Been seeing lots of references (via Ran, JP and Damn Data) to a peculiar group of people in the Amazonas state of Brazil called the Piraha (Pirahã). The thing that makes these folks unique is that they allegedly do not - as a culture - engage in abstract thought.
Or so the buzz goes, anyway. According to various articles, they don’t possess words for numbers, colors or time. They have no written language, make no art and tell no fictional stories. They have only three vowels and seven or eight consonants. Dan Everett, a Manchester University professor who has been studying them since 1977, explains “They confine their talk to subjects that fall within their immediate experience.”
He once attempted to teach the Piraha to count, but after several months, gave up. No-one learned to count to ten or add one plus one.
They tried reading, but found the idea amusing and eventually stopped the lessons, saying they went along simply because it was “fun to be together and I made popcorn”, Prof Everett said.
It all sounds very lovely. Ran Prieur remarks on their culture that it “sounds to me like heaven.” JP writes that it “Sounds like the kind of society we should be striving towards.” Is it heavenly though? Should we be striving towards it? Why?
Aren’t the notions of heaven and of striving themselves abstractions? Isn’t it ironic that this culture was brought to light by an academic, somebody whose whole purpose is the studying of abstractions? Even more ironic, if we really ought to strive to be like these people, then it follows that we can’t talk about them unless or until any of us actually go out there and experience life among them. Otherwise, holding an idealized image of them in our minds is a nasty nasty abstraction.
Without abstractions, none of us could have websites - and certainly not on the arcane topics that we cover. Heck, we wouldn’t even have the internet if it weren’t for the awesome power of the human mind to abstract. Fact is, I’m not willing to uncritically say that abstraction is bad or that we should categorically avoid it in favor of direct experience.
Another question: when we create an abstraction and hold it in our minds, aren’t we directly experiencing it in some sense? If not, what does direct experience really mean? Physical experience? If it only means that, then what happens to that vast swath of territory that moves inside of us?
There’s another factor that doesn’t seem to be addressed by most of the commentary on these people, their elaborate mythology:
This immediate and literal way of seeing the world fits with the Pirahã’s apparent lack of a creation myth, but it seems at odds with one of the most important aspects of their everyday life. They believe in an elaborate spirit world, which takes the form of something like parallel universes, with evil spirits inhabiting their own realms above and below the Earth. It may sound suspiciously mystical for a culture supposed to lack mythology, but Everett notes that the Pirahã’s relationship with their spirit world is remarkably practical. They claim to have direct experience of some of the evil spirits - a notion made only too real to him during his early days in the Amazon when he was awoken one night and asked to ward off an evil spirit nearby. Marching manfully into the jungle, he soon heard the low growl of the “spirit”: a prowling panther.
Okay, so they say they have direct experience of these spirits. I’m willing to accept that. But the equation of “panther = spirit” makes me wonder, just what is an abstraction anyway? Is an abstraction an identification of one thing with another? Is an abstraction a method of understanding or explaining something? When exactly does an abstraction arrive and do these people truly not have them? I’m not saying these people aren’t unique, interesting or worthy of study, but are they really what we say they are, or are we making them into something we romantically wish we ourselves could be?
There’s a great Daniel Pinchbeck interview excerpt where he is talking about Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy which I think could shed some interesting light on the questions we’re asking here about abstraction and direct experience:
He notes that you can’t really make a final distinction between our thoughts about things and the things themselves. Thinking, for him, is a part of reality - as much a part of reality as any physical object. He points out that we have no right to consider a plant’s ability to produce leaves, roots, and blossoms as separate from the thoughts we have about that plant. It may be that our thoughts about the plant are as much a property of that plant as its blossoms, stems, and leaves.
If that’s truly the case, then the Piraha and us are no different. We’re all directly experiencing the world, because there’s quite possibly no other way to do it.
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6 Comments
Thanks for the mention.
I think what is so fascinating is that everything cascades from their liminality - they truly live in the moment.
From this the need for tenses, numbers, etc. all fall away. Their need for a creation myth evaporates as their world “just is” - it always has been and always will. Their complex demonology also arises from this - things that leave their immediate experiences actually vanish and creatures you can hear, but not see, could easily be actual spirits. The idea of parallel dimensions then seems a natural extension of this from which they then derive the idea that illness, etc. is caused by their things from this alternate reality.
While I don’t think this is some kind of ideal to aspire to (or even some kind of view of a “primitive” state - it is as “artificial” as other modes of dealing with the world and is probably relatively recent - at least when compared to systems like that of the Australian Aboriginals) what it does show us is that we can fundamentally alter the way we view reality. Our own “reality” with its numbers, tenses, Gods and Creation Myths all cascade from our own needs and thinking (seasonality, which they don’t have in rain forests, imposes a concept of time and the need for planning ahead). It also suggests we have the flexibility to fundamentally change the way we perceive the world.
My mind often goes back to the Subanthropic Principle and the above would suggest that it might not be that we are too stupid but that we just don’t have the right mental framework for dealing with certain events and leads to things like the alien abduction scenario or reports of high strangeness that emerge from places like Skinwalker Ranch - we are currently just grasping at straws.
One wonders if the military-occult complex have a better grasp on this yet - they (and in particular the NIDS) have clearly been very interested in the various fields that could lead to a breakthrough on this front. Somehow I doubt it.
I think Rudolf Steiner is full of shit. Is that a paradox?
it suggests to me, and i will carefully point out that this is opinion, that it shows differences in brain archetecture between us and piraha, and that we aren`t able to directly experience whatever is causing some to be “abducted by aliens”, whether these things arre actually seperate events perpetrated by aliens in flying saucers or whether they are beamed into our minds by military technology…..or something else entirely.
there are many different, culturally distinct ways of percieving reality, from the primarily literate constructs of the west to the tribal oral bias of african and muslim and aboriginal cultures.
It may be that when the Piraha see a panther, they see something very different than what we do.
Excellent point - perhaps the “panther = spirit” equation is simply a result of translating into a western mindset, and not their own.
right, who can say what a panther is? you can trap one in a cage and examine it inside and out so you have a model of its physical structure built in your mind, but that’s not a panther, it’s just an abstract conceptualization labelled “panther”. There may be a whole lot more to being a panther than just having the body of one.
When encountering a panther with your mind unencumbered by thought models, there’s no telling how you’d reconcile or percieve the experience in a way that you could talk about it.