!"
With private property, it’s also not like people’s. Most of the things are shared. Is that simple clothes and personal weapons each have their own. However, if a person does not use this or that subject, then he does not need it. And, therefore, such a thing can be easily borrowed. If this fact upsets the former owner, then it will be returned to him. It should also be noted that the children of the Piraha do not have toys, which, however, does not prevent them from playing with each other, plants, dogs and forest spirits.
If you set yourself the goal of finding people on our Planet who are free from any prejudices, then the Piraha is in the first place here too. No forced joy, no false politeness, no thank you, sorry, and please. Why all this is necessary when Piraha and so love each other without any stupid formalities. Moreover, they do not doubt for a second that not only fellow tribesmen, but other people are always glad to see them. Feelings of shame, resentment, guilt, or regret are also alien to them. Who has the right to do what he wants. Nobody educates or teaches anyone. It is impossible to imagine that any of them would steal or kill.
“You will not see chronic fatigue syndrome in Pirakh. You will not face suicide here. The very idea of suicide is contrary to their nature. I have never seen anything in them that even remotely resembles the mental disorders that we associate with depression or melancholy. They just live for today and they are happy. They sing at night. It's just a phenomenal degree of satisfaction - without psychotropic drugs and antidepressants,”says Everett, who has devoted more than 30 years of his life to Pirahã.
The relationship of the children of the jungle with the world of dreams is also beyond our usual framework. “They have a completely different concept of the objective and the subjective. Even when they have dreams, they do not separate them from real life. Sleep experiences are considered to be just as important as experiences while awake. So, if I dreamed that I was walking on the moon, then from their point of view, I really took such a walk,”explains Dan.
Contrary to Daniel's fears about the possible disappearance of the tribe due to a collision with the Big World, the number of Pirach today has increased from 300 to 700 people. Being in four days' journey along the river, the tribe still lives quite apart today. There are still almost no houses built here and the soil is not cultivated to meet their needs, completely relying on nature. Clothing is the Pirah's only concession to modern life. They are extremely reluctant to perceive the benefits of civilization. “They only agree to accept certain gifts. They need cloth, tools, machetes, aluminum utensils, threads, matches, sometimes flashlights and batteries, hooks and fishing line. They never ask for anything big - just small things,”comments Dan, who has thoroughly studied the customs and preferences of his unusual friends.
“I think they are happy because they don’t worry about the past and the future. They feel they are able to take care of their needs today. They do not seek to get things that they do not possess. If I give them something - good. If not, that's fine too. Unlike us, they are not materialists. They value the ability to travel quickly and easily. I have never and nowhere (even among other Indians of the Amazon) have met such a calm attitude towards material objects."
As you know, nothing changes consciousness and the inner world like travel. And the farther you can get from home, the faster and more powerful this effect. Going beyond the familiar and familiar world can become the most powerful, vivid and unforgettable experience in life. It is worth leaving your comfort zone to see something that you have not seen before, and to learn about something that you had no idea about before.
“I've often drawn parallels between the Pirahã worldview and Zen Buddhism,” continues Everett. “As for the Bible, I realized that for a long time I was a hypocrite, because I myself did not fully believe in what I was saying. Man is a much more complex being than Scripture tells us, and religion does not make us any better or happier. I am currently working on a book called The Wisdom of Travelers, about how important and useful lessons we can learn from people who are very different from ourselves. And the greater these differences, the more we can learn. You will not get such valuable experience in any library."
Hardly anyone on this Planet will have an exact definition of what happiness is. Perhaps happiness is a life without regrets and fear of the future. It is difficult for the people of megalopolises to understand how this is possible. On the other hand, the natives of the Piraha tribe, who live "here and now," simply do not know how to do otherwise. What they do not see for themselves does not exist for them. Such people do not need God. “We do not need heaven, we need what is on earth,” say the happiest people in the world - people whose faces never leave a smile - the Piraha Indians.
