The Awful Other - Part IV
The history of anthropology is a far-flung chain of islands, each more inscrutable than the last.
In
his book Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Daniel Everett famously documents his loss of faith while working as a missionary for SIL International (an evangelical Christian organization devoted to indirect proselytization through literacy promotion and translation of the Bible into minority languages). John Chau wrote in his journal that he longed to save the Sentinelese people’s eternal lives and
“see them around the throne of God worshipping in their own language as Revelation 7: 9 –10 states.”
Chau was convinced that to effect this goal, he had to preach openly and directly. The first words he called out to the Sentinelese from his kayak were,
“My name is John. I love you and Jesus loves you. Jesus Christ gave me authority to come to you. Here is some fish!”
SIL missionaries also embrace the spirit of linguistic diversity avowed in the book of Revelation. But their methods are rooted in the belief that it is not through rhetoric but through language itself that you reach a culture and its people. As Everett writes in Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes,
“SIL missionaries do not preach or baptize. They avoid pastorlike roles. Rather, SIL believes that the most effective way to evangelize indigenous peoples is to translate the New Testament into their language.”
In harboring this conviction, the SIL missionaries lay bare that their ministry did not evolve in a vacuum, but adapted to ideas developed throughout the 20th century about the relativity of culture and language.
In
1887, in the middle of Maurice Portman’s tenure in the Andamans, Franz Boas, writing in the journal Science, first articulated a principle more radical than Portman’s assumption that the Andaman tribes were praiseworthy and, now that their pre-contact purity had been sullied, needed protection. Other cultures, Boas asserted, aren’t delicate figurines to be kept safe in the menagerie of supposedly more enlightened cultures:
“It is my opinion that the main object of ethnological collections should be the dissemination of the fact that civilization is not something absolute, but that it is relative, and that our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes.”
Boas had just finished his studies and was working as a researcher and ethnological museum curator when he wrote that. Over the next half century, he would blaze a trail in the fields of anthropology, ethnology, and linguistics for dozens of renowned and brilliant protégées. More than any single figure, Boas is responsible for turning the tide of public opinion against the racialist science of Portman, Francis Galton, and their ilk. Without Boas there would be no consensus that “race” is a social construct.
His 1911 book The Mind of Primitive Man accomplished two goals: First, it definitively demonstrated that claims of the superiority of white European culture in America were specious and could have no coherent grounding in science; second, it argued that the factors of genetic inheritance (which he still called “race”), culture, and language mutually influenced the individual, but none was reducible to the other. “The social conditions,” Boas writes,
“on account of their peculiar characteristics, easily convey the impression that the mind of primitive man acts in a way quite different from ours, while in reality the fundamental traits of the mind are the same.”
That is Boas’s first principle: Individuals might use structurally different languages, might belong to cultures that have different ideas and values, might have different genetic inheritances—but people are people. As Kwame Anthony Appiah has pointed out, Boas’s face was covered in crosshatched scars he acquired by settling disputes with fellow students via Mensur, or academic fencing, as was the custom in his college days in Germany. “For Boas,” writes Appiah,
“the contingencies of culture were written on his face. When, two decades after his dueling days, he detailed the techniques of face painting among Indian villagers in British Columbia, he must have been conscious that his own features bore the marks of similarly community-bound customs.”
Boas’s scars were a reminder of the fact that every person is bound to contingent customs, but those scars were not the sum of who he was. You can’t compare the diverse customs of different communities, or the way they speak, and extrapolate from them the most basic form of human thought. Neither anthropology nor linguistics can offer an explanation of mind.
That conviction wasn’t held by other pioneers in the study of human culture. If you’ve ever found yourself wondering what the difference between anthropology and sociology was, well, good question, but you could do worse than contrasting Boas’s ideas with those of the French architect of sociology, Émile Durkheim.
Born
in April 1858, just two months before Boas, Durkheim’s career dovetails with Boas’s in time, but it carves a conceptually divergent path. Durkheim also believed that our ideas are “true only so far as our civilization goes,” but for Durkheim that belief had implications all the way down. He thought that when individuals interact and attempt to understand each other, they form society. But, paradoxically, society itself was the source of all of the ideas in the first place.
In an essay written with his nephew Marcel Mauss, and then in far greater detail in his most influential book, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim argued that the basis of human thought is religion, and religion is essentially social. “A religion,” writes Durkheim,
“is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.”
