The Kingdom of Speech (11 page)

Walking barefoot or in flip-flops at night in Pirahã land was a form of Russian roulette…and so the Pirahã had learned to be light sleepers. Long middle-of-the-night conversations were not uncommon, so wary were they throughout the midnight hours.

Whatever else it was, Everett's twenty-five-thousand-word revelation of life among the Pirahã was sensational news in 2005. He had decided not to publish it in any of the leading linguistics journals. Their circulations were too small. Instead he chose
Current Anthropology,
which was willing to publish the entire twenty-five thousand words, uncut. That took up a third of the August–October 2005 issue and included eight formal comments solicited from scholars around the world—France, Brazil, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States.
e
Two of the scholars, Michael Tomasello and Stephen Levinson, were affiliated with the prestigious Max Planck Institute. By no means were their comments—or any others—valentines. They all had their reservations about this and that. So much the better. The big academic presentation paid off. Radio, television, and the popular press picked up on it here and abroad. Germany's biggest and most influential magazine,
Der Spiegel,
said the Pirahã, a “small hunting and gathering tribe, with a population of only 310 to 350, has become the center of a raging debate between linguists, anthropologists and cognitive researchers. Even Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Steven Pinker of Harvard University, two of the most influential theorists on the subject, are still arguing over what it means for the study of human language that the Pirahã don't use subordinate clauses.”
134

The British newspaper the
Independent
zeroed in on recursion. “The Pirahã language has none of [recursion's] features; every sentence stands alone and refers to a single event.…Professor Everett insists the example of the Pirahã, because of the impact their peculiar culture has had upon their language and way of thinking, strikes a devastating blow to Chomskyan theory. ‘Hypotheses such as universal grammar are inadequate to account for the Pirahã facts because they assume that language evolution has ceased to be shaped by the social life of the species.'” The Pirahã's grammar, he argues, comes from their culture, not from any preexisting mental template.
135

The
New Scientist
said, “Everett also argues that the Pirahã language is the final nail in the coffin for Noam Chomsky's hugely influential theory of universal grammar. Although this has been modified considerably since its origins in the 1960s, most linguists still hold to its central idea, which is that the human mind has evolved an innate capacity for language and that all languages share certain universal forms that are constrained by the way that we think.”
136

In academia scholars are supposed to think and write at a level far above the excitement of the popular media. But Everett and his Pirahã publicity got so deeply under the scholars' skin, they couldn't stand it any longer. In 2006, MIT's linguistics department—not Noam Chomsky's linguistics department—invited Everett to give a lecture about the “cultural factors” that made the Pirahã and their language so exceptional. Three days beforehand, a diatribe appeared on all the Listservs usually reserved for notices about talks to the MIT linguistics community, calling Everett a shameless out-and-out liar who falsifies evidence to support his claims concerning the Pirahã and their language. In fact, says the writer, Everett is so utterly shameless that he had already written about this small Amazonian tribe twenty years earlier in his doctoral dissertation…and is now blithely and brazenly contradicting himself whenever he feels like it. I'm publishing all this ahead of time, says the writer, for fear I and others who see through Everett's scam will be “cut off” if we try to expose him at the event itself. In his peroration he says, eyeteeth oozing with irony:

“You, too, can enjoy the spotlight of mass media and closet exoticists! Just find a remote tribe and exploit them for your own fame by making claims nobody will bother to check!”
137
It turned out to be by Andrew Nevins, a young, newly hired linguist at Harvard. He couldn't hold it in any longer!

Nobody in the used-to-be-seemly field of linguistics or any other discipline had ever seen a performance like this before. Even Chomsky's execration of B. F. Skinner had maintained a veneer of politeness and scholarly protocol.

