A Fresh Face in Hell with Jonathan Evison
A Fresh Face in Hell with Jonathan Evison is an hour long, conversation based, format. Guests include writers, musicians, athletes, actors, philosophers, scientists, and an array of experts across a variety of disciplines. Subjects will be treated with a mix of humor and thoughtful exploration.
A Fresh Face in Hell with Jonathan Evison
Daniel Everett - Lessons from the Amazon
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In 1977, linguist and Christian missionary Daniel Everett took on the challenge of moving his family to a remote jungle region of the Amazon to study and convert a native tribe called the Pirahã. In his book, "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle," Daniel recounts his adventures living with the Pirahã and how their concept of truth ended up pushing him towards atheism. Daniel's incredible stories are a curious reflection on what we have gained and lost as a modern society. A telling example . . . the Pirahã have no cultural concept of suicide.
Daniel Everett - https://daneverettbooks.com
linktr.ee: https://linktr.ee/freshfacepods.evison
Welcome to a Fresh Face in Hell. I'm your host, Jonathan Evan. Every week we talk to someone new and interesting, somebody intellectually curious, somebody who will hopefully renew our faith in this cool, cool world we live in. Fresh Face. I'm fascinated with indigenous cultures who still manage to live in relative isolation, away from the ruinous forces of the outside world. I feel like there's so much we could learn from these cultures and so much we've forgotten along our relentless march towards progress. My guest today, linguist and anthropologist Daniel Everett, spent four decades studying and living among the pitaha of the Amazon, and he has stories to tell. Daniel is the author of over a dozen books, most recently, Don't Sleep, There are Snakes. Please welcome this week's Fresh Face in Hell, Daniel Everett. Daniel, thanks for joining us. Great to be here with you. So you spent the better part of four decades going back and forth from the Amazon, and for for nearly a decade, you lived there permanently. As part of your missionary training before you went, you had to spend days, I think, I believe like 10 days in the thick of the Amazon jungle alone. No food, no water, no supplies. How'd that go? I'm obsessed with survival stories. So unpack this for me from the beginning. I want to hear it from drop off and just how this went for 10 days.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. That was um that was a very good experience. It was actually like the final exam of several months of uh survival training and jungle training. So once we completed the training, um there were about um 20 of us, maybe not quite that many, 15 or so. And we piled into a big dugout boat, and um the uh people who had been training us took us out to the jungle and um then left us in various parts of the jungle all by ourselves, completely separated, um, you know, miles from each other. And um, we were supposed to put all of our jungle training uh into practice, and that meant building a shelter, building a fire, collecting firewood, uh seeing to our water needs, and um then collecting edible plants and wherever possible trying to fish. And we were evaluated at the end first if we were still alive. I mean, they expected us to be, but they didn't I didn't see them again for about 10 days, and then uh also how well we taking care of ourselves. If you look pretty ragged and you hadn't been eating, um, you might fail uh the survival camp, it was called. Uh, survival camp. And um actually it was called survival hike. Um, and you would fail that if you didn't show much pioneering spirit and you seemed totally beat up by the environment. But if you seemed like you were still in good spirits and you had been feeding yourself and you had plenty to drink, then you were um talked about as pioneer missionary material and somebody they would trust to send out into the jungle, in my case, out into the Amazon.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it just seems like okay, 15 people. That just seems like rife with disastrous possibilities here. Did first of all, did did did you all make it out alive?
SPEAKER_01We did, although some of them, well, what happened was this there were actually there was another group of 15 that went in a totally different direction. We were all separated, nobody saw anybody, we're all trying to live. So then when they finally came and collected the first 15 of us, they brought us together and they said, Okay, you've all done well, but there's one more thing you have to do. Uh, and they gave us little packets of food for ourselves, because you know, because the first actual high-calorie food we'd had in 10 days, and they gave us other packets of food. They said, the thing is, this food is for the other guys, because we're gonna pretend that they're lost in a plane wreck and you gotta find them. So then we had to organize ourselves into a search team and spend a couple of days beyond that uh with these little bitty rations we had, just like little glad bags, little bitty baggies of trail mix, and um find the other guys. And when we found them, which we found them in a couple of days, um some of them just burst into tears. And some of our guys were crying because they were so beat and so worn out. And um, I actually got a couple of bad comments because I was um laughing and telling jokes the whole time, and uh they thought my humor was rather sarcastic at the expense of the guys who were crying. So uh I got a couple of demerits for that. But it was a very good experience, and uh everyone was glad to get back and and uh say that we had completed that because in the in the several months of training we had had in anthropology and linguistics and living in the jungle, living with indigenous peoples, um we knew that this survival hike was the final test. And if you failed that, and a couple of them did fail it, then that doesn't mean they died, it just means they were just too beat up psychologically. They were told they could not advance further and they couldn't be missionaries. Um, so um we advanced beyond that and we knew that was the last hurdle, and now I was clear to go to the Amazon.
SPEAKER_00I'm just shocked that everybody found their rendezvous point, right? You're all dropped off at 15 different points. So was your rendezvous point the same place you were dropped off? I mean, because like how are you going to deal with the coordinates? It just seems like the if you're foraging for food and trying to survive, it seems like the possibility of getting lost is so high. I guess if your rendezvous point is on the river, what you just find yourself back to the river and then look for a familiar landmark? Or I mean, how did they? I'm just shocked that y'all lived.