A Church, a moral community, can be found anywhere where thought is happening. Ethnological fieldwork focused on “primitive” societies is useful, because such societies are smaller in population, have interacted less often with others, and have accreted fewer “categories of thought.” We may see patent absurdity in their categories, but those categories still bespeak some truth. You have to know “how to go underneath the symbol to the reality which it represents and which gives it its meaning,” writes Durkheim.
“The most barbarous and the most fantastic rites and the strangest myths translate some human need, some aspect of life, either individual or social.”
The most shocking assertion Durkheim makes is that the categories of thought practiced in science—“ideas of time, space, class, number, cause, substance, personality, etc.”—are just as “religious” as any other. He admits that these categories “are like the solid frame which encloses all thought”; they “correspond to the most universal properties of things.” Unlike other categories, they are hard to see as contingent. But contingent they must be, and his grounds are also his grounds for maintaining that all thought is social. He contrasts two categories of his own: first, “apriorists,” who believe that basic categories like time, space, number, and cause are logically prior to individual thought and experience—a priori—and second, “empiricists,” who hold that these categories are inventions of human necessity; that
“they are constructed and made up of pieces and bits, and that the individual is the artisan of this construction.”
(In this dichotomy, Franz Boas was an empiricist.) Durkheim asserts that both sides of this conflict are insufficient: the empiricist has no respect for the fact that these basic categories of the mind are universal and necessary—there can be no thinking without them. The apriorist, meanwhile, cannot account for where these categories come from. If the grasp of logical thought, which is based on these fundamental categories, is so comprehensive, why can’t it explain the source of those categories?
Durkheim offers a middle road explanation that he thinks can breech the impasse: the categories are social in origin. Societies establish moral categories because they make cosmological order possible—comprehension happens at the communal level; each individual person is an embodied instance of the society making moral sense to itself. If there is internal conflict, and the moral categories are violated, the categories also allow for disruption and moral revival to happen in an internally consistent way. Durkheim says that logical categories are just like moral categories: They are internally consistent and cannot be violated.
“They represent the most general relations which exist between things; surpassing all our other ideas in extension, they dominate all the details of our intellectual life. If men did not agree upon these essential ideas at every moment, . . . all contact between their minds would be impossible, and with that, all life together. Thus society could not abandon the categories to the free choice of the individual without abandoning itself. If it is to live there is not merely need of a satisfactory moral conformity, but also there is a minimum of logical conformity beyond which it cannot safely go.”
This is a magic trick. Durkheim wants to say that individuals cannot stray from rational thought because that would violate the internal consistency of the socially-determined categories of rational thought. But if those categories are socially determined, then, rationally—following one of the most rudimentary categories of thought, namely the necessary consequences of a particular grounds—I have no reason to think they are universally valid. Durkheim is really just making the apriorist’s argument. The insistence that a priori knowledge is socially determined is patently absurd. On another level, though, there is an internal consistency to his rationalization—the appeal to social determinism is a myth that translates some human need, some aspect of life, both individual and social.
The need remains as urgent today as it was 100 years ago. If Boas made the moral case for declaring that “race” is a social construct, Durkheim gave us the theoretical tools for explaining what “social construct” even means. And it didn’t take long for the appeal of the sociological origin of categories to catch on back then, either. It was immediately apparent to Durkheim’s contemporaries.
Alfred
R. Radcliffe-Brown was a young up-and-coming anthropologist in 1912. He had studied at Cambridge, then in 1906 had conducted field research among the Onge on Little Andaman to hone his practical skills. His initial thesis was written in the manner of empirical description espoused by Franz Boas. But then Radcliffe-Brown read and was enamored by the work of Durkheim and Marcel Maus. In a series of correspondences with Maus, he delineated some qualms he had with Durkheim’s theories about the origins of social organization, but he emphasized that in principle he was enthralled with Durkheim’s project. “In England,” wrote Radcliffe-Brown,
“Durkheim’s views are either ignored or misunderstood. It is to be hoped that the new book will do something to alter this.”
