It made me feel moved and empowered in a deep-down way. I was surprised at how deeply this gesture affected me. In his hypothetical examples, every homeowner, attorney, and city planner was female. (In an Urban Planning class in graduate school, I noticed that the male professor used entirely feminine pronouns whenever he described a scenario to the class. Making pronouns more gender-neutral includes and empowers women. This is based on our acknowledgment that the way we speak affects the way we think, even in subtle ways. Older books and papers always use “he,” but more recent pieces use “s/he,” ”they,” or “she” at least some of the time. He also gives an example from our own culture: the effort in recent decades to change the gender pronouns we use. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same worlds with different labels attached.Įverett explains: “I might say I saw a branch move and might say that they saw a spirit move the branch.” These two ways of describing the same event imply very different ways of thinking about it. Human beings do not live in the objective world alone…but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society… No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. As Safir writes in “The Status of Linguistics as a Science” (1929): This is the Whorf hypothesis, or sometimes the Whorf-Safir hypothesis. One thing that caught my eye in Don’t Sleep: There are Snakes was Everett’s mention of a hypothesis that language and thought shape each other. Our language shapes how we experience the world. I like the new perspective I gain by visiting a culture that’s alien to me, stepping outside of my worldview and reexamining it. I like this book for the same reason I like watching Star Trek and traveling to other countries. At the beginning of the book, he recounts how his entire village was once standing on the banks of their river, shouting excitedly at the spirit they could see walking on the opposite bank. They do believe in spirits, though-so much that they’re able to see spirits that are invisible to Everett. And they’re virtually unique in that they have no theology-no creation story, and no storytelling at all except about things that happened to individuals who are still alive. Pirahã culture is one of the last in the world that is virtually unaffected by modern society, and thus it’s full of surprises.įor example, the Pirahãs really don’t sleep for more than a few hours at a time and are as likely to go out fishing at 3:00 am as they are at 3:00 pm. No one in the tribe of 300 people spoke anything but Pirahã, and no one else spoke their language.Īs he worked to bridge the communication gap between himself and the Pirahãs, Everett gained a great deal of insight into the effects of language on culture and vice versa. A linguist, he was the first person to translate Pirahã into any other language. He went to live with them as a missionary, but eventually converted to atheism while living with them. The book is the author’s account of his decades with an isolated tribe called the Pirahã. I’m reading a wonderful book called Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, by Daniel L.
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