From a study published in
Current Anthropology via
George Monbiot:
The Piraha (a tribe found in the Brazilian Amazon), Everett reveals, possess "the most complex verbal morphology I am aware of [and] are some of the brightest, pleasantest, most fun-loving people that I know". Yet they have no numbers of any kind, no terms for quantification (such as all, each, every, most and some), no colour terms and no perfect tense. They appear to have borrowed their pronouns from another language, having previously possessed none. They have no "individual or collective memory of more than two generations past", no drawing or other art, no fiction and "no creation stories or myths".
All this, Everett believes, can be explained by a single characteristic: "Piraha culture constrains communication to non-abstract subjects which fall within the immediate experience of [the speaker]." What can be discussed, in other words, is what has been seen. When it can no longer be perceived, it ceases, in this realm at least, to exist. After struggling with one grammatical curiosity, he realised that the Piraha were "talking about liminality - situations in which an item goes in and out of the boundaries of their experience. [Their] excitement at seeing a canoe go around a river bend is hard to describe; they see this almost as travelling into another dimension".
Me think Piraha people plenty smart. Me think Piraha people
really know how to live life. Not wasting any time clinging to ghosts of the past or worrying about the future. As Philip Kapleau says in his foreword to
Zen Keys:
For what else is there but the pure act -- the lifting of the hammer, the washing of the dish, the movement of the hands on the typewriter, the pulling of the weed? Everything else -- thoughts of the past, fantasies about the future, judgments and evaluations concerning the work itself -- what are these but shadows and ghosts flickering about in our minds, preventing us from entering fully into life itself?