That “new book” was a radical reimagining of Radcliffe-Brown’s Cambridge thesis, titled simply The Andaman Islanders, published in 1922 and including two new sections that interpreted the social and psychological functions that customs and myths serve in maintaining the social order of the Great Andamanese and Onge peoples. In Radcliffe-Brown’s portrayal, there are variations between them, but collectively the Andaman Islanders’ existence is dominated by structured rituals based on the acquisition of food from the rainforests of the interiors and the mangrove swamps and coral coves on the perimeters of the islands. The lives of individual men and women are separated into three phases: childhood, adolescence, and adulthood; and the transition of each phase is marked by elaborate rituals in which they are denied certain foods—among them yams, and the meat of dugong (saltwater cousins of manatees) and birds—and then slowly permitted their consumption by degrees.
Two ceremonies are the major points of ritual inflection in the process of becoming adults: for the groups that live along the coast, the denial and then communal eating of turtle meat (turtles being their largest source of sustenance); and for the groups that live in the rainforest, a similar wild pig-eating rite. At the end of aka-op—the period of abstinence before adolescents can partake of those respective meats—their faces are painted with clay, they are covered in the animal’s fat by an older man, served the meat, and must eat it in silence. Aka-op ends for girls at their first menstruation. For boys, elders decide whether they are ready to endure a process of bodily mutilation: they must dance throughout a night, bathe in the sea, then receive three rows of cuts along their backs while sitting silently with a fire behind them.
Radcliffe-Brown interprets these rituals as essentially ascetic—but not necessarily with the associations you might have with asceticism in other contexts. It’s not about personal mastery; the idea is not that the body is faulty and in need of punishment to make it fitter and less needy. The idea is to make a moral ideal become a lived and visceral experience. The well-being of the group depends on a sense of fairness, modesty, and solidarity in each individual, for the acquisition of food is a harrying ordeal, and death is an aways-present alternative to living.
But it is not so much death that is abhorrent as the uncertainty of a world that is out of order. As Radcliffe-Brown conveys it, the Great Andamanese tribes treat the apportionment of people between the realms of the living and the dead just like the apportionment of food between the young and the mature. When a person at first dies, they’re buried, often under or near a tree. Then the people of the tribe wait till their flesh has decayed and only their bones are left. This is a relatively long period (although in the Andaman climate, it’s not too long), and during that time the names of the dead are not uttered. They still partially belong to the community of the living and are not yet spirits. They’re in between. They’re adolescents. When their bones are finally free of flesh, they are cleaned in the ocean, and the skulls are decorated and passed along to friends and relatives.
The Akar-Bale subgroup, which went extinct after about 1931, had a myth about the origin of death, which Radcliffe-Brown recorded in The Andaman Islanders. I’ll relate it in my own words:
Yaramurud, an adolescent of his tribe, lived together with his brother Toau and his mother Kalwadi. One day, he went hunting for a wild pig but found nothing to kill. Back at home, Kalwadi laid some of their remaining pork in front of him to eat, but when he reached behind himself to grab the knife from the sling he had hanging around his neck, he accidentally sliced into his back. His mother pronounced, “You are dead now, so you’ll have to go. You aren’t wanted here anymore.” Then she gathered him up, carried him to the forest and buried him. But Yaramurud soon returned home.
“Oh! I thought you would be gone,” exclaimed Kalwadi, glancing at him in horror.
“But mother, I’m not dead! Why did you bury me?”
She replied that she was certain he was dead, took him back to the forest, and buried him all over again. He returned once more, and the whole process was repeated—three times in total. Finally, fed up, Kalwadi took Yaramurud to a big hollow tree, kicked it, then told her son to climb inside. He did as he was told, and when she was satisfied he’d gone far enough, Kalwadi called to him.
“So, can you hear me, son?”
“Yes!”
“Can you hear the spirits?”
“Yes!”
“How do they speak?”
“‘To kit!’”
“That’s it, then. You’re finished now. You won’t come back.”
Satisfied, Kalwadi returned home. But Yaramurud did come back, as a ghost, because he wanted to see his brother Toau. When Toau, who was busy building a hut, saw the ghost of Yaramurud, he immediately collapsed and was dead, too. Kalwadi then told the rest of the tribe that even though no one had ever died before, now they would all die just like her two sons.
We are used to encountering people in fairy tales and myths whose motives and gossamer logic could only seem coherent in dreams. But Kalwadi’s motives do cohere: It’s as if the Andaman culture were self-aware, embodied in Kalwadi, desperately trying to be complete by finding the means, among the edifice of symbols and materials that comprise it, to contain the inexplicable within itself.
