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3:41am July 8, 2013

➸ Nico: Does anyone have info on the Piraha language that isn’t derived from...

nicocoer:

Does anyone have info on the Piraha language that isn’t derived from white dudes wanking about how it either taught them to embrace atheism or boosted their professional careers/destroyed someone else’s or taught them xyz truth because of stuff that every time I read it looks like the “simple…

As far as I can tell, so few non-Pirahã people speak Pirahã, and vice versa, that literally everything written about them in English is the same few white dudes wanking. And my guess is that if any Pirahã people have spoken out about out in a language other than Pirahã, it would be in Portuguese. But the main Pirahã who would speak Portuguese would be children now, because they’ve worked so hard to resist assimilation including learning other languages.

Leaving the only people to interpret their culture in other languages, to be white dudes with their own cultural agendas. That, as far as I can tell from the main white guy who learned their language, he doesn’t strike me as the type to be very aware of his own unspoken agendas. His book is available for Kindle though so I’m going to read it, but I expect to read it through gritted teeth.

It also looks like one of the main agendas white people have about the Pirahã is to bicker back and forth about linguistics and whether their language disproves a popular theory or not. With the actual Pirahã people, their culture, their language, and their own agendas for themselves, getting lost in the bickering about a tiny number of obscure features that may exist in their language.

(Which is hard to know even that, because so few outsiders speak it. Like only the tiniest handful, if that, from what I can tell.)

So I sincerely doubt there is any English language stuff out there from the Pirahã perspective, and honestly also doubt there’s anything out in Portuguese. The only thing I can tell is they’ve worked really really hard to resist cultural or linguistic assimilation from the moment white people began interacting with them. Which of course frustrates most white people, and gets held up as an example of “purity" by the rest, while scientists love it because it supposedly means they’re cognitively uninfluenced by outside cultures.

So you’re not going to find anything not written from the perspective of white dudes with complicated cultural and personal agendas.