Decoding Amazon: life of the Pirahã | SLICE | FULL DOCUMENTARY

[Music] in a remote corner of the Brazilian Amazon live the 400 remaining members of the Peter ha life has changed little here in centuries something about the Peter ha has caught the world's attention it's how they communicate Peter ha can be spoken hummed Sun even whistled foreign [Music] [Music] I buy about 150 to 200 kilos of Maniac meal Farina as it's known locally for the pinaha each time I go in 400 kilometers upriver Professor Daniel Everett is preparing for his annual research trip to the Peter Hall Everett has studied the tribe for 30 years and what he claims to have found has made news around the globe there's just a narrow range of gifts that they want to receive they want cloth they want tools they want maybe flashlights and batteries Fish Hooks online uh little things they never ask for big things they always ask for little things and and they always say I uh which means I almost begin to want that the Linguistics professor and University Dean believes the Peter her language is so remarkable it undermines the most powerful theory of human language it's an explosive claim and many are convinced he's wrong the gifts that I buy for the peterha are important to show them first of all that I appreciate and respect what they do in helping me they don't really understand what the value of the information they give me is but they do know that there's a value to me that's a hundred kilos on his back he's only got 50 kilos it's very important for me as a scientist to give other scientists more information so they can reach their own conclusions about some of the more controversial claims I've made about the Pizza Hut and we're off after all the work that has gone on the last couple of days really excited foreign Villages spread along the naisi river the tributary of the Amazon [Music] first sighted by Portuguese gold Hunters 300 years ago the tribe has since rejected almost all outside influence [Music] foreign unique amongst Amazonian groups the Peter ha speak only their native tongue is but in the 1950s the Peter ha were forced to open their world with their children dying of measles help arrived in the form of American missionaries [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] but with medicine came something less welcome [Music] one of the missionaries who came was Daniel Everett this has to be one of the most beautiful River trips on the planet we're going to travel down the Madeira River the seventh largest river of the world to the Micey River in the state of amazonas to see the pita Han [Music] Everett first made this journey with his young family in 1977. [Music] I was raised in Southern California and I came from a very blue-collar family my stepfather worked in a Packing Shed my father was a cowboy my mother was a waitress I was playing my guitar all the time flunking all my courses in high school smoking marijuana every day convinced I wanted to be a rock star [Music] and then in high school I met a fellow who was had a Brazilian magazine and asked him where he got this Brazilian magazine and he said well my my parents are missionaries in Brazil and he had this very cute sister named Karen and we got to talking a lot about what to do with our lives and we got romantically involved with one another from the time we were 16 and he got engaged at 17 decided we wanted to be missionaries and when I come back here now I think a lot of the time that I arrived here originally with my family and the work and the dreams and the aspirations and the love for these people the love I felt for God at that time I was passionate a passionate believer I was ready to die for my faith and ready to do anything that my faith required of me I had no idea when I started trying to convert another group of people is an inherently colonialist activity it's colonialism of the mind of beliefs it's just another form of colonialism whenever it first arrived here he was just 25 years old we landed the previous missionary flew out with us and he just stayed for an hour or so and then left and he taught me two phrases which I couldn't repeat they were just too hard for me then he said tell them that you just want to hear Peter ha and that phrase is and I didn't remember I couldn't remember any of that so I was just here sort of dumbfounded not knowing what to do there's a Pizza Hut there's our first Pizza Hut ounce so walk up I know I I go okay they just recognized me [Music] oh it's always great to see how excited the pita get when I come here I feel like a rock star after all sometimes when I come in here [Music] but the feeling is mutual I feel just as excited to see them as they seem to be to see me four day boat ride means even today the Peter ha received few visitors this is the first time they have seen a film crew okay hey guys [Music] oh my figure the Peter Hurst clothing is their one concession to Modern Life there are no permanent buildings no cultivation and they rely almost entirely on nature to meet their needs ideas today the professor is one of only three Outsiders who can speak Peter ha the others being his former wife and the missionary he replaced I said that for the price of coffee we just want to keep one child they said well there are a lot more upriver take one of those [Laughter] [Music] foreign and his