Franz
Boas read a paper at the “International Congress of Arts and Science,” a colloquium held during the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis
“to emphasize the relationships between the various branches of knowledge, and thus to encourage harmony and unification in the intellectual world,”
in which he expedited a process that had been taking shape organically throughout the nineteenth century: reconfiguring how anthropology was understood, pushing ideas through the membrane that separated older fields like ethnology, ecology, anatomy, archeology, and folklore, and reconstituting them into a four-field whole: 1) physical anthropology (the progenitor of paleogenetics), 2) cultural anthropology, 3) archeology, and 4) linguistics. Today the boundaries between those fields are less porous than Boas envisioned. (It has been argued that a common ethic still binds them, but the dissension the paleogeneticist David Reich has expressed with the “orthodoxy” that he believes holds sway over other branches of anthropology than his own soberingly refutes that fantasy.)
Even 100 years ago, however, there was something counterintuitive about the inclusion of linguistics as one of the four fields of anthropology. We tend to think of language as deeply personal and bound up with our conscious experiences, and it seems awkward to regard the idiosyncratic expressions of people’s minds as natural phenomena to be described and cataloged. Although he was an enthusiastic documentarian of languages, Boas was amenable to that skepticism. In the Handbook of American Indian Languages, a nearly 3000-page tome documenting the morphological features of the diverse native languages of North America (and a seminal work of early linguistic typology), Boas stipulates that language is not like other sorts of ethnological phenomena; it is bound up with the nature of human thought in ways that material culture isn’t.
Contrary to the conscious and rational “categories of the mind” that Durkheim describes, Boas maintains that language emerges from subconscious functions that are pre-rational:
“The behavior of primitive man makes it perfectly clear that all these concepts, although they are in constant use, have never risen into consciousness, and that consequently their origin must be sought, not in rational, but in entirely unconscious, we may perhaps say instinctive, processes of the mind.”
Subconscious tendencies like, say, classifying people and animals according to sex or distinguishing animate versus inanimate objects, might manifest themselves in certain languages with phenomena like grammatical gender (el mar, la mer, das Meer) or the distinction between which/who, but we shouldn’t believe that such structures determine how people think in any given culture. We shouldn’t imagine “that there is any direct relation between the culture of a tribe and the language they speak, except in so far as the form of the language will be moulded by the state of culture, but not in so far as a certain state of culture is conditioned by morphological traits of the language.”
Other anthropologists didn’t heed that caveat. Boas’s own pupil Edward Sapir suggested that the language a people spoke tinged how they understood reality, but Sapir finally rejected the idea language could actually shape how people thought. The linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, on the other hand, believed exactly that. The concept of “linguistic relativity” often carries the moniker the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,” but unlike Sapir, Whorf was single-minded in the belief that the traits of a language influence how groups of people think and that languages are as diverse as the cultures who use them.
Ideas sometimes have a life of their own, and in all likelihood you've encountered two of the examples Whorf used as evidence for his hypothesis: One was the suggestion that, because the Yupik and Inuit languages have many more words for snow than most well-studied European languages, the Yupik and Inuit people can perceive various kinds of snow that speakers of those other languages are oblivious to. The other example you might have encountered is that “the Hopi Indians have no concept of time.” The former is actually pretty close to what Whorf suggested, and it was quickly debunked. The latter is an oversimplification of Whorf’s hypothesis. He actually wrote that the Hopi language lacked verb tenses or any other
“words, grammatical forms, constructions or expressions that refer directly to what we call time, or to past, present, or future, or to enduring or lasting . . . .”
Nevertheless Whorf maintained that, based on his ethnological experience, the Hopi could comprehend any phenomenon they might encounter and speak about it effortlessly. Thus, he conjectured that the Hopi possessed a completely different metaphysics, minus the infinite space and “flowing time” of our own, where everything could be split into subjective and objective categories: what we call the future, as well as our internal human experiences, belong to the subjective half; while the past, the present, and all observable phenomena—physical and social—belong to the objective half.
