Pirahan

According to archaeological data, the Moore Indians came to Amazon not later than 10 thousand years ago. By the time of their first skirmishes with the Portuguese in 1714, the pyrahan was already a separate group.

In 1921, the anthropologist Kurt Nimuendaju visited the pirakhan and noted their lack of interest in the achievements of Western civilization. In the late 1950s, the missionaries of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, spouses Arlo and Vi Heinrich, settled among the pirakhanes in order to convert the Bible to the Pirakhan and convert them to Christianity, in the mid-1960s they were replaced by Stephen and Linda Sheldon, in 1978 - Daniel and Kerin Everett, who passed Kenneth Pike's course in translation technology ^[5] .

Since the 1980s, anthropologists regularly work with pirakhan, but most of the modern data on them are known from the publications of Daniel Everett, who spent seven years with the pirakhan in total, and the works of scientists who collaborated with him, since, apart from the pirakhan themselves, only Everett, his ex-wife Kerin and Stephen Sheldon mastered their language.

They live in mono-ethnic villages . Journalist John Colapinto , who visited Pirakhan in 2006, described the village as a group of huts located along the shore on four pillars, without walls and floor, with a roof of palm leaves, the only furniture of which is a bed in the form of a wooden platform. The hut is designed for a family of 3-4 people.

The property consists of a pot, pot, knife and machete . Men dress in finished shirts, t-shirts, shorts; women sew dresses made of cotton fabric, wear necklaces made of shells, feathers, teeth and beads. Utensils, clothes, and cloth are exchanged by river merchants for Brazil nuts, wood, and chewing gum; bows, arrows and bags of palm leaves do it yourself. Trade deals and hunting are men. According to Everett, the list of purchases includes powdered milk, gunpowder , whiskey, sugar and canoe , which pyrahan is technically capable of doing, but not willing; and a common payment, except nuts, is sex with local women ^[6] .

Near the village in a semi-wild state, cassava grows, which is ground to flour. Food is not procured for future use. ^[five]

All residents of Pirakhan consider prolonged sleep dangerous and therefore sleep in polyphase sleep four times a day for 30 minutes every six hours.

In 2011, an expedition from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discovered outposts of Western civilization in a Pirahan village: a first-aid post, a stationary toilet with running water, light from a gasoline generator, a TV, and a school where a Pirahan teacher teaches Portuguese and Portuguese arithmetic. During the Everett expedition in 2009, none of this happened. The pirakhan themselves perceived the new everyday opportunities positively. Both expeditions are documented in the movie The Amazon Code: The Grammar of Happiness (2012) ^[7] . The film is not reported on the success of the training; earlier, Everett was able to teach Portuguese to count only a few children, but they did not take this system seriously. The film includes shots of hunting a pyrahan with a bow and arrow for monkeys and fish, although other frames show modern fishing hooks, and the purchase of gunpowder indicates the use of guns.

Residents of the villages closest to Pirakhan - the Tenjarin and Jahuy Indians - are included in Brazilian everyday life, use laptops, receive standard education and charge a car fee for driving through their territory along the Transamazon Highway ^[8] .

There is no social hierarchy , including leaders , there is no economic base for this: the benefits are publicly available and not stocked. Endogamous marriage, however, sex with strangers is not forbidden, which is a likely cause of the absence of signs of degeneration.

Pirakhan relies on information that their senses are currently receiving, or that other living people are receiving in the same way. Everett called this the “principle of direct experience” (immediacy-of-experience principle). According to Everett, the pyrahan does not have decorative art, and they do not know how to draw ^[9] .

They can make a sculptural model of a previously unfamiliar complex object - for example, a hydroplane - but only while they see it, and when it flies away, they lose interest in the model. Collective memory does not extend beyond two generations. It is believed that the world has always been the same as it is now. Everett reported that the pyrahan had no idea of ​​creation and the gods. According to Everett, the pyrahans have ideas about spirits , and the belief that they regularly see them in the form of objects of the world, such as animals, plants or other people ^[6] . For half a century, missionaries have not been able to convert the pirakhan to Christianity, since they do not understand the appeal to their future fate, as well as to the person of Christ, with whom the missionaries did not personally communicate ^[5] . Other anthropologists cited the presence of myths, including cosmogonic ones , in the pyrahan .

The experiments were carried out before the appearance of the school at Pirakhan.

Peter Gordon asked the pyrahan to show him as many objects as he shows them. We used AA batteries , nuts, drawn lines, sweets and boxes with different numbers of fish depicted. Gordon placed objects in a line, spontaneously or in groups; in one experiment, he hid objects in a second after the show, in another experiment he threw them into an opaque jar. Gordon concluded that the pyrahan did not operate well with more than three. He noted that although they use finger counting, the number of bent fingers does not necessarily coincide with the number of objects ^[10] .

The experiment was repeated in a purer form by a group of scientists. Spools of thread were laid out in numbers of up to 10 pieces on a flat surface to avoid arbitrary movement. Pirakhan had to lay out the same number of balls. They made almost no mistakes if the coils were aligned in front of them: in response, they put a ball in front of each coil. They were mistaken in more than half the cases if the coils were closed with a screen after the show, or if they had to set their line of objects perpendicular to the line of the experimenter. Only 12 cases out of 56 pirakhanas guessed the number of items thrown into an opaque jar. That is, Gordon was wrong: the error is affected not so much by the number of objects, but by the order of their location and visibility.

The same group experimentally confirmed the absence of numerals. Pirakhan uses the relative terms h'oi, ho'i and ba'agiso, each subsequent of which means a quantity greater than the previous one, but the number of objects that separate one quantity from another is not fixed; pirakhan chooses the term according to the situation, and the opinion of others may not coincide with his opinion. One item is always ho'i, but other quantities can be indicated with this word.

The experimenters concluded that the pyrahan understand the quantitative difference, even if it is one subject, but the lack of abstract terms for the number makes it difficult for them to transfer information about the quantity in space and time. Thus, the concept of number is one of the inventions that expand the cognitive capabilities of a person, like the alphabet , but not an obligatory feature of the human language ^[11] .

The discovery of language features and the cognitive abilities of the pyrahan stimulated a discussion about the correlation of language and cognitive abilities of a person in general. Leading linguists studying the functioning of the human language took part in the discussion of the phenomenon of pirakhan. Brent Berlin suggested that the language of the pyrahan reflects the stage in the development of syntax already passed by other languages. Stephen Levinson opposed the possible interpretation that the pyrahan was less intelligent than the rest, and in this I agree with Everett; Anna Vezhbitskaya said that people are the same people regardless of the potential solution to the question of the difference or equality of their cognitive abilities ^[5] .

• Everett D. L. Do not sleep - around the snake! Life and language of the Indians of the Amazonian jungle. M .: Languages ​​of Slavic cultures, 2016.384 s. ISBN 978-5-9907947-6-4

• Video recordings of reports of a round table on the book of D. L. Everett . Moscow, Institute of Linguistics, RAS. Feb 21 2017.