The Eternal Present Is Not Tense

'Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes'-Daniel L. Everett.

I was warned when I started this book that I would want to skip parts of it. In the end I skipped very little and what I skipped were descriptions of Western Academia at it's least self explanatory. Philosophical/linguistic points where the what the author discusses is a sort of chicken/egg argument where he asks 'What came first? Culture or language?'. Culture would seem to be his answer but after settling that question the academic debate among Western scholars of language lingers whilst culture and language appear to be competing runners in a race where they egg each other on and up each others game.

The book starts with a proposition; can a missionary learn the language of a tribe, where the language seems to be the most intractable living language still in use in the world today? the author wants to learn it in order to present The Piraha, who live deep in the Amazon forest close to the river, with The Gospels, nothing more nothing less. The author wants to introduce The Piraha to the Jesus that he himself believes in.

There is a 500 year long history of tribes receiving missionaries first where armies visit the tribes and decimate them after, either through the illnesses the armies carry without being aware of how they came to be so diseased or the wealth of weaponry. There the missionaries do not knowingly play 'soft cop' to the soldiers being 'the hard cop' but the missionaries seem all the more effective in that role, for how they conceal it. That the societies they sought to evangelise were self-policing, lived in proportion on the land they occupied, and the society has little to no need for hierarchies and chiefs when the missionaries come from societies which are highly hierarchical, made it all the worse for the tribes who did not even have a currency of any sort.

So, could a missionary who was no part any soft cop/hard cop strategy, either consciously or unconsciously get a conversion by fair means just through a translation from a proportionately living self policing people with no leader whom they would all defer to?

The good news is that the longer the Daniel and his family stayed the more of the detail of the tribal life of The Piraha they observed. Whilst their lives were shorter, maybe half the length of a wealthy westerner's life, what their lives lacked in longevity they more than made up for contentedness, and a lightness with how they lived. The Piraha had a sense of life in the present tense in their language and culture that resisted all unpicking of it, to create any sense of past and future, a future where life might be different from the present.

The one area where the missionary does some genuinely good work for The Piraha, and sees farther than they do, is in engaging with a Brazilian government land commission to define and protect the boundaries of the tribal forest lands that The Piraha live in as if they own it all, whilst having no sense, nor language for, the concept of ownership.

But with an airtight lock between a language and culture where both are fixed in the present tense as if no other tense existed, or were possible, coupled with the sense that something could only be true if other Piraha have witnessed it, live, all attempts at introducing The Piraha to Jesus and The Gospels foundered. The author would have to have seen Jesus live in the present day in the forest, rather learned to believe in Jesus from reading a book about him for his witness to the Piraha to have any effect on them. Even then the experience of Jesus living in the forest would have to be repeatable in some way for The Piraha to be evangelised, and they could be most resistant to some persuasion, without it being obvious. 

A point that is not made, not even made indirectly, but which is easily inferred, is that when the forest is 'your book of life', then the forest is what you have to read to live by. Anything written in books is so outside the experience of life in the forest that the forest itself makes knowledge outside of it seem pale and second hand. That it is only in books that we get a choice of tense, past present and future, well such choice seems absurd to the forest and those who live in it. The forest will always win over anything written or spoken-the forest is there in front of the Piraha everyday as a symbiotic personal experience.

The power of the forest as an everyday experience comes to seriously affect the beliefs of the missionary, who if he could have found one believer among The Piraha he might have found many. But since even as the gospel of Mark is presented to them on tape, as spoken by one of the tribe, eve there the Piraha detect that the reader who says the words is acting out what sounds like merely an act of ventriloquism committed to tape rather than a reflection of the belief of the speaker.

The missionary's attempt to introduce the spiritual binaries of 'the lost' and 'the saved', and the concepts of past, present, and future tenses, through written and spoken language to a people who live only in the present tense and mostly through spoken language and applied life inevitably fails. The experiment of introducing the ideas ends. The Piraha 1 The Missionary 0 then? Up to a point, I came away from the book believing that witness works where there is need for an upgrade to how communal and personal life is lived; no upgrade was required or was possible with The Piraha. The forest made them as free as they would ever be and made the missionary see how freedom had to be seen and lived for it to be real.

The  Piraha means of communication and lives exclude divisions of time into past present and future, and differing personal status. With this the missionary's faith in the structure of the society he came from crumbles as if it had been very gently absorbed by the forest itself. So The Piraha 1 The Linguist/Missionary 1 is the end score in my reading of the book. With their self evident commitment to co-equality for all and treatment of children as would-be adults The Piraha would not want it any other way.