#2547 - Daniel Everett

I’d been looking forward to this, because your life is wildly unusual: Christian missionary, years with the Pirahã in the Amazon, then eventually no longer believing. You spent about eight years in the jungle across different trips and have worked with them for four decades.

That’s right. I wasn’t from a religious family. In 1968, outside a Jimi Hendrix concert, I was trying to sell LSD for ticket money when I met a straight-laced missionary kid from Brazil. Her father’s jungle stories got hold of me. Soon I was a serious Christian: Bible school, theology, ordination, street preaching—the whole thing.

That’s a hell of a rebellion. How did you get ready to go into the jungle?

It took eight years: college, linguistics, then jungle training in Chiapas. The final test left me alone for about ten days with a machete, water, fishing line, and matches. You find water in vines, eat plants, make hooks, and learn that keeping fire alive in rainforest is nearly full-time work.

That is not a simulation. You’re hoping whatever circles camp at night isn’t a jaguar, and a machete feels awfully optimistic against one.

It did once I saw real jaguars. The Pirahã are extraordinary hunters and share rather than store food: one man said his brother’s belly is where the meat is kept. But dams have altered water levels and fish, pushing people toward hunger, displacement, Portuguese, and closer contact with towns.

You arrived to translate the Bible and build a church, but the language itself was an immense challenge.

I had old word lists that didn’t mark tone. In Pirahã, pitch can turn “friend” into “enemy,” or make you say something embarrassing while everyone laughs. I traded goods for fish, pointed at things, wrote down sounds, and watched what people said when objects moved. I returned with my wife and three small children and lived there for a year.

Then malaria hit your family hard: meningitis, malaria, and your wife nearly dying. That’s not romantic jungle adventure.

No, it was horrific. A priest loaned me a canoe and motor so I could get my family out. Yet the work changed me. I was translating from Greek through English and Portuguese, trying to explain a desert to people who had never encountered one. I learned that not everyone necessarily has words for numbers, colors, or the kind of God I assumed was universal.

The Pirahã findings put you into a huge fight with Chomsky, especially over recursion—the claim that languages nest structures inside comparable structures. You said Pirahã doesn’t.

I thought it was premature to announce rules for thousands of languages when serious data covered only a fraction. I’d admired Chomsky immensely, but after I proposed Pirahã lacked recursion, I was called a liar and charlatan. Researchers designed tests and found my account held up; critics often ignored that. Intelligence doesn’t vaccinate anybody against stupidity. Science needs guesses, tests, and willingness to abandon guesses, but prestige makes that hard.

Meanwhile, the Pirahã asked Christianity’s most direct question: had you personally seen Jesus? Had your father? If nobody you knew had seen him, why ask them to believe?

They were smart questions, and I had no good answers. After I showed Jesus filmstrips, someone in the next village appeared as Jesus in their terms—naked, falsetto-voiced, frightening the women. That was their rejection. They were more content and capable than the Christians I knew: laughing, sharing, playing with children, and not needing an afterlife story to face death.

I began doubting after five or six years and left Christianity in 2001. You pray, read apologetics, then find the answers don’t satisfy. I could not ask them to accept claims they reasonably challenged when I could not defend them. When I said I no longer believed, the men laughed: now I was like them.

Their community seems to be the center of their moral world, and anger is especially bad.

They don’t hit children or retaliate casually. A man’s drunk brother shot his dog; he wept for the dog but said, “He’s my brother,” and would not hurt him. But danger to the whole village can mean banishment—alone in the jungle, perhaps a death sentence. They can be violent, which may be why they avoid it wisely.

They describe fast-mouths, shape-shifters, jaguar-associated beings, but I wouldn’t flatten that into “spirit.” They notice what I miss: branches moving, bubbles rising, snakes in leaf litter. It’s profound learned perception and pattern recognition. In their forest, I’m the special-needs person who needs watching.

Their life is unbelievably hard physically, but perhaps happier than our comfortable lives. They worked maybe fifteen or twenty hours in a good week for food; now outside food and drink bring problems.

Fish once made up about seventy percent of the diet, alongside nuts and forest foods. A dentist found no cavities. Then rice, sugar, soda, and alcohol arrived. Hunter-gatherers can eat almost anything because they rarely get enough of one thing for it to become chronic.

The larger loss is language. Languages vanish about one every two weeks. A language is a library: Pirahã names for plants, animals, and birds encode how to find and understand them. When a language disappears, a whole way of knowing the world goes with it.

Your commitment to learning it—being wrong, laughed at, taking notes, returning, and narrowing in on what people mean—is what makes this story incredible. I really appreciate you coming in.

Thank you. I enjoyed it. My book title comes from what the Pirahã say at bedtime: don’t sleep—there are snakes.