SPEAKER_01Well, it was a big lake mainly. It was uh Lake Ocot in uh in Chiapas, Mexico. And um, well, the way it happened was they they take you out and they leave you isolated by yourself for 10 days, but then they come along and collect you. Um, so we didn't have to find our way back to the rendezvous point. But once they did get us back to the rendezvous point, we were on our own and we had to use the compasses and we had to chart a course to find the other guys. And so first we had to talk about where's the most likely place to start looking, and um, you know, what are the rules of looking for them? And you you couldn't touch their food. You were carrying this food, and when yours was gone, you still had to keep theirs with you because when you got to them, this was going to be the first food that they had. And you had so we got our trail mix about three days before they got theirs, so they were actually isolated longer than we were, and it was a lot of hiking on an empty stomach. I mean, you hadn't eaten well in 10 days, and um you were thirsty, and nobody had slept all that well, and then you have miles and miles and miles of hiking to do over a couple of days before you find the other guys. And once we found them, uh we spent the night. Uh, you know, we used their shelters. Um, and so it'd be one guy teamed up with an another guy who we had found, and then we all started back uh to the main camp where we had started from.
SPEAKER_00Okay. I'm I could talk about this alone for an hour. I'm still trying to, I just feel like a bunch of things are coming to mind. Like, A, I think as much as I sort of like fantasize about these survival stories, written several novels that sort of deal with this. I kind of feel like on my own, after like two or three days, I'd be like, why am I doing this? And like, this was a mistake. I also see the possibility of losing track of the days, like just because you're not completely all there, just being like, has it been six days or seven days? What day do I go back? Or I I just I'm just shocked that y'all made it. Um talk to me about your first day among the Piraha. They they they just sort of dropped you in the in the village. Uh were they expecting you? Uh uh how are you greeted? Were you scared?
SPEAKER_01Well, there's no um there's no way to tell the Pidaha that a plane is coming today. A previous missionary had told them that he was leaving for good and that a redheaded guy, I'm no longer redheaded, but I was at that time, a redheaded guy is gonna come and and and live with you. That's all they knew. Um, so the day that we left uh was uh December, uh the first week of December in 1977. I had only been in Brazil since the end of October, so not even six weeks. And I went there by myself first time. So I get on the plane, and all I knew was that I was going to see a people that I expected to live with for the rest of my life and learn their language and translate the Bible into their language. So it was a huge responsibility. I didn't know what they looked like. I mean, I had seen pictures, but I didn't know what they look like in the flesh. Uh, I had never been to an Amazonian indigenous village. I had been to um villages in in southern Mexico, but that's a far cry from hunter-gatherers and the Amazon. And so we loaded up on this uh Cessna aircraft, a single engine, headed out two and a half hours over the jungle from the nearest city. And uh the first thing I noticed was that I was very airsick. Uh I never have adjusted to flying on Cessna aircraft, small um aircraft that are buffeted by the wind all the time in the updrafts. And um I was I was really sick to my stomach, and the pilot, who of course wasn't sick at all, was eating a tuna and onion sandwich, and he offered half of it to me. He said, he reached back, he says, Hey, want some sandwich? And I said, you know, no, I don't. I love it. And um, and then we landed uh eventually, and all I saw, I was sick, sick, and when the plane comes down from 5,000 feet to uh, you know, to land in in the jungle, it suddenly gets really hot inside the plane. You realize this is very hot, very humid, and the door opens and the plane is just surrounded by pita haas, and they're talking, and I didn't understand a word of their language. And um, but I have to say I was 26 and I thought this was one of the greatest moments of my life.
SPEAKER_00I was god, man.
SPEAKER_01I'm getting chills just thinking about I mean it's so intimidating, but it was extremely intimidating, but also very exciting, and I felt in many ways, and I was right, that my life was just beginning with that landing. Um, and I was um eventually, you know, I I learned their language fluently, and I made many friends that I still have there, and I lived with them a total of about eight years in the jungle. Um, and uh, you know, that became like my second home. But it didn't start off easy. I mean, you have to, it just so many sounds happening, you're sick to your stomach, but these were some of the sweetest, nicest people from the very second we landed, because they knew I was coming and because um they trusted the other missionary, he had been somebody they really liked, they were welcoming to me. And I could have never asked for um more friendly people, and and they started talking to me. They knew I wanted to learn their language, so they just started pointing to things, and I got information overload as they started giving me all this. I would say, wait, wait, and I would write it down and write it down and try to figure out what it might mean. And then I started asking questions, and it was just going exactly like all my courses. All the training I had had was just perfect. I felt at home from the first second I got out of the plane.
SPEAKER_00And you literally had no even rudimentary grasp of their language, you didn't know four nouns, nothing.
SPEAKER_01I didn't know anything, nothing. Wow. Um, there had been things written on the language by the previous missionary, but he told me ignore everything I wrote because I didn't ever figure it out. What I said is probably wrong, so just ignore it all. So I did. Um, and it turned out that what he said wasn't entirely wrong, but there was a lot I disagreed with. But um I just started from scratch from that moment on.
SPEAKER_00Now, did did did P have any conception of religion?
SPEAKER_01No, they don't have uh concept even of God and know nothing like religion or organized religion. In fact, they don't, in my opinion, ha in my analysis, have anything like superstition. They just they're sort of like the ultimate empiricists. They s um they need evidence for what they say. Um, and that becomes a very important part of their culture. But they were not religious, they were not superstitious, they had no belief, no concept of God.
SPEAKER_00Wow. I yeah, I I want to I want to keep staying broad here. I mean, what what can you tell me about their way of life? I mean, where exactly are they situated in the Amazon? Talk to me about their culture. Uh I I understand it's not hierarchical, but like just just sort of broadly kind of characterize their culture for me.