Today in the Big World, only three people speak the Pirahã language - Everett, his ex-wife, and the missionary who was Daniel's predecessor in the lost jungle of the Amazon.
What is the language and culture of Pirah? Here are their main features (and the main feature is the extreme poverty of abstract thinking):
The poorest set of phonemes in the world. There are three vowels (a, i, o) and eight consonants (p, t, k, ', b, g, s, h). True, almost each of the consonant phonemes corresponds to two allophones. In addition, the language has a "whistling" version, used to transmit signals on the hunt.
- Absolute lack of account. All other peoples of the world, no matter how primitive they are, can count at least to two, that is, they distinguish between “one”, “two” and more than two. Piraha can't even count … to one. They do not distinguish between singularity and plurality. Show them one finger and two fingers and they will not see the difference. They only have two matching words: 1) "small / one or a little" and 2) "large / many". It should be noted here that in the Piraha language there is no word for “finger” (there is only “hand”), and they never point their fingers at anything - only with their entire hand.
- Lack of perception of integrity and particular. In the Piraha language there are no words "all", "all", "all", "part", "some". If all members of the tribe ran to the river to swim, then the story of the piraha will sound like this: “A. went for a swim, B. went, V. went, big / many feasts went / went”. Also, piraha has no sense of proportion. Since the end of the 18th century, white merchants have been trading with them in exchange and everyone is amazed: a piraha can bring a couple of parrot feathers and demand in return the entire luggage of the steamer, or he can bring something huge and expensive and demand a sip of vodka for it.
- Lack of subordination in syntax. So, the phrase “he told me which way he would go” at the feast is not literally translated.
- Extreme poverty of pronouns. Until recently, piraha most likely did not have personal pronouns at all ("I", "you", "he", "she"); the ones they use today are clearly borrowed from the tupi neighbors.
- Lack of separate words for colors, and, therefore, poor perception of them. Strictly speaking, there are only two words: "light" and "dark".
- Extreme poverty of kinship concepts. There are only three of them: "parent", "child" and "brother / sister" (without any gender distinction). Besides, "parent" means grandfather, grandmother, etc.; "Child" - a grandson, etc. The words "uncle", "cousin", etc. not. And since there are no words, there are no concepts. For example, sexual intercourse between an aunt and a nephew is not considered incest, since there are no concepts of "aunt" and "nephew".
- Lack of any collective memory, older than the personal experience of the oldest living member of the tribe. For example, modern feasts do not realize that there was once a time when there were no white people in the district at all, that they once came.
Almost complete absence of any myths or religious beliefs. Their whole metaphysics is based solely on dreams; however, even here they do not have a clear idea of what kind of world it is. It should be noted here that there are no separate words "thought" and "dream" in the Piraha language. “I said,” “I thought,” and “I saw in a dream” all sound the same, and only the context allows you to guess what is meant. There is no hint of a creation myth. Piraha live in the present tense and today.
- Almost complete absence of art (no patterns, no body paint, no earrings or nose rings). It should be noted that the children of the piraha do not have toys.
- Lack of a consistent daily rhythm of life. All other people are awake during the day and sleep at night. Piraha doesn't have this: they sleep at different times and little by little. I wanted to sleep - I went to bed, slept for 15 minutes or an hour, got up, went hunting, then got some sleep again. Therefore, the phrase "the village plunged into a peaceful sleep" is not applicable to the feast.
- Lack of food accumulation. There are no storage sheds or storage facilities. All meat brought from the hunt is immediately eaten, and if the next hunt is unsuccessful, they go hungry until they are lucky again.
With all this, the feasts are very happy with their lives. They consider themselves the most charming and attractive, and the rest - some strange subhuman. They call themselves a word that literally translates as "normal people", and all non-piraha (both white and other Indians) - "brains on one side." Interestingly, the closest (genetically) to them the Moore Indians were once, obviously, the same as they, but then assimilated with neighboring tribes, lost their language - and their primitiveness - and became "civilized." Piraha, however, remain the same as they were, and they look down on Moore.