When Tom Bartlett of the
Chronicle of Higher Education
e-requested an interview, Nevins e-replied:

“I may be being glib, but it seems you've already analyzed this kind of case!” Below Nevins's message was a link to an article Bartlett had written about a Dutch psychologist who had confessed to fabricating results by citing studies that had never been made, i.e., were sheer fiction. Bartlett invited Nevins to expand on the implication that Everett was trying to pull off a hoax. Nevins replied, the “world does not need another article about Dan Everett.
138

What he actually meant, it turned out, was, “The world needs just one more article about Dan Everett, and I'm writing it.” Nevins was already at work with two other linguists, David Pesetsky and Cilene Rodrigues, on an article so long—31,000 words—that it was the equivalent of well over 110 pages in a dense, scholarly book.
139
They fought Everett point by point, no matter how dot-size the point. The aim, obviously, was to carpet bomb, obliterate, every syllable Everett had to say about this miserable little tribe he claimed he had found somewhere in the depths of Brazil's Amazon basin. It appeared online as “Pirahã Exceptionality: A Reassessment,” by “Andrew Nevins (Harvard), David Pesetsky (MIT), and Cilene Rodrigues (Universidade Estadual de Campinas)”…three linguists from three different universities, Pesetsky pointed out
140
…
hmmm
…a bit…disingenuously…because put them all together…they spelled
CHOMSKY
(MIT). Chomsky had been David Pesetsky's dissertation supervisor when Pesetsky got his doctoral degree at MIT in 1983.
141
Five years later he returned as Chomsky's junior colleague on the linguistics faculty. Chomsky's close friend Morris Halle, the MIT linguist who back in 1955 had played a major role in bringing him to MIT in the first place, became the dissertation supervisor to Andrew Nevins. Nevins was an MIT lifer. He had enrolled as a freshman in 1996 and had been there for nine years by the time he received his PhD in 2004
142
…and married Cilene Rodrigues, a Brazilian linguist who had been a visiting scholar at MIT for several of the past four years. What they wrote, “Pirahã Exceptionality: A Reassessment,” couldn't have seemed more of a Chomsky production had he put his byline on it.

The problem was, it had taken the truth squad, namely, Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues, all of 2006 to assemble this prodigious weapon. They planned to submit it to the biggest and most influential linguistics journal,
Language,
but it could easily take another six or eight months for
Language
to put it through their meticulous review process. So the trio first decided to publish it online on LingBuzz, a linguistics article-sharing site with a large Chomsky following. Their behemoth doomsday rebuttal appeared there on March 8, 2007—

—and keeled over thirty-three days later, April 10. On that day, the
New Yorker
published a ten-thousand-word piece about Everett entitled “The Interpreter: Has a Remote Amazonian Tribe Upended Our Understanding of Language?” by John Colapinto, with a subhead reading “Dan Everett believes that Pirahã undermines Noam Chomsky's idea of a universal grammar.” The magazine had sent the writer, Colapinto, down to the Amazon basin with Everett.

In his opening paragraph Colapinto describes how he and Everett arrived on the Maici in a Cessna floatplane. Up on the riverbank were about thirty Pirahã. They greeted him with what “sounded like a profusion of exotic songbirds, a melodic chattering scarcely discernible, to the uninitiated, as human speech.” Colapinto's richest moment came when the linguist W. Tecumseh Fitch arrived. Fitch was a reverent Chomskyite. He had collaborated with Chomsky and Marc Hauser in writing the 2002 article proclaiming Chomsky's discovery that recursion was the very essence of human language. Fitch wanted to see the Pirahã for himself, and Everett had said come right ahead. Fitch had devised a test by which he somehow—it was all highly esoteric and superscientifical—could detect whether a person was using “context-free grammar” by filming his eye movements while a cartoon monkey moved this way and that on a computer screen, accompanied by simple audio cues. He was absolutely sure the Pirahã would pass the test. “They're going to get this basic pattern. The Pirahã are humans—humans can do this.”

Fitch was very open about why he had come all the way from Scotland into the very bowels of the Amazon basin: to prove that, like everybody else, the Pirahã used recursion. At the University of St. Andrews he had left the building a few times to do fieldwork on animal behavior, but never for anything even remotely like this: to study an alien tribe of human beings he had never heard of before…well beyond the boundary line of civilization, law and order, in the rainforests of Brazil's wild northwest.

With Everett's help he set up a site for his experiments, complete with video and audio equipment. The first subject was a muscular Pirahã with a bowl-shaped haircut. He did nothing but look at the floating monkey head. He ignored the audio cues.

“It didn't look like he was doing premonitory looking,” i.e., trying to sense what the monkey might do, Fitch said to Everett. “Maybe ask him to point to where he thinks the monkey is going to go.”

