The Pirahã (pronounced ) are an
indigenous people
Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original people ...
of the
Amazon Rainforest
The Amazon rainforest, Amazon jungle or ; es, Selva amazónica, , or usually ; french: Forêt amazonienne; nl, Amazoneregenwoud. In English, the names are sometimes capitalized further, as Amazon Rainforest, Amazon Forest, or Amazon Jungle. ...
in Brazil. They are the sole surviving subgroup of the
Mura people
The Muras are an indigenous people who live in the central and eastern parts of Amazonas, Brazil, along the Amazon river from the Madeira to the Purus. They played an important part in Brazilian history during colonial times and were known for t ...
, and are
hunter-gatherers
A traditional hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living an ancestrally derived lifestyle in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local sources, especially edible wild plants but also insects, fungi, ...
. They live mainly on the banks of the
Maici River
Maici River is a river of Amazonas state in north-western Brazil.
The Maici River is a left tributary of the dos Marmelos River
Dos Marmelos River ( pt, Rio dos Marmelos) is a river of Amazonas state in north-western Brazil. It is a tributary ...
in
Humaitá
Humaitá is a town and ''distrito'' on the Paraguay River in southern Paraguay. During the Paraguayan War, it served as the main Paraguayan stronghold from 1866 until its fall in August 1868. During that time, it housed as many as 24,000 troops. ...
and
Manicoré
Manicoré is a municipality located in the south-east of the Brazilian state of Amazonas.
Location
The population of Manicoré was 56,583 (2020) and its area is 48,282 km2. The town is located on the banks of the Madeira River about downst ...
in the state of
Amazonas. , they number 800 individuals. The Pirahã people
do not call themselves ''Pirahã'' but
instead the Híaitíihi, roughly translated as "the straight ones."
To the linguistic anthropologist and former Christian missionary
Daniel Everett
Daniel Leonard Everett (born 26 July 1951) is an American linguist and author best known for his study of the Amazon basin's Pirahã people and their language.
Everett is currently Trustee Professor of Cognitive Sciences at Bentley University ...
,
The Pirahã are supremely gifted in all the ways necessary to ensure their continued survival in the jungle: they know the usefulness and location of all important plants in their area; they understand the behavior of local animals and how to catch and avoid them; and they can walk into the jungle naked, with no tools or weapons, and walk out three days later with baskets of fruit, nuts, and small game.
The Pirahã speak the
Pirahã language
Pirahã (also spelled ''Pirahá, Pirahán''), or Múra-Pirahã, is the indigenous language of the isolated Pirahã people of Amazonas, Brazil. The Pirahã live along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon River.
Pirahã is the only surviving ...
. They call any other language "crooked head".
Members of the Pirahã can
whistle their language, which is how Pirahã men communicate when hunting in the jungle.
Culture
As far as the Pirahã have related to researchers, their culture is concerned solely with matters that fall within direct personal experience, and thus there is no history beyond living memory. Pirahã have a simple
kinship
In anthropology, kinship is the web of social relationships that form an important part of the lives of all humans in all societies, although its exact meanings even within this discipline are often debated. Anthropologist Robin Fox says that ...
system that includes ''baíxi'' (parent, grandparent, or elder), ''xahaigí'' (sibling, male or female), ''hoagí'' or ''hoísai'' (son), ''kai'' (daughter), and ''piihí'' (stepchild, favorite child, child with at least one deceased parent, and more).
Daniel Everett states that one of the strongest Pirahã values is no coercion; one does not tell other people what to do.
There appears to be no
social hierarchy
Social stratification refers to a society's categorization of its people into groups based on socioeconomic factors like wealth, income, race, education, ethnicity, gender, occupation, social status, or derived power (social and political). As su ...
; the Pirahã have no formal leaders. Their social system is similar to that of many other hunter-gatherer bands in the world, although rare in the Amazon because of a history of horticulture before Western contact (see
history of the Amazon).
Although the Pirahã use canoes every day for fishing and for crossing the river that they live beside, when their canoes wear out, they use pieces of bark as temporary canoes. Everett brought in a master builder who taught and supervised the Pirahã in making a canoe, so that they could make their own. However, when they needed another canoe, they said that "Pirahã do not make canoes" and told Everett he should buy them a canoe. The Pirahã rely on neighboring communities' canoe work, and use those canoes for themselves.
Pirahã build simple huts where they keep a few pots, pans, knives, and machetes. They make only scraping implements (for making arrowheads), loosely woven palm-leaf bags, bows, and arrows.
They take naps of 15 minutes to, at the most, two hours throughout the day and night, and
rarely sleep through the night.
They do not store food in any quantity, but generally eat it when they get it.
