Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes

Linguist Daniel Everett lived with a small tribe of Amazonian Indians in central Brazil, and his experiences and discoveries led to a new way of looking at language. He arrived with his wife and three young children intending to convert the people to Christianity, but he found that their language defied all linguistic theories and reflected a way of life that evaded understanding: The Pirahã have no counting system and no fixed terms for color. They have no concept of war or of personal property. They live entirely in the present. Everett became obsessed with their language and its cultural implications, and with their remarkable contentment with their way of life, so much so that he eventually lost his faith in the God he’d hoped to introduce to them.