It’s enticing to believe that metaphysical concepts could be rejiggered in this way, like playing cards reshuffled. But if you think about it, Whorf’s version of Hopi metaphysics doesn’t sound much different from the common-sense way you or I consider time—or what the sciences say, for that matter: The past and the present are real in a way that the future just isn’t—yet. The experience of time is relative to distance and speed, but the “arrow of time” flows in one direction. The future is the domain of the subject. As for Hopi vocabulary and grammatical structures, the German-American linguist Ekkehart Malotki has definitively shown that the Hopi have plenty of ways of talking about years, months, seasons, days, durations, times of day, and times a day; and by attaching suffixes to their verbs, they can employ mode, aspect, and tense to talk about time. The Hopi timelessness controversy flares up occasionally, but has largely been laid to rest under the conviction that time is a universal feature of conscious experience.
In one sense, the spirit of Whorf’s hypothesis has been upheld by linguists who emphasize just such universality in human conscious thought. Following Whorf—and contrary to empiricists like Boas, or “apriorists” like Immanuel Kant—these universalists believe that the structure of language determines conscious thought. But unlike Whorf, they believe that the diversity of traits between languages is superficial, and that the very fact that humans have capacities for speech and thought far beyond those of other animals means that there are universal language structures that undergird all natural thought and speech. The linguist most associated with this line of inquiry is Noam Chomsky.
Chomsky’s
renown is biggest today in circles of political activism, where he has long been an outspoken critic of American imperialism and Zionist aggression. In fact, his reputation as a political and social critic precedes him so profoundly that even writing this perfunctory description seems shabby and unnecessary. But as outsized as his reputation for political criticism is, it’s nearly as hard to be hyperbolic about his influence on the cognitive sciences. The vast swaths of American academia industrially armed with fMRI machines scanning anything resembling a brain are unimaginable without Chomsky’s suggestion that those brains are computers running on nature’s ur-firmware.
More controversial is Chomsky’s contention that that firmware is grammatical, and that all human speech is finally reducible to it. The basis of Chomsky’s grammar is recursion. In the broadest of terms, recursion just means defining a thing—any thing—in terms of itself or the kind of thing it is, mirror in mirror. In Chomskyan grammar (also known as “generative grammar,” because if you follow its rules, you can generate a grammatically complete sentence in a given language), the object of recursion is one atomic syntactical unit: the subject-predicate phrase.
If you’re old enough, perhaps you had to diagram a sentence when you were in school. That sort of diagraming restricted itself to clarifying clauses. Take the sentence The machine formed bearings: in that sentence, there is only one clause, formed is its predicate, and the so-called “arguments” that help complete the meaning of the predicate are Machine (the subject) and bearings (the direct object). From this perspective, there is a superfluous determiner, The, which needs to be accounted for, so it’s embedded as part of the subject’s noun phrase—but it’s not part of the main show.
From a Chomskyan perspective, however, the predicate is everything other than a subject. And any human utterance entails lots of subject-predicate phrases stacked inside each other—turtles all the way down. In the same sentence from above, The machine formed bearings, the phrase The machine is the subject and the rest is the predicate. So far so good. But simultaneously, The machine is also a subject-predicate phrase, where the determiner The is the subject and the noun machine is the predicate. In that phrase, machine is what the The does.
If that sounds absurd to you, you’re not alone. Plenty of linguists have been dubious about the explanatory power of this school of syntax—although for much of the second half of the twentieth century and well into the present century, an intuition has persisted that, if not exactly Chomsky’s system, some form of syntax has to underlie human language. I understand where they’re coming from. My day job is teaching English academic composition at the University of Hamburg. The students come from diverse, often multilingual backgrounds. In my experience, even the most sophisticated non-native speakers tend to lose track of the thing they are referring back to when they write complex sentences with lots of clauses and phrases stacked inside each other. Sometimes a well-placed anaphoric noun can help clarify some abstract antecedent from earlier in the sentence. And to find out where the confusion lies, I find it helpful to have them diagram their sentences using Chomskyan syntactical “trees.” Nevertheless, I would say embedding and recursion are nothing more (or less) than fantastic tools for expediently and efficiently organizing thoughts. They are just two among a myriad of possible features, all of which exist in some languages—but none of which exist in all languages. That’s what Daniel Everett thinks, too.
