rating: 4 of 5 stars
FASCINATING. Don’t Sleep just about successfully bridges the gap between professional ethnography and popular autobiography.
Everett was a linguist with the Summer Institute of Linguistics, an evangelical organization which sends linguist-missionaries to learn the languages of various cultures so that they may translate the New Testament for them and thereby save their souls. He went to the Pirahã with this goal in mind, accompanied by his wife and three children.
Interspersed with his stories of learning to live with this radically different culture is extensive information on their unique language and a hilarious (to me, a linguistics dork) intellectual sparring with Chomsky’s theories of universal grammar.
Don’t Sleep is being pimped around the atheist blogosphere as a book about a missionary who is deconverted by his subjects. And yes, that happens, but it is contained in the epilogue, and the book is by no means about that experience. That part is a little infuriating to read, though–Everett went through hell on earth trying to get help for his wife and one of his daughters when they were very ill with malaria, yet when he came clean about no longer believing in a god, she left him. (Kiiiiinda wanna scratch her face for that, lol.) Seems to me that dragging a feverish and delusional person all over Brazil for a week trying to save her LIFE would be proof enough of a morality that doesn’t necessarily come from religion, but whatever. The point is, not much is made in the book proper of the deconversion. More important is the clash of Everett’s Western, Christian culture and the Pirahã culture–he cannot convert them to a belief in a god they cannot see, as they generally aren’t concerned about anything not in their direct experience. In fact, we do not know of a single Pirahã conversion. They just can’t be arsed.
So: if you’re interested in language, the cultures of the Amazon basin, religion and irreligion, or the lives of ethnographers, this is a good one.
Tags: atheism, Christianity, Daniel Everett, ethnography, irreligion, linguistics