SPEAKER_01Sure. Um they, if you took out all the country maps, all the country boundaries, and you looked at a map of South America and you looked at the Amazon, they are right smack in the middle of the Amazon, just right in the middle. They're south of the big city of Manaus, which sits on the Amazon River proper. They are a tributary of a tributary of a tributary of the Amazon. So um, if you were to fly into the big city of Manaus and rent a boat, you would travel about four days uh on that boat, um actually more like five days down the Amazon and then up the Madeira River, and then at the Madeira you switch to a smaller boat and you go up the Marmelos and you go up there to the Mysi. So all these tributaries, and it would take you over a week by boat. And uh I've done that trip by boat many times. I've done it in a in a motorboat of my own all by myself, traveling over a thousand miles round trip, um, carrying all my gasoline with me. Um and I just love uh the Amazon. I mean, there are a lot of there's a lot of danger, but you don't tend to think about it when you're when you're cruising that way. But this time wasn't by boat, it was by plane, which gets you there a lot faster, but it doesn't give your body a chance to acclimate. It doesn't give your brain a chance to acclimate. You just go from a missionary compound in a nearby city, two and a half hours by Cessna, and then suddenly you're in the with hunter-gatherers that have only bows and arrows for as their highest technology and are largely um, you know, naked living off the land. Um and and that was um well, I would I won't say it's a shock because I knew that's what I was, I knew intellectually that's what I was gonna find, but it was just wonderful. I couldn't believe it. I I just um I told somebody once, there are people who would pay thousands and thousands of dollars to have this experience, and he said, You did pay thousands and thousands of dollars to have this experience. I said, Oh, right, I did. Um, but it was um uh, you know, I've had I've had a lot of diseases there, but um, it's still a great experience. But you ask about their culture, um, they are, as many American Indians are, they're egalitarian. Nobody is the boss, everybody cooperates. Sometimes they'll reach a consensus about something really important, but by and large, you get up in the morning, you do what you want to do. If you don't feel like hunting or fishing, don't. You're gonna go hungry and your family's gonna go hungry, but that's your business. You know, you do what you want to do. Um, you sometimes they have other projects, they want to make something, or they go to the field and they work, they have smaller fields now. They used to be 100% hunter-gatherers, and they still depend, I would say 70% of their diet is fish from the river. Um, and uh then now they've supplemented it with very small fields, not enough to keep them going. But um, so they have different different activities, but by and large, uh women are out gathering every day and men are out hunting or fishing, usually fishing. Hunting's a lot harder and it's more dangerous, but they still do that. But fishing, you just go to the river and with your bow and arrow and shoot fish out of the river and come back with half a canoe full of fish. Uh if you're hunting, then you have to worry about snakes and you have to worry about jaguars and mountain lions and um that kind of thing. In the river, you have to worry about alligators and stingrays and anacondas and things like that.
SPEAKER_00God. And so about 150, 200 people? How many people in the village?
SPEAKER_01When I first got there, I estimated the total population of the enti all the villages combined at about 150. Uh, the average size of a village is probably 30 or 40, depending on the time of year. It can get bigger and it can get smaller. But I would say today that the total population of all the Pidaha is probably between seven and eight hundred people. Okay. So there are only that many people who speak the language in the world.
unknownDang.
SPEAKER_00So, like the pace of life. I mean, these people have been at it for a while. They're not going to be as uh probably have to be quite as earnest in their fishing and hunting as is a white person coming into the jungle or a European. Uh what was the kind of general pace living among them like? Were they were a busy culture, or was there a lot of downtime? Was there different times of the day where people were active? I'm just trying to really get a sense of like what you felt living among them.
SPEAKER_01And well, I tried to calculate by observation um a rough estimate of how much time a man spends hunting per week. And I estimated it at about uh 20 hours a week. Um, and the rest of the time, well, they might they might go gathering food with their wives, but but by and large, um, once they're done hunting and fishing, they just lie around the fire telling jokes and laughing and uh having a great time. I mean, it's a very relaxed culture. It's like, you know, I told my wife um when we first got there, I was expecting all these rituals and stuff. I said, this is like a bunch of people on a campout. You know, they're just having a blast. It's like constant vacation here. They do have hard times. There's a lot of danger, but when there aren't those hard times, and that's not every day, and when there's not danger, and danger's around, but they don't feel under danger most days. I mean, they're just enjoying life, they love it.
SPEAKER_00I uh I did a little cursory research just because I want to, you know, thinking of my questions, and I'm just really I'm fascinating. I love this. I love I love kind of getting a sense of of what it's like to live among them. But uh one of the things I learned is that this kind of shocked me, is that they do not store their food or preserve their food.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00Like like most uh, you know, like indigenous Native American cultures.
SPEAKER_01That's right. Um, most Amazonians, in fact, um if they kill an excess of meat, they will smoke it, or if they have salt, they will salt it, um, or they might dry it into jerky. So there are various ways of preserving meat. Um the pitaha have learned to do these things, but they don't do them. Uh I know they know how to do them because uh back in the days that boats were coming up their river on a regular basis to buy Brazil nuts, they would dry uh meat or smoke meat to trade with the Brazilians. Um, but when there's nobody coming up the river, they don't do that and they go hungry. And uh, you know, I'll say, Aren't you gonna smoke the meat or aren't you gonna, you know, salt the meat? And they would say, No, I store my meat in the belly of my brother. Um, and you know, they share with one another, so I may not kill anything today. Uh, and so my family will go hungry, except that my brother, everybody is a brother. Um, they don't have different words for brother and sister, they just have word for sibling. Everybody, my generation is a sibling, and um, so if one sibling doesn't catch something, um, another sibling will, and they share with one another equally. Um, so this is how somebody gets to take a day off. You know, my my buddy's gonna feed my family today, and I'll feed his family tomorrow. Um, so there's just maximal cooperation. That's not to say that there's no arguments and that. Some guys aren't lazy. But the arguments one of the worst sins among the Pedaha, the only thing I would actually call a sin, it's it's not really a sin in the Christian sense of the word, uh, but uh is to get angry with somebody else, to be violent or show anger. This is really frowned upon. But but other than that, um, you know, people get along uh because it's easier to get along when you're living in such a small group and you're depending on one another than to be in competition. So they get along. Um and you know, I I've seen so many times where I would have thought there could have been conflict, but there's not conflict, you know. If if um if a couple decides they want to go off and spend a couple of days together, they'll leave their children behind. Not always, but sometimes they leave their children behind. But everybody in the village takes care of those kids. They watch them, they make sure they have food, they make sure they've got a fire. If the kids want to come over and sleep with them, that's fine. Um, and there's no, you don't have to ask permission. Everybody takes care of everybody. Uh sometimes a whole family will go off for several days. If they're going to go be gone longer than two days or so, they'll take their children, usually, but not always. Um, but it's very relaxed. You don't need to worry about babysitters, uh, you don't need to worry about somebody, your kids getting into trouble when you're out of out of sight for just a bit. Um and even sometimes when all the men are gone, there will there it'll never be the case that all the men are gone. You might have 10 men in the village and you wake up and nine of them are out hunting and fishing, but there will always be one man uh with his bow and arrow who's uh wide awake and he's the he's sort of like the guard for the day. He's in charge of keeping the village safe. Um, you know, uh it's not they're not gonna get visitors from the outside, and no pitaha is gonna is a criminal. They're not going to hurt each other. But wild animals do come into the village sometimes, you know. You see you have a 400-pound jaguar walk into the village, you better have somebody there who can handle it. Um no problem with neighboring tribes, no, they they are quite isolated from other tribes. The closest other tribe is about uh three days canoe trip. And um they would not be. What's that?