In 2005, Everett published a paper in Science, in which he argued that the Pirahãs—an isolated tribe of Amazonian Indians whose language seems unrelated to any other remaining language—fail to exhibit many linguistic features that might be considered nearly universal:
“number, numerals, a concept of counting and of terms for quantification, . . . color terms and embedding,”
pronouns complex enough to refer to different kinds of people and things; as well as social features one would reasonably expect any culture to have: a modestly intricate system of kinship, creation myths, “individual or collective memory of more than two generations past.” He explained all of this in defense of a conclusion about the Pirahãs that, if true, had implications for fundamental theories of culture and language. To wit: he asserted that the Pirahãs’ most deeply-held value is groundedness in the simplest and clearest facts a person can glean from their own experience—what Everett calls “the immediacy of experience.” If this value genuinely manifests itself in all those absent features of language and culture, that would imply that the structures of language a culture employs tie in with, are maybe even determined by, cultural values. Recursion itself is hardly mentioned at all until the end of Everett’s paper, when he considers what repercussions his conclusions might have for specific work being done in linguistics:
“For advocates of universal grammar the arguments here present a challenge—defending an autonomous linguistic module that can be affected in many of its core components by the culture in which it “grows.” If the form or absence of things such as recursion, sound structure, word structure, quantification, numerals, number, and so on is tightly constrained by a specific culture, as I have argued, then the case for an autonomous, biologically determined module of language is seriously weakened.”
This, needless to say, didn’t sit well with Chomsky and his ilk. In an interview in the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo, Chomsky himself claimed that Everett had once been a decent descriptive linguist, but had become a “charlatan” other linguists avoided working with. The linguists Andrew Nevins, David Pesetsky, and Cilene Rodrigues wrote scathing critiques and co-authored a reassessment of Everett’s work. They contended that Pirahã does exhibit embedded clauses and recursion of a sort. Everett offered a rebuttal.
The feud took on new dimensions when Everett published Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes. That book is a platypus of autobiography, philosophizing, and popular science writing, and in one chapter he tackles the debate about recursion that ensued after his article was published. He argued that the insistence that embedded clauses were present in every language had been compelled by the centrality of recursion in computer science and artificial intelligence. The entire enterprise of those fields is explaining human cognition and reason, so it would be elegant if you could show that all linguistic behavior modeled exactly the structures that AI says are the basis of cognition, all while explaining the human capacity for speech—two birds with one stone. When he showed that the Pirahãs did not use recursion in their language, Everett insisted, he put a damper on things. And he made himself even less popular when he noted that in response to his evidence, the Chomskyites had started moving the goalposts:
“The newest definition of recursion to emerge from Chomsky’s school makes recursion a form of compositionality. Simply put, it says that you can put parts together to make something new and you can do that endlessly. Under this novel notion of recursion, which is not accepted by any mathematical linguists or computer scientists that I know of, if I can put words together to form a sentence, that is recursion, and if I can put sentences together to form a story, that is recursion.”
The problem is the Chomskyites want to prove that human reason is based on recursive syntax, so any time they see reasoning, they proclaim that it’s proof of recursion. They put the cart before the horse.
The last straw came in 2016, when Tom Wolfe, author of The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and From Bauhaus to Our House—a social satirist of broad brush strokes and big, undisciplined swings of the bat, whose entire oeuvre is based around taking public figure he finds self-important down a couple of pegs—set his sights on Chomsky. His book The Kingdom of Speech first tries its hand at character-assassinating Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution (of all things) and then turns its gun on linguistics. In that latter section, the book takes Everett as its ruddy-hued champion and Chomsky as its pasty villain. When it engages questions of linguistics and evolution, it is an over-baked mess. But Wolfe (who died in 2018) was never an ideas man; he was a savant whose outsized talent was in recognizing fools. And when he takes on the hypocrisies of Everett’s critics, he is spot on.
The Kingdom of Speech marked an intense escalation of the debate. It became a topic of sensation for the general public, and suddenly opinion writers in most major publications offered takes or held forth on Wolfe’s take downs. Journalists sought out interviews with both Everett and Chomsky. Chomsky alleged in an interview with La Voce di New York that Everett’s thesis that Pirahãs lacked recursion had “been shown by careful scholarship” to be mistaken. And in an interview in the New York Times, he insisted that even if Everett’s conclusion were true, it wouldn’t matter, because it’s about the Pirahã
“language itself, not about the common human faculty of language.”
Noam Chomsky is circumspect. So are those numerous linguists who have staked their reputations on following his theory of universal grammar. And Daniel Everett thinks he knows why: It’s not easy to give up on an idea once you’re invested in it. In an article he composed for the digital magazine Aeon, Everett writes that many people have immense respect for Chomsky. “And in my opinion he has earned every bit of that respect.”
