An extraordinary tribe of Piraja Indians lives by the Maisi River in Brazil. With a unique way of life and your faith. Writer and former missionary Daniel Everett has lived among the feast for 30 years! During this time, he lost faith in the human values of the modern world.
People who do not sleep
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 the Pirah style of “Good night” it sounds like “Just don’t try to sleep! There are snakes everywhere!"
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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 are really in bulk here.
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.
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“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
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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 a metronome, that allowed Piraha to establish a very strange relationship with the category of time. They do not know what is "tomorrow" and what is "today", and they 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.
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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 piraha did not make food supplies. Generally. So that the tribe, leading a virtually primitive way of life, does not care about the day ahead - this is impossible according to all canons. But the fact remains: the piraha do not store food, they just 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 Pirah were warmly greeted by representatives of Catholic and Protestant missionary organizations, they gladly covered their nakedness with beautiful donated shorts and ate canned compote from cans 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 does not know pronouns and if they need to show the difference between "I", "you" and "they" in speech, 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.
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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 is 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 byproduct 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 a 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 a white man trying to run there with strange iron pieces in a box?
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 simply 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 Pirah 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. No? 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 a person 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.