SPEAKER_00Like 70, 80 miles? What's that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. They um uh they travel, uh let's see, my motorboat goes at about um 25 knots, and they go at about uh five knots. Uh so you know they go, they can paddle all day and all night. When I say three days, that's usually paddling all day and all night. Uh they take turns, they don't they don't stop. Sometimes they do, but usually they just go straight down. Um so they would know, and don't ask me how they always know, but they always know if somebody's coming who's not part of the pitaha, and they're ready for them. Uh last year, uh how well actually this last summer, I had How do they know?
SPEAKER_00That's crazy.
SPEAKER_01There's wildlife uh that gives signs and and and things, um, and usually there's always a pitaha, there are always pitaha men spread out in all directions for miles and miles while they're hunting and fishing. And as soon as they detect anything unusual, they run back to the village. But last year they had uh three Brazilians, not Indians, but three Brazilians from an a farm offside off of the uh Pidaha's reservation who felt like the Pidaha had stolen from them, and they sent three young guys with shotguns to threaten the Pidaha. That was a serious mistake. So all three of those guys shot got shot with arrows. Um, and they never saw the Pedaha who shot him. One of them was killed. He got shot through the head. The arrow passed almost all the way through his head uh from the back to the front. Um and the other guy got shot in the stomach, and the other, and another guy got shot in the arm. But the only reason somebody got shot in the stomach and the arm is because they just wanted to wound them. That one guy that got killed, he was intended to be killed. So they wanted to make them afraid of coming down, and they should have been. Anybody who knows about the Pidaha knows that the river narrows, it's surrounded by jungle, you can't see what's in the jungle, and any of their arrows can kill all the way across the river. You know, so you can be on the far side of the river from them, but the river's narrow enough, so they'll still kill you if they shoot at you and they don't miss. So I would never advise anybody to go in after them.
SPEAKER_00Did you ever see that? I think it was a John Borman movie from the 70s called I think it was called the Emerald Forest. It had like Powers Booth in it.
SPEAKER_01And it was about Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it was about like a dam engineer that was they were damming part of the one of these tributaries of the Amazon and his son strayed off and he ended up living among uh for years and years among these people, and they they they had the the blow darts and stuff. I mean, I was just wondering if that if in your memory, if if that uh, you know, the way they were portrayed in the movie is anything like say the Pidaha.
SPEAKER_01Well, all the movies are romanticized to some degree, but if somebody just showed up, especially somebody really young among the Pedaha, and they didn't represent a threat, they weren't yelling or screaming or trying to hurt anybody, they would be treated very well. They wouldn't be, you know, the these guys who got shot were the Pedaha knew they had shotguns and they were coming to hurt them. If if you're just lost or something, the Pedaha will probably not only feed you but put you in a canoe and take you out uh to s to the the nearest um settlement of Brazilians. Um but um dams, you mentioned dams, dams are destroying the Pedaha's way of life. These are very dangerous things. So they built dams on the Madeira River, which is two tributaries away from the marmellows, but those dams lowered the water so much, they lower it every season so much that most of the fish the Pedaha depend on leave the river. So they go months.
SPEAKER_00And that's 70% of their diet.
SPEAKER_01That's 70% of their diet. And when the fish leave the river, they start, they starve, they hunt, but the animals also leave. If there's no water, the animals are leaving. So um they're in very bad shape right now because of these dams, uh, and it's hard to help them understand. And even if they did understand, there's nothing they can do about it. The Brazilian government's not going to destroy those dams to save 700 people who live by hunting and gathering. Um it would be cheaper.
SPEAKER_00They wouldn't do it for 700,000.
SPEAKER_01No, they wouldn't. Uh, so you know, they they the this typical way the U.S. did this and Brazil does this is to try to move the reservation so that um they become more dependent on the outside world and lose their original hunter-gatherer culture. Uh uh the I'm not allowed to go back right now because of all this turmoil, and the government doesn't want anybody from the outside in there, which is a shame because nobody in the government speaks the language at all, and the Pitaha don't speak Portuguese all that well. And so um the only one who could possibly translate and figure out what's on their mind is me. But um uh the government is not allowing me in. And I, you know, it's not like I don't understand. They they want to really limit the flow of people and keep it to officials, but uh I don't think it works out as well for them uh as it should.