family lived intermittently here for more than 30 years this is all that's left in my house just a few support posts here and there I raised my children here for several years I lived here for about eight years I had a large Pita House style house [Music] my wife almost died here my daughter almost died here I had malaria many times here our lives were threatened by The Pita House here on at least three separate occasions they threatened to kill us all and I had to sit up all night out in front of the house while my family was locked inside to try to keep them away they shot arrows at each other they were really different then our relationship has changed over the years [Music] uh today Dan shares a more harmonious relationship with the Peter ha this morning they cooked scrambled alligator eggs for him sharing this way of life would have been impossible if Everett had not first cracked their language code [Music] [Music] in the midst of all of this well you start with since there's no language in common I just start picking up objects and trying to get the names for those objects pointing at them boys and spending day after day doing this you can see how you can construct the knowledge of the language without any language in common and eventually I learned Peter Hahn Everett's teacher was foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] and the word for foreigners are we and the word for hand is and the word for Brazil nutshell is and that's only distinguished by the tones all of those [Music] um as his fluency grew Everett began to realize something was missing the Peter ha have no words for colors no past or future tense and Incredibly the Peter ha have no numbers [Music] [Music] research from nit indicates that Peter ha may be the only culture on Earth without numeracy Peter I don't have numbers because they don't need them they survive just fine without them somebody asked me once you mean Peter harm others don't know how many children they have well that's exactly what I mean they don't know how many children they have but they know all of their children's names and they know all of their children's faces they don't need to know how many children they have to know who their children are and how they feel about them [Music] years of hunting with these people led Everett to another discovery I have an encyclopedic knowledge of their world every Peter hard child woman and man in the entire culture knows the name of every single species of Flora and Fauna in their environment the thousands of different species that they encounter they not only can give you the name of they can describe in detail they can tell you what they eat they can tell you how they live they can tell you where they're found mm-hmm that's uh see all right [Music] as Everett immersed himself in their world he had a profound realization appeared to live entirely in the present they're not worried about whether they're going to eat later because they know very well they can just go out on the river and get fish they let each activity be dictated by their needs of the moment rather than by their worries of the future or their knowledge of the past they live in the present [Music] for many The Pursuit of Happiness means living free of regret and future worry [Music] something that Peter ha seemed to have mastered [Music] when I'm around these people and I'm by myself with them and I talk to them they're just so relaxed and so laid back and so hard to agitate and get excited or get worried they just have so much to teach us about taking each day one day at a time whatever [Music] the contentment Everett witnessed affected him profoundly he began to question his own deep beliefs The Dilemma for the Christian Missionary is for your message to work you have to convince them that they're wrong so they have to be lost before you can convince them that they need to be saved all right I eventually realized that the pinaha are happy already they don't believe in hell they don't believe in heaven so taking the message of God to the Peter has like taking ice to the eskimos [Applause] [Music] in 25 years of missionary work Daniel Everett failed to attract a single Peter ha convert thank you [Music] the questioning of my own faith began as I saw how happy the pitaha were as I tried to answer they're very probing and direct questions about the nature of the evidence that I had for what I believed and as I reflected on all of these things it eventually led to the abandonment of my own faith [Music] this dramatic change triggered the breakup of Everett's family it was a traumatic experience to have a relationship of over 30 years come to an end like that I mean we got married when we were 18 but much more difficult to me was the fact that my children didn't speak to me for two years and even today they struggle with some things based on how radically I've diverged from the father that they thought I was in terms of my beliefs abandoning missionary life Everett began to focus on his academic career he had long suspected something was fundamentally different about Peter grammar and if this hunch was right it could transform our understanding of human language [Music] thank you at the time that I was going through the spiritual crisis and the family crisis and the marriage crisis I was also going through an intellectual crisis