Pirahã have ignored lessons in preserving meats by salting or smoking.
They cultivate
manioc
''Manihot esculenta'', commonly called cassava (), manioc, or yuca (among numerous regional names), is a woody shrub of the spurge family, Euphorbiaceae, native to South America. Although a perennial plant, cassava is extensively cultivated a ...
plants that grow from spit-out seeds and make only a few days' worth of manioc flour at a time.
They trade
Brazil nut
The Brazil nut (''Bertholletia excelsa'') is a South American tree in the family Lecythidaceae, and it is also the name of the tree's commercially harvested edible seeds. It is one of the largest and longest-lived trees in the Amazon rainforest. ...
s and sex for consumables or tools, e.g. machetes, gunpowder, powdered milk, sugar, whiskey. Chastity is not a cultural value.
They trade Brazil nuts, wood, and ''
sorva
''Couma macrocarpa'', known by the common names leche caspi, leche huayo, sorva (a name it shares with its smaller relative '' Couma utilis''), and cow tree, is a species of tropical plant native to tropical, humid Central and South America from ...
'' (rubbery sap used in chewing gum) for soda-can pull-tabs, which are used for necklaces.
Men wear T-shirts and shorts that they get from traders; women sew their own plain cotton dresses.
Their decoration is mostly necklaces, used primarily to
ward off spirits.
The concept of drawing is alien to them and when asked to draw a person, animal, tree, or river, the result is simple lines.
[Gordon, Peter]
Numerical Cognition Without Words: Evidence from Amazonia, Supporting Online Materials
p. 5. Science, 2004. However, on seeing a novelty such as an airplane, a child may make a model of it, which may be soon discarded.
According to Everett, the Pirahã have no concept of a supreme spirit or god, and they lost interest in
Jesus
Jesus, likely from he, יֵשׁוּעַ, translit=Yēšūaʿ, label=Hebrew/Aramaic ( AD 30 or 33), also referred to as Jesus Christ or Jesus of Nazareth (among other names and titles), was a first-century Jewish preacher and religious ...
when they discovered that Everett had never seen him. They require evidence based on personal experience for every claim made.
However, they do believe in spirits that can sometimes take on the shape of things in the environment. These spirits can be jaguars, trees, or other visible, tangible things including people.
Everett reported one incident where the Pirahã said that "''Xigagaí'', one of the beings that lives above the clouds, was standing on a beach yelling at us, telling us that he would kill us if we go into the jungle." Everett and his daughter could see nothing and yet the Pirahã insisted that ''Xigagaí'' was still on the beach.
Adoption of Western culture
A 2012 documentary called ''The Grammar of Happiness'' which aired on the
Smithsonian Channel
The Smithsonian Channel is an American pay television channel owned by Paramount Global through its media networks division under MTV Entertainment Group. It offers video content inspired by the Smithsonian Institution's museums, research facilit ...
, reported that a school had been opened for the Pirahã community where they learn
Portuguese
Portuguese may refer to:
* anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal
** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods
** Portuguese language, a Romance language
*** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language
** Portu ...
and mathematics. According to
FUNAI
is a Japanese consumer electronics company headquartered in Daitō, Osaka. Apart from producing its own branded electronic products, it is also an OEM providing assembled televisions and video players/recorders to major corporations such as Sh ...
the school is the responsibility of the
Ministry of Education of Brazil
The Ministry of Education (Portuguese language, Portuguese: ''Ministério da Educação''), also known as MEC, an initialism derived from its former name Ministry of Education and Culture (Portuguese: ''Ministério da Educação e Cultura''), is a ...
. In addition to a formal school being introduced to the culture, the documentary also reported that the Brazilian government installed a modern medical clinic, electricity and television in the remote area.
Language
Anthropological linguist
Daniel Everett
Daniel Leonard Everett (born 26 July 1951) is an American linguist and author best known for his study of the Amazon basin's Pirahã people and their language.
Everett is currently Trustee Professor of Cognitive Sciences at Bentley University ...
, who wrote the first Pirahã grammar, claims that there are related pairs of curiosities in their language and culture.
After working with the language for 30 years, Everett states that it has no
relative clause
A relative clause is a clause that modifies a noun or noun phraseRodney D. Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum, ''A Student's Introduction to English Grammar'', CUP 2005, p. 183ff. and uses some grammatical device to indicate that one of the arguments ...
s or
grammatical recursion. Everett points out that there is recursion of ideas: that in a story, there may be subordinate ideas inside other ideas. He also pointed out that different experts have different definitions of recursion.
If the language lacks grammatical recursion, then it is proposed as a counterexample to the theory proposed by Chomsky, Hauser and Fitch (2002) that recursion is a feature which all human languages must have.