SPEAKER_00A fascinating idea I ran across, and this is this is I I can't even fully get my mind around it. That's why I'm gonna ask you is that the Peter cosmology involves this idea of layers of land, like parallel planes which don't communicate. So, like I'm thinking on a quantum level, this almost sounds like the idea of dimensionality, you know. Uh this may be a leap on my part, but this idea that there is more going on and on on different levels and different frequencies that that we are not aware of in our current reality. I mean, what what can you kind of help explain this idea about this layered perception of reality?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, uh it was certainly strange for me when I first encountered it. And the way I encountered it was, you know, just asking words for things. An obvious word to get is ground. So I had um I had a stick and I said, What's this? You know, I'm speaking English because I although I know they don't understand it, uh they do know that other people have other languages, and uh so they know I'm trying to communicate. So, you know, what's this? And they say, i, which is stick. I thought it meant stick, and it does mean stick. And so I let it fall, and I say, uh stick falls, and they say i he migge cowbe, and migge means ground, so it fell to the ground. So it ground the stick, ground fell. That's what they said, literally. Um, so ground is Miggy, and so I confirmed that, you know, so I pointed and it said MIGI, and then I pointed to the sky, and I said, What is that? And they said Miggy. And I thought, okay, something's wrong here. They're telling me the same word for sky as they told me for ground. There must be something I'm not hearing. They sound similar, but they're not the same. But it turns out they are the same, and it doesn't mean ground, and it doesn't mean sky, it means barrier. Um, so the MIGI is the lower barrier, and the MIGI up there is the upper barrier, and you can actually refer to them that way using you know the up high barrier and the down low barrier, you can call them that. Um, and and um so the entire universe below this Miggy, there are other Miggies, and above that there are other Miggies, other barriers, and um there can be some communication. So um they believe that some of the people from the upper Miggy can come down to this place, and people from this place can go up, come up. People below us can come up to our level, and people from up there can come down. And some of them say they have been up to the upper levels as well in their dreams, uh, which is pretty much the same thing as having been there, in their opinion. Um, so it's fascinating to see these different layers and how they they think about it. Um and for me, that was one of the first of many eye-openers and different ways of perceiving the universe. You know, I had I didn't have any graduate degree at the time. The only degree that I had was a degree in Bible and theology. Um, and that didn't prepare me for sophisticated anthropological reasoning or linguistic. I had basic linguistics. I had, you know, I had some basic linguistic training, but um, it was only as I began to go more into my graduate studies that I just realized, you know, this is really mind-blowing. This is just unusual, and it shows us very different conceptions of the universe that we live in.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm for instance, the uh I correct me if I'm wrong, but the Pidaha have no conception of suicide. Didn't they when you tried to explain the idea? Didn't they laugh or something?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. I was uh when I, you know, in my strongest missionary phase, I was often talking to them about God and showing so I was trying to tell them how God can help you when you're sad. And so I told them the story of my stepmother who committed suicide. And, you know, that's a very emotional story for me. So I told it and I wanted them to feel like I was sharing, you know, a really intimate part of myself and that I was letting down my barriers for them. Um, that was how naive I was about cross-cultural communication. But um, once I finished the story, I expected them to look really serious and ask me questions, but instead they all burst out laughing. And I'm thinking, you know, what what are these people laughing for? I just told them my stepmother committed suicide. So I asked them, why are you laughing? And they said, You people kill yourselves? This is this is bizarre. We don't kill ourselves. We didn't know there were people who killed themselves. Why do you kill yourselves? And um so suicide is completely foreign to them.
SPEAKER_00Um, oh go on. Well, there was kind of makes sense in a way because the culture you describe is so works so well that this this idea of the the individual feeling isolated, I mean, because isolation and depression, these these things that generally in the sort of Western conception lead us to suicidal ideation, you can kind of see why they wouldn't exist because everything is in such balance, everything is has such a natural equilibrium. There's no isolation.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's right. You see, sometimes you see people who are sitting uh contemplating, and one guy I thought he was depressed, and I thought, yeah, I saw he said he was sitting by the river looking out over the river, and I said, What are you looking at? What are you thinking about? He says, I'm just thinking how beautiful the river is, just watching the river. Isn't it beautiful? I love this river. Uh, and that was like I thought he was depressed, and he's just appreciating the beauty of nature. Uh, they love nature. You know, I used to I asked them one time, I said, Do you know why I've come here? And they said, Well, it doesn't get cold here like you've told us it gets in America. This is a much better place, right? You this is the most beautiful place anywhere. And um I started to think, well, you know, they're not they're not far off.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's a it brings up an interesting sort of question, which is like, how how how do the Pedaha feel about the outside world? I mean, what is it like? I wonder for them if you're describing a landscape that's completely foreign to theirs, like, you know, mountains and glaciers and and like you know they I mean, I at this point I imagine they've seen photographs of these places or they have more of a conception of the outside world, but when you first came there, that's all they know is just their environment. They they have, I would guess, no conception that there are other that there's deserts, or that there is uh, you know, uh, you know, alpine terrains or oceans.
SPEAKER_01I was trying to translate the Bible, and that has a lot of talk about deserts, you know. John the Baptist, a voice crying in the wilderness and the desert. And how do you talk to them about desert? There's a verse that says, um, you know, uh talks about the value of a cup of cold water. Well, water doesn't have any value to them at all. The Amazon's almost all water.
SPEAKER_00And it rains 200 inches a year, too. So yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01There's rain all the time. You know, my ex-father-in-law used to say if your nose grew upside down, you would drown to death in the Amazon. Um, because the what water would be going in your nostrils all the time. But um talking to them about the desert, I said it's like one big beach, because they have seen beaches. When the river goes down, there are these beautiful, fine, white, sandy beaches up and down the river that are just fabulous. Um so you try to get the ideas across. I I once mentioned to my wife, I said the only way that you could really translate some of these terms is to charter a plane and take them all over to Israel and let them walk around and describe things and then take them back. Uh, that was, you know, sort of joking, but uh uh yeah, they and to explain to them what cold is. I took in some ice one time uh and let them feel the ice and they couldn't believe it was water, but then they watched it melt in their hands and they had never seen solid water, so they call it stone water uh because it's solid and they had never seen solid water, never even heard of solid water. Um and uh I mean originally they probably came um from Peru during the time of the Incas, and they were a big nation back then, and they didn't want to be conquered by the Incas or serve the Incas, so they left. This is the this is not proven, but it is the the best evidence we have suggests that this is what happened. Um so they don't have any memory of any ice. If they saw ice in the Andes, they don't have any any collective memory of that, it's not in their language. Um so um, yeah, there were a lot of differences, a a lot of shocks. And and I took, I, you know, sometimes somebody would get sick and I would take them out to the city of Porto Velo, which is the closest really big city with hospitals. And um, and they couldn't figure out how anybody could find their way around that town. And I said, Well, I same thing, I can't figure out how you guys know your way around the jungle, you know. Um, so um it it is it is uh really an encounter of two very different life experiences, and it's um the greatest privilege one can have is to be immersed in such a radically different culture. Well, not everybody would consider it a privilege, I do. Um and and to learn from these people so unlike yourself, and and learn that there are many other ways of seeing the world than the way you were raised to see it.