and I had to say something about this at the same time that I tried to explain a number of the unique characteristics of the petaha language [Music] I had no idea when I started writing this paper that it was going to be controversial to the degree that it was Daniel Everett had just picked a fight with the father of modern Linguistics gnome Chomsky Norm is not only the most influential linguist in this sense of the past Century but I think it's probably the case that he's the most influential linguist of all time I finished the paper I sent it off to the number one Journal of anthropology and then all hell broke loose I think he knows he's wrong that's what I really think it might be an interesting question of say um social anthropology but can't have anything to do with the nature of language this just doesn't make any sense I had people sending me hate mail accusing me of racist views and I think it's a move that many many intellectuals make to get a little bit of attention I was appalled when I read the Chomsky and said that Dan was a charlatan I know both these people and that is not right that is unacceptable the reason there was so much fuss is really not very scientific I mean it was here's this guy coming out of the Jungle with this language that only he knows and he's saying that the greatest linguist in history is dead wrong about his most important idea there's also questions about whether any of it's true but that's another story bitter war of words is in reaction to the grammatical anomaly Dan Everett claims to have found according to Everett Peter ha shows no evidence for recursion the ability to combine an endless number of ideas in a single sentence so let's say that we have a simple sentence like Bill saw Mary and now we want to make that part of a larger sentence John said that bill saw Mary but for this to be recursion we have to be able to keep going so we might want to say something like John said that Bill said that Mary said that Peter said that Irving bought a house and that is real that is true recursion the ability for a sentence to just keep going on forever if in a language you can show there is a larger sentence and you can't make it any larger that language doesn't have recursion and Peter ha is such a language in 2002 Noam Chomsky proposed that recursion is the basis of all human language key component of his theory of universal grammar the most influential idea in linguistics Universal grammar argues the structure of language the grammar is innately found in the human genome something we are rather than learn according to the theory all human languages regardless of their surface differences share a common deep structure a universal grammar it's a powerful idea and its dominated Linguistics for more than 50 years in the modern sense Universal grammar is just the theory of the genetic component of the language faculty that it exists is hard to deny it is right about Peter haar then many believe the case for Universal grammar is severely undermined [Music] Chomsky who kind of has an outsize influence in linguistics whatever his latest pronouncement is everyone takes very seriously in a recent paper Chomsky argued that the narrow language faculty the part of language that's specific to language consists only of an ability to do recursion uh not every linguist to put it mildly accepts that I don't uh but it was out there as the latest statement from Mount Olympus on what's special about language and so the claim that there's a language that was missing exactly that thing that Chomsky said is essential obviously made it much more interesting to people if I'm right and Pita hot does lack recursion then recursion can't be the universal basis for human language so one of us is right and one of us is wrong [Music] it's now been two years since Everett's last visit to the Amazon at mit's brain and cognitive Sciences lab a new Expedition is preparing to go and test his claims leading the team is Professor Ted Gibson I think Dan's most controversial claim is the claim that human language doesn't have to be recursive it might be right and it might be wrong I just don't know the answer I think that's a very interesting open controversy how many rules along with colleague Dr Steve pianta dossi Gibson has developed a new computer program for analyzing human language he's designed it specifically to test Everett's recursion claim but first he needs Peter ha recordings what Ted and I are doing is trying to make make the debate scientific and so I think that that's really the only way to to resolve these kinds of questions um you can't just go back and forth bickering you know all the time you have to have some kind of scientific method and some some kind of quantifiable evidence if you want to answer these things one of the most interesting properties of this language and culture is that they're uninterested in in the outside world so we get a uh a look at human cognition without the influence of other cultures just sort of one culture this Expedition will be the largest and perhaps most rigorous to test Daniel Everett's ideas in the eyes of many its results May well settle this debate Everett will accompany the team as translator but taking on the world's leading linguist is more than an academic argument strikes at the heart of where human language stems from foreign