“They don't point,” Everett said. And they don't have words for left or right or over there or any other direction. You can't tell them to go up or down; you have to say something concrete such as “up the river” or “down the river.” So Everett asked the man if the monkey was going upriver or downriver.

The man said, “Monkeys go to the jungle.”

Fitch has been described as a tall, patrician man, very much the old Ivy League sort. His full name is William Tecumseh Sherman Fitch III. He is a direct descendant of William Tecumseh Sherman, the famous Civil War general.
f
But now with Everett in the Amazon basin, he was sweating, and his brow was beginning to fold into rivulets between his eyebrows and on either side of his nose. He ran the test again. After several abortive tries, Fitch's voice took on “a rising note of panic.” “If they fail in the recursion one—it's not recursion; I've got to stop saying that. I mean embedding. Because, I mean, if he can't get
this
—”

In the Amazon basin, the tall patrician is reduced to ejaculations such as “Fuck! If I'd had a joystick for him to
hunt
the monkey!” He departs, insisting to Colapinto that his experiments have been a success. But when Colapinto asks him in what ways, his diction turns to fog. Fitch reports to Chomsky in due course that he did detect “context-free grammar” in Pirahã…even though you had to listen and watch the monkey closely, as closely as a Nevins or a Cilene Rodrigues would, to pick it up. As for “context-free”
syntax,
those results were inconclusive.
143

The
New Yorker
piece made Chomsky furious. It threw him and his followers into full combat mode. He had turned down Colapinto's request for an interview, apparently to position himself as aloof from his challenger. He and Everett were not on the same plane. But now
the whole accursèd world
was reading the
New Yorker
.
Dan
Everett, the
New Yorker
called him,
Dan,
not
Daniel L. Everett
… in the magazine's eyes he was an instant folk hero…Little Dan standing up to daunting Dictator Chomsky.

In the heading of the article was a photograph, reprinted many times since, of Everett submerged up to his neck in the Maici River. Only his smiling face is visible. Right near him but above him is a thirty-five-or-so-year-old Pirahã sitting in a canoe in his gym shorts. It became the image that distinguished Everett from Chomsky. Immersed!—up to his very neck, Everett is…immersed in the lives of a tribe of hitherto unknown na—
er
—indigenous peoples in the Amazon's uncivilized northwest. No linguist could help but contrast that with everybody's mental picture of Chomsky sitting up high, very high, in an armchair in an air-conditioned office at MIT, spic-and-span…he never looks down, only inward. He never leaves the building except to go to the airport to fly to other campuses to receive honorary degrees…more than forty at last count…and remain unmuddied by the Maici or any of the other muck of life down below.

Not that Everett in any way superseded Chomsky. He was far too roundly resented for that. He was telling academics that they had wasted half a century by subscribing to Chomsky's doctrine of Universal Grammar. Languages might appear wildly different from one another on the surface, Chomsky had taught, but down deep all shared the same structure and worked the same way. Abandoning that Chomskyan first principle would not come easily.

That much was perhaps predictable. But by now, the early twenty-first century, the vast majority of people who thought of themselves as intellectuals were atheists. Believers were regarded as something slightly worse than hapless fools. And the lowest breed of believers was the evangelical white Believer. There you had Daniel Everett. True, he had converted from Christianity to anthropology in the early 1980s—but his not merely evangelical but missionary past was a stain that would never fade away completely…not in academia.

Even before the term “political correctness” entered the language, linguists and anthropologists were careful not to characterize any—
er
—indigenous peoples as crude or simpleminded or inferior in any way. Everett was careful and a half. He had come upon the simplest society in the known world. The Pirahã thought only in the present tense. They had a limited language; it had no recursion, which would have enabled it to stretch on endlessly in any direction and into any time frame. They had no artifacts except for those bows and arrows. Everett bent over backwards to keep the Pirahã from sounding the least bit crude or simpleminded. Their language had its limits—but it had a certain profound richness, he said. It was the most difficult language in the world to learn—but such was the price of complexity, he said. Everett expressed nothing but admiration when it came to the Pirahã. But by this time, even giving the vaguest hint that you looked upon some—
er
—indigenous peoples as stone simple was no longer elitist. The word, by 2007, was “racist.” And
racist
had become hard tar to remove.