SPEAKER_00What about just the sheer scope and size of the universe or or the the earth is a sphere instead of like a flat plane, or like any conception of it? Seems like they're you know, they they range, you know, whatever, a hundred miles or whatever to their hunting and gathering, but like do they have really any conception of how gigantic the world is? Or like I said, is it that it's that it's round and that it's a heavenly body and that it's you know, I mean, you brought up the Inca who had a very strong sense of uh cosmology and the sense of the movement of the planets and the and the constant, you know. Did do these did the P Peterha could you get a sense of of their conception of this the size and scope of the Earth?
SPEAKER_01Well, i if you look up into space and see the stars and the sun and the moon and all of that, they know that very well. They can they they know um where some certain stars are that they name and planets and they they recognize differences in space. They don't have a word for planet versus star, but they can tell that some heavenly bodies twinkle and some don't twinkle, and they um have names of constellations, you know. So they they have a really well-developed idea, probably not at the level of the Inca, but not being an astronomer myself, I never explored their knowledge of space in much detail, except to say that they know it. But when you come back down to Earth, this other MIGI, this other barrier, uh, it's their conception is that it's all one big jungle, that the there's just a jungle, and and every human being lives in the jungle. Uh in fact, the word jungle, oi, um, doesn't just mean jungle, it means environment, biosphere. In fact, you want to tell somebody to be still, they're sitting in a canoe, and you don't want them to tip it over, you say, don't move in the environment, um, which means to stay absolutely still still. And the jungle's part of the environment. The only time they get anything like a big sky view of the world is if they paddle way down to the Madeira River. And where they hit the Madeira, it's probably three or four miles wide. And once you get to a river like that, you can see the sky in all directions, and it's the closest they they get to a big sky view of of the world. Um, and so they know the world is big, they have no concept of how big it is. I tried taking in maps and explaining stuff to them, but it I was not successful, you know. Um, so it's just it's just so foreign. It would be like me trying to explain um what it's like to know the jungle like the back of your hand to somebody born and raised in New York City. Um just other worlds, very, very different worlds. I mean, I think that um it's funny, I've taken American students with me um to start their research among the Pedahas, and they're expecting it to be very, very different. So they have they're still shocked, they still have culture strain and culture shock, but they're expecting a lot of difference. I've taken Brazilian graduate students from southern Brazil there with me, and they undergo more shock because they think they're gonna still be in Brazil, so it's all the same, and they find out, oh, this part of Brazil is like another planet uh from São Paulo. Um so um uh if anybody gets the most shocked I've seen students when I've taken them are Brazilians. Um but they everybody adapts fairly well. And this is a self selecting group. Anybody who wants to go to the Amazon with me is self selecting uh because I don't I make sure that they know as well as I can communicate it what they're going to encounter and what's going to be hard for them.
SPEAKER_00Well what do you think are some of the things that people most misunderstand about the Pedaha or other indigenous cultures of the Amazon?
SPEAKER_01Well, they don't realize sometimes some people don't realize how the Pedaha language is not primitive. It's incredibly complex. I see stories talking about how simple it is because it doesn't have, for example, this property called recursion, but their verbs are very complicated. The people themselves are very sophisticated thinkers. I would say that some of the most intellectually satisfying conversations I have had are with these naked hunter-gatherers talking to me about their views of the world and answering their questions about my culture. They ask better questions than many Americans ask me about the Amazon. You know, uneducated Americans asking me about the Amazon. Their questions are less sophisticated than the Pedath Haas questions to me about America.
SPEAKER_00Can you give me like an example of what a question might look like?
SPEAKER_01Well, um, you know, so telling them about Jesus, uh, which I did, they want to know the facts, you know. So, how did you see Jesus? Uh well, I didn't see him. Um they start asking me all these questions about how I have come by the evidence for the things that I'm telling them. So, in that sense, they're reasoning like philosophers, you know, like epistemologists. Whereas um when I tell also when they see that Americans do things differently from them, so I built an outhouse, they considered that to be the most disgusting thing they had ever heard of in their entire life.
SPEAKER_00They're kind of they're not wrong.
SPEAKER_01I mean, yeah, you collect all this waste in one stinky spot that stinks up the whole village. I eventually learned how to make one that didn't stink so bad, but um um that's interesting.
SPEAKER_00Rather than just go squat by a tree like them, you decided to you you stuck to your to your code and you're gonna have to get away.
SPEAKER_01Well, I had a I had my family with me.
