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rowanglass 's review for:
Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle
by Daniel L. Everett
adventurous
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
On the whole this is an interesting and engaging book that is part ethnography, part linguistics, and part personal memoir and travelogue. The first part of the book concerns the author's life among the Pirahã, an Indigenous group living along the Maici River in the Brazilian Amazon, and presents various snapshots of their culture, lifeways, history, interactions with caboclos (a culturally distinct subset of Portuguese-speaking Brazilians living along the rivers of the Amazon), and the author's missionary work and family life. Frequently the author compares and contrasts his culturally determined values and assumptions with those of the Pirahã, who, as we learn throughout the text, constitute a unique culture in many ways. The second part of the text concerns the Pirahã language, the study of which occupied most of the author's time with them (approximately eight years collectively over a 30-year period). According to Everett, Pirahã lacks grammatical features that were once, and by some still are, seen as universal, namely recursion, the grammatical ability to fit a theoretically endless number of clauses within a single sentence. An extended grammatical discussion with a spattering of theory and the succinct distillation of competing theories (namely Chomsky's universal grammar) tie this section nicely together, though it is a denser read than the more narrative-driven first part. The short third part of the book concerns Everett's eventual loss of faith as a missionary among the Pirahã, which he attributes to their high standards as regards evidentiality, a cultural phenomenon he introduces early in the text as the "immediacy of experience principle," which is also key to the synthesis he effects between language and culture (again, to the chagrin of Chomskyans). This final section effectively brings together the ethnographic, linguistic, and personal.
While an enjoyable and informative read, my biggest gripe with the book relates to its organization. I feel it could have done with more careful editing, both between subsections and paragraphs within chapters, and between chapters within the overarching parts. Sometimes it feels that the text doesn't know what it wants to be, whether personal memoir, travelogue, ethnography, grammar, or theoretical expose. But, for better or worse, that is often the nature of popular ethnographic writing, and I think the book is not much the weaker for it. I still readily recommend this book, though more for pleasure than scholarly information (see its bibliography for the latter).
While an enjoyable and informative read, my biggest gripe with the book relates to its organization. I feel it could have done with more careful editing, both between subsections and paragraphs within chapters, and between chapters within the overarching parts. Sometimes it feels that the text doesn't know what it wants to be, whether personal memoir, travelogue, ethnography, grammar, or theoretical expose. But, for better or worse, that is often the nature of popular ethnographic writing, and I think the book is not much the weaker for it. I still readily recommend this book, though more for pleasure than scholarly information (see its bibliography for the latter).