Pirahã is perhaps second only to
Rotokas
Rotokas is a North Bougainville language spoken by about 4,320 people on the island of Bougainville, an island located to the east of New Guinea which is part of Papua New Guinea. According to Allen and Hurd (1963), there are three identifie ...
in
New Guinea
New Guinea (; Hiri Motu
Hiri Motu, also known as Police Motu, Pidgin Motu, or just Hiri, is a language of Papua New Guinea, which is spoken in surrounding areas of Port Moresby (Capital of Papua New Guinea).
It is a simplified version of ...
for the distinction of having the fewest
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...
s of any of the world's languages. Women sometimes pronounce ''s'' as ''h'', reducing the inventory further still.
Everett states that Pirahã, Rotokas, and Hawaiian each have 11 phonemes.
Their language is a unique living language (it is related to
Mura, which is no longer spoken).
John Colapinto
John Colapinto (born in 1958) is a Canadian journalist, author and novelist and a staff writer at ''The New Yorker''. In 2000, he wrote the ''New York Times'' bestseller '' As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl'', which exposed ...
explains, "Unrelated to any other extant tongue, and based on just eight consonants and three vowels, Pirahã has one of the simplest sound systems known. Yet it possesses such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations."
Peter Gordon writes that the language has a very complex verb structure: "To the verb stem are appended up to 15 potential slots for morphological markers that encode aspectual notions such as whether events were witnessed, whether the speaker is certain of its occurrence, whether it is desired, whether it was proximal or distal, and so on. None of the markers encode features such as person, number, tense or gender."
Curiously, although not unprecedentedly, the language has no cardinal or ordinal numbers. Some researchers, such as Peter Gordon of
Columbia University
Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
, claim that the Pirahã are incapable of learning
numeracy
Numeracy is the ability to understand, reason with, and to apply simple numerical concepts. The charity National Numeracy states: "Numeracy means understanding how mathematics is used in the real world and being able to apply it to make the bes ...
. His colleague, Daniel L. Everett, on the other hand, argues that the Pirahã are cognitively capable of counting; they simply choose not to do so. They believe that their culture is complete and does not need anything from outside cultures. Everett says, "The crucial thing is that the Pirahã have not borrowed any numbers—and they want to learn to count. They asked me to give them classes in Brazilian numbers, so for eight months I spent an hour every night trying to teach them how to count. And it never got anywhere, except for a few of the children. Some of the children learned to do reasonably well, but as soon as anybody started to perform well, they were sent away from the classes. It was just a fun time to eat popcorn and watch me write things on the board."
The language does not have words for precise numbers, but rather concepts for a small amount and a larger amount.
The language may have no
unique words for colors, contradicting Berlin and Kay's hypothesis on the
universality of color-naming. There are no unanalyzable root words for color; the recorded color words are all compounds like ''mii sai''
or ''bii sai,'' "blood-like," indicating that colors in the language are adjectival comparisons that are not consistently applied.
It is suspected that the language's entire
pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not co ...
set, which is the simplest of any known language, was recently borrowed from one of the
Tupí–Guaraní languages, and that before that the language may have had no pronouns whatsoever. Many linguists, however, find this claim questionable due to lack of evidence. However, if there had been pronouns at an earlier stage of Pirahã, this would not affect Everett's claim of the significance of the system's simplicity today. There are few Tupi–Guaraní loanwords in areas of the lexicon more susceptible to borrowing (such as nouns referring to cultural items, for instance).
See also
*
Indigenous peoples in Brazil
Indigenous peoples in Brazil ( pt, povos indígenas no Brasil) or Indigenous Brazilians ( pt, indígenas brasileiros, links=no) once comprised an estimated 2000 tribes and nations inhabiting what is now the country of Brazil, before European con ...
*
Pirahã language
Pirahã (also spelled ''Pirahá, Pirahán''), or Múra-Pirahã, is the indigenous language of the isolated Pirahã people of Amazonas, Brazil. The Pirahã live along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon River.
Pirahã is the only surviving ...
*
Linguistic relativity
The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis , the Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language affects its speakers' world view, worldview or cognition, and ...
References
Further reading
*
*
*
*
*
*
* (2007 version of article)
* (reply to 2007 version of Nevins et al.)
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
* (a lengthy article about the Pirahã and Daniel Everett's work with them, with accompanyin
Slideshow Correction appended online.)
*
External links
Google map of the location where Daniel Everett lived with the PirahãA Conversation with Augusto and Yapohen PirahãA conversation with Jose Augusto and Yapohen Pirahã, who represent the leadership of the Pirahã tribe. (Portuguese with English subtitles.)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Piraha People
Hunter-gatherers of South America
Indigenous peoples in Brazil