SPEAKER_00Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_01And so I had three little children, and eventually what I did was to make an outhouse, but also have a chemical toilet for camping, and we had a screened off, we had a private part in the house, so my kids would use that, and then I would dump that once a day down the outhouse. But for me, I mean for a man, you don't have to use every time you need to go to the bathroom, you don't need to squat. But um, but uh the outhouse um is kind of important. You have to learn how to make one, though. The first one I made was basically just a hole with you know someplace to sit above it. Um, and then snakes come there, you you know, you s you see snakes coming into the outhouse and out of the outhouse. You gotta it's it takes a lot of technology, so you gotta really believe that that keeps the bacteria down. So this requires an entire theory of communicable disease and germs that they don't have, and that it would be very difficult to convince them of because I can't show them a germ, uh, and I can't show them a germ causing a disease. So there's I don't have the evidence that I can produce that this is a good thing to do. But they rather than condemn me, they'll joke about it, but they don't condemn me. They accept these differences. They say, Americans do it this way, Pitaha do it this way, um, Brazilians do it another way. Um But Americans that I've taken there and that have asked me about them when I was traveling to churches and stuff when I was still a missionary, everything I told them about the Pedaha wasn't just different, it was inferior. It was dramatically inferior. So they said, Oh God, these are such primitive people. And I'm thinking, yeah, well, I think they actually at least as smart as you are, and and uh at least as sophisticated in their thoughts as you are, and probably a lot more. You know, Americans, I showed, I remember I showed slides of the Pedaha to a church in Texas, and I forget that the Pedaha are naked. I've just you see it all the time, it's always around you, and I don't even think twice about it, you know. Um, and I'm showing these slides, and people start to walk out and they say, These people are naked. I said, Yeah, well, that's how they live. But you're the missionary, you haven't taught them that it's a sin to go without clothes. Well, I don't really think it is a sin to go without clothes, you know. I don't see that in the Bible. And they said, Well, Adam and Eve were ashamed because of their nakedness, and God banished them from the garden. Um, so you know, I had to, you know, deal with all of this stuff. And even once I took a Pedaha man for medical treatment all the way to Sao Paulo, to the university I was then teaching at, and uh he I took him to class with me. You know, it's a class on Brazilian Indian languages. So I took him to this class, and the professor who was teaching it, who was like the greatest expert in the world on Amazonian languages at the time, um, didn't like me bringing this Indian to class. Um he said, this guy's dirty and everything. Well, he's an Indian, you're teaching a class about him, and you know, so I was I had my mind boggled by um by the in implicit inherent racism of many people, as well as the inability to get outside of their own culture and and respect the fact that other people do things differently, and those differences are not necessarily inferior. In fact, many of them are superior.
SPEAKER_00That's so interesting to me because we think of like racism as almost this sort of intuitive human response to things that are different from us, almost like a fear-based, like this is different than us, it must be inferior or superior, or however you're gonna frame it. And yet the Pedaha seem to understand that that's not the case. So it isn't it isn't just some sort of uh ingrained human conception well if they can accept outside cultures they accept us very well.
SPEAKER_01That doesn't mean that they don't think their way of doing things is superior. Okay, I know them well enough to know now that they do believe that what they do, the way they do things, is better than the way we do them. But they would never say that, and they would never act like they're able to accept differences. Okay, you guys do it that way. Uh, that's fine. We don't do it that way, and we like our way better, but we're not going to condemn you for doing it that way, and we don't think we're less of you for doing it that way. So so you can have an opinion that my way is better without telling the thinking of the other person as inferior or worse or anything like that. Um, they are ethnocentric, there's no question about that. So they're they when you speak pitaha, you're speaking with a straight head. And when you speak any other language, you're speaking with a crooked head. So um, but at the same time, you don't see uh the repugnance. When I first got there, the women were very much against me. And I learned later that's because many of them had seen other women raped by outsiders and attacked. And there were there was a case I tell in my new book that's coming out next year, Born of the River, of a guy who got off a boat and just walked up and started asking a Pedaha woman questions, and she didn't speak Portuguese, plus they women don't speak to outsiders they don't know. And he just pulled out a gun and shot her six times and killed her in front of everybody. Jesus Christ. So they're not um that's how racism really manifests itself when there's no law around. But um um they don't condemn people like that. But out of fear and out of repugnance for what had been done to them, at first the women, when I would try to talk to them, would turn and spit, which is a real sign of disgust. So I stopped talking to them for a while. But when I learned the language, I would walk by them and I would tell jokes. And sometimes those jokes were somewhat off-color because they tell off-color jokes all the time. They're not formulaic jokes, they're not jokes that anybody's written down, they're just comments that are off-color uh sometimes. They're not always off-color. Anyway, I would tell the I would make these little remarks and I would notice some of the women smirking. And then um eventually doing that, they started asking me questions and they started telling, you know, making off-color remarks to me. And so then after that, we hit it off really well. But that only took about a year of constant effort.
SPEAKER_00So I I've saved kind of what I feel is like one of the most interesting parts of your story for last, which is that you went to the Amazon as a missionary to translate the Bible and you came back an atheist. Talk to me about what happened. Was that a gradual process?
SPEAKER_01Like it was very gradual. I was a very strong believer. I used I like to tell people that I believed the Bible cover to cover and even the covers. Um so my faith was very important to me. But there were several things happening in my life at the same time. One was that I was in a PhD program in Brazil, and I was learning about philosophy and science and linguistics and anthropology, and uh learning to think in ways different than I had been trained to think as an undergraduate majoring in Bible and theology. Uh, more importantly, however, was the fact that uh the of the Pedaha. There were, and there were two things about the Pedaha that challenged me to think and eventually led me to give up my faith. First of all, I had gone there to communicate the gospel so that they could go to heaven and not hell, but also so that they could live uh lives of peace and they could uh know love and joy in their lives and have better character. And then what I discovered was they had better character than me already. They already had better character in many ways, better sense of morality, less um jealousy, less anger, uh, more calmness, uh, more peace than even any Christian that I know, even any Christian missionary. So that was an that was a personal moral challenge to me. Second, they would ask me questions about the evidence I had for God and for Jesus and what I had seen with my own eyes and how I had um who else I knew that had seen these things with their own eyes, which is important to the Pedaha. And as they poked holes in all of my evidence in a very polite way, but still poking holes in it, I realized I'm not thinking scientifically about what I believe. I am um I am not using real evidence as a scientist would use, and I don't have any moral authority to appeal to them. You know, some Christians, when they hear that I have abandoned the faith and become an atheist, they said, Well, the main point is that they're still going to hell, no matter how happy they are. And um, so I guess I came to believe that um no, I I don't believe in hell and I don't believe in heaven. And so when I told the Pina Haw all this, they said, Well, good, now you're like us.
