"Don't sleep, There are snakes", by Daniell Everett is a very interesting book that portrays the life of a missionary linguist among the Piraha tribe of the Amazonian rainforests. Mr. Everett, a missionary, sponsored by the evangelical churches in the United States to "change the pirahas' hearts", to persuade them to worship the Christian god, and to accept the morality and culture that goes along with that worship, ended up losing his faith in the process and realized the atheist in him. I arrived at this book after listening to a radio documentary on the same topic.
According to Everett, Pirahas showed him that there is dignity and deep satisfaction in facing life without the comfort of heaven or the fear of hell. Pirahas seem to value direct experience and observation. Everett observes that "If you want to tell the Pirahas something, they are going to want to know how you came by your knowledge. And especially they will want to know if you have direct evidence for your assertion. He calls it the "Immediacy of Experience" principle. This means that if you haven't experienced something directly, your stories about it are largely irrelevant. This renders Pirahas relatively impermeable to missionaries, who are purveyors of incredible stories of the distant past that no one alive has witnessed. Creation myths are no match for the Pirahas' demand for evidence. According to Everett, there was no sense of sin among the Pirahas, no need to save mankind or themselves. There was acceptance for things the way they are, by and large. Their faith was in themselves and had no fear of death. He concludes by saying that the Pirahas are an unusually happy and contended people, who are fitter and better adjusted to their environment than any religious person he has ever known.
The book also delves deep into his attempt to learn the Piraha language over several decades and gets into details of linguistic research and literature, which can be a little boring to someone not interested in the topic. But he ties it all together by finally focusing on the need to invest time, money and effort in studying languages by invoking the close relationship between language, grammar, culture, and cognition. He quotes the "Rausing Endangered Language Project's" website and states that "Today, there are about 6500 languages and half of those are under the threat of extinction within 50 to 100 years. This is a social, cultural, and scientific disaster because languages express the unique knowledge, history, and world view of their communities; and each language is a specially evolved variation of the human capacity for communication."
There may not be immediate practical benefits in studying and recording all the endangered languages. But treating languages as repositories of specialized cultural experiences will enable us to realize that they are vital in teaching us different ways of thinking about life and of approaching our day to day life.
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