“I admire him tremendously, having spent the first 25 years of my career working in his theory. . . . [H]owever, if Chomsky is wrong, many research careers built on his theory are on shaky ground. One linguist asked me if the fact that so many very smart people were attracted to Chomsky’s theory didn’t indicate that it was right. Not at all. There have been many brilliant theologians. But I still don’t believe there is a god to theologise about. Intelligence is no guarantee of being right, and science is not a democracy.”
In
book VII of the Confessions, St. Augustine relates how excruciating but also exhilarating it was to abandon Neoplatonism and Manichaeism. It became easier for him when he followed the advice of a church elder named Simplicanus, who told him to simply read fewer books of philosophy and instead read about the lives of converted saints. In the last chapter of Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Everett similarly relates his inner turmoil in carrying around profound doubts about his faith, all while working as a missionary, and about what effects those doubts might have on his family and career. Taking to heart what he saw as the central values of the Pirahãs made it easier for him to embrace atheism: The past can have little effect on you, it’s over, and you don’t need to worry about it; the future doesn’t exist yet; and only that which you immediately experience should hold any sway over you. Everett’s first marriage ended after 35 years and he was estranged for a time from his adult children, though they have now reconciled.
Since 2009, Everett has been denied access to the Pirahãs because FUNAI, the Brazilian agency tasked with protecting native populations, has alleged that his research doesn’t meet scientific standards. Particularly concerning is his description of Pirahã culture, which they label racist, as it seems to imply the Pirahãs are feebleminded and inferior. As FUNAI would have it, Everett portrays the culture that served collectively as his Simplicanus like a bunch of simpletons. He forcefully rejects the accusation, countering that his portrayal is simply descriptive, though full of admiration. The Pirahãs value immediate experience. Everett believes that the individual is a blank slate and their cultural values shape everything about them, down to and including the things they perceive and the language structures they employ. Far from infantilizing the Pirahãs, Everett valorizes their system of values. He is a convert.
When Alex Perry, trying to understand John Allen Chau’s motivations, asked Everett to list some traits that are common among missionaries, “he mentioned one that generally doesn’t make it into the books: personal catastrophe.” He related how his father had been an alcoholic and his mother had died at an early age.
“‘[T]hese are the traumatic experiences that very often lead people to religion,’ he said. ‘If you accept faith, and it does for you what you hope it will do, you’re willing to give everything to that faith.’”
Everett elaborates on the personal catastrophes of his youth in Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes. After several attempts to convince some Pirahãs that embracing his faith would benefit their lives, all of which fell on deaf ears, Everett decided to recount a story that he knew usually affected people emotionally. He told them about his stepmother’s suicide and how much he had suffered emotionally after that trauma, and how turning to Jesus had eased his pain and convinced him to stop drinking alcohol and taking drugs. The Pirahãs’ response was to laugh dismissively. When he asked why they were laughing, they questioned how she could have been so stupid as to kill herself and said that a Pirahã would never do that.
Rather than make faith more attractive, he had only made it clearer how different their values were. As he writes at the end of the book, it was the Pirahãs who succeeded in convincing him of their values:
“The Pirahas are firmly committed to the pragmatic concept of utility. They don't believe in a heaven above us, or a hell below us, or that any abstract cause is worth dying for. They give us an opportunity to consider what a life without absolutes, like righteousness or holiness and sin, could be like. And the vision is appealing. . . . Is it possible to live a life without the crutches of religion and truth? The Pirahãs do so live.”
No one is more zealous than a convert. But if you take Everett’s reasoning and apply it to itself—if you use a larger sort of recursion—a contradiction appears. For his judgement about the appeal of the Pirahãs’ system of values is itself a value judgement. Where did that value come from? From his own culture? The one he’s just been condemning? If so, then cultures are not so incommensurate as he claims. We can’t be blank slates programmed by our different cultural values, because we seem to have transcendent values with which we adjudicate between them. The question of where values come from, where the categories of rational thought come from—the question that Boas begged and left Durkheim and Whorf confounded by antinomy—that question now faces Everett, like an apparition.
“That’s it, then. You’re finished now. You won’t come back.” Satisfied, Kalwadi returned home. But Yaramurud did come back, as a ghost.