SPEAKER_00Uh so you went you went there to sort of try to uh you went there to try to uh you save them and they ended up saving you, or or persuade them, but you ended up being persuaded. Have you heard this story from other missionaries? Do you know other missionaries who have who have embarked on this journey? Yeah, it seems very unique to me, and I think it's because you're a scientist deep down.
SPEAKER_01Well, I think that has a lot to do with it. Um, and I would use the word save. I do feel that they saved me, not from everlasting torment, but from superstition and from um burdens on what I could think and what I couldn't think, what was appropriate to think, what was they have given me greater freedom through this than I ever thought possible when I was a Christian missionary. Since I published the book Don't Sleep There Are Snakes, um I have heard from the children of missionaries who um had a similar journey. And I have heard from one or two missionaries who said, I never would have told anybody this, but yeah, that happened to me in my mind, even though I never told anybody that. Um you know, the um the freedom that that came with it, it also led to a divorce. You know, my wife uh didn't want to live with somebody who wasn't a believer. All the Christian friends that I had had for you know more than 20 years abandoned me. None of none of them, not one of them, is still a friend of mine. Uh, and it's not because I don't want to have anything to do with them. Anytime somebody contacts me from my past, from my Christian past, they are trying to convert me, you know, and I tell them, you know, you're barking up the wrong tree. I still know the Bible better than you do. And uh there's not a verse you can give me that I haven't heard and don't know. Um, so uh, you know, but you know, I I've met so many people uh who accept you. If you know, in academics, if somebody tells me they're a fundamentalist Christian, I figure, well, that's that's your business. As long as you don't try to convert me back to that, that's fine. I'm happy for you.
SPEAKER_00You do things differently, as the Pedaha would do.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, exactly. You're we're we're different people. I don't, you know, when I stopped being a missionary and people thought I was going to start pushing atheism, I said, I was an evangelist for Christianity, but I'm not an evangelist for atheism. You know, I'm out of the evangelism business. I've got enough stuff to worry about trying to take care of myself and my family and do my research and write the things that I write. In my in my new book, Born of the River, um, which is a collection of stories told by almost 20 different Amazonian groups that I collected over a period of 50 years about birth and teenage childhood, teenage years, adulthood, marriage, community, and death. It ends with a couple of different perspectives on what happens after death. And so some indigenous peoples of the Amazon believe in something very much like a heaven, and other people believe that uh death is the end of it, and when you're dead, you're dead. Uh, just like you can look at a monkey that's been killed, it's not gone anywhere. Its body is there and it's dead. Um, so there are different perspectives, and you can't classify it. Nothing irritates me more than to have people talk about Indians of the Americas as though they were all the same, or Amazonian Indians as though they were all the same. There are 200 different languages spoken in the Amazon by two by over a hundred distinct different cultures, and they no more think alike than um somebody born in San Diego, California thinks like somebody born in Beijing. There are overlaps, but they're not identical.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. I I've noticed I had a problem in publishing with that, where I had a characters that were indigenous characters and they they were uh they're basically pre-Salish native peoples on the coast here. And the booksellers, this is in the age of great sensitivity.
SPEAKER_01I actually have written a couple of articles on Salish languages.
SPEAKER_00So yeah. And so the my the booksellers, the publishers were like, well, we just want to make sure, you know, that this isn't like some sort of racist, uh, you know, it's just this we live in a time of very racial sensitivity. We have sensitivity readers, they call them now. And their idea was what we're gonna do is we're gonna send it to this uh Navajo bookseller we know that lives down in the Southeast. And I'm like, okay, who you know, and they did they didn't see the irony of that. There must be 200 cultures, you know, in the East American cultures between the Salish and the Navajo, and you're you this is your solution.
SPEAKER_01And for all that no, the Navajo might hate the Salish. Exactly. You haven't done an investigation, you don't know what the relationship is there, you know. That in my new book of all these stories, even though they're not my stories, uh, I I'm recollecting and taking them from my field notes and everything. That's my publisher was extremely sensitive to that, you know. Oh, you think this is going to make them look bad, you know, uh to people who don't know them. So we thought about that a great deal. And I I have hundreds and hundreds of stories. Um, but I left out, you know, I only include 30 stories, 30-something stories in the book, uh, plus connecting material and things like that. Um because you have to think very carefully when you're the third party and you're choosing the story from that group to represent that group to some other readership, how will it be received? How will it be perceived? And so my hope is that people can read these stories and think, gosh, these are interesting people and they're intellectually sophisticated and they're tougher than hell. I mean, these are just you talk about toughness, you don't know what it's like to be tough unless you're an Amazonian Indian with a quarter inch of callus all over your body almost, and and you can take pain. And I've I've seen so many horrible injuries where people didn't show much pain at all. Uh it's it's you know, they're these are just the toughest of the tough, in my opinion.
SPEAKER_00Dang, man, I could talk to you forever about this stuff. You are a fascinating dude. Promise me that the next time I'm on tour in Boston, I can get you out for a beer because I want to keep picking your brain about this stuff. We have hardly even delved into the linguistics part of it, which is a writer, it's very interesting to me. I was so interested in the culture. Um, but man, you've been amazing. Uh he he is Daniel Everett, linguist, anthropologist. Check out Don't Sleep. There are snakes. Uh, and the uh of the river, what's the second one called? Born of the River. Born of the River. Uh, Daniel, thank you for being our Fresh Face in Hell this week. Great, wonderful to be with you. A Fresh Face in Hell with Jonathan Evan is brought to you by Fresh Face Pods and produced by Jason Botkin and yours truly. Check us out on Instagram, YouTube, or at our website at FreshFacePods.tv. Don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter for updates and special content. And if you love the podcast, by all means run up and buy all of Jonathan Evan's award winning novels wherever books are sold.