what makes us human that's what this debate is all about where does our language come from is our language some mysterious Gene that somehow crept into our Evolution if so that's worth knowing that's very interesting what I'm claiming is that culture can affect not just the words of a language but the entire grammar of a language and I'm saying that the pita ha are one clear example of this happening perhaps the most radical claim of uh Dan Everett is that the is that unusual features of piraja grammar are a consequence of features of their culture because there's one generalization that I think almost all linguists would agree with which is that the variation among languages doesn't have a whole lot to do with variations across the the cultures of the people who speak the languages so just to be Concrete in some languages put the verb in the middle and have the object after John ate the sushi some have the verb at the end John the sushi but do any of these features correlate with some kinds of culture with more you know uptight cultures or expressive cultures or intimate cultures or technological cultures the answer is generally they don't [Music] for Everett the detail of how Peter her culture affects grammar lies in their fixation with the present this preoccupation he claims produces a grammar with only a present tense a grammar without recursion a grammar of happiness [Music] okay all right foreign [Music] [Music] thank you on the eve of his departure Everett gets a call from Brazil's national Indian Foundation known as funai foreign yeah I mean I think that uh it's going to be EXT I don't think I know it's going to be extremely disappointing to uh Ted and his team uh you know I don't know how I'm going to deal with it well I mean I was just told that uh you know after all this planning and all this effort and having gone down that uh valmir the local funai Supervisor has said that we can't go back to the Village I I don't know what's going to happen but I think the only thing I can do is fly all the way down there to Brazil go talk to valmir and say you know what can we do to make this happen with one stamp valmir parinchintin can grant Everett access to the Peter half he is the regional coordinator of funai the agency responsible for Brazil's indigenous tribes a um missionary the fact Everett is now professor of linguistics doesn't appear to count for much his old occupation continues to haunt him so now I'm on my way to umaita amazonas to meet with valmir parenching change valmir is the one with the power to say whether I can or can't go back to the Village right now if valmir says no there's a good chance that that will be no for good it may be the last chance I ever have to go to the piano Edwards suspects his religious past is not the sole reason for his rejection the real cause he believes is his collision with the Linguistics establishment as a result of my work I've been come quite controversial among linguists a couple of years ago a couple of U.S linguists wrote a letter to the national Indian Foundation accusing me of conducting racist research whenever it arrives he's told valmir is out of town and won't be back for a fortnight so he's not there I came all this way and he's not even there [Music] rejection in the Amazon the only course left is an appeal to the president of funai in the Brazilian capital really important for me to get back to the pinahan I have spent so much of my life with those people and I love them so much so if I'm not allowed to get back there and explain to them it's it's like you promised to meet somebody on a street corner and then you never show up I have no way of accounting for my absence the day of Brasilia Professor Ariane Rodriguez and Professor Anna sueli head the department of indigenous languages they've invited Everett to give a talk but it's far from a full house you know I've just been informed that the main Linguistics Department here at the university has decided once again to boycott my talk because it's critical of their Theory it's frustrating because it's not a real scientific attitude of exchange this isn't what universities are supposed to be about um [Music] foreign foreign Daniel the following day news arrives at the team's appeal since ciao no uh I can't I can't go back these people have refused to meet with me they refuse to talk to me they refused to let me go there and present My Views all of this takes place behind closed doors at meetings I'm not allowed to be at with people saying things about me that I'm not allowed to respond to it is cowardly I mean I can't go back this time I probably never go back as long as as these same people are in charge although Dan and the scientists have been blocked funai has allowed our film crew to re-enter the reservation not knowing if he'll ever see the Peter ha again Dan records a message for the crew to show them guys yeah [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] with the Expedition canceled Ted Gibson and Steve pianta dossi have found another way to test Everett's claims they've turned to recordings made over decades by Everett and the missionary who preceded him Steve Sheldon so these are all stories yeah these are all stories and how much of that is Dan's Galleria um it's almost all Steve sheldons but yes it was a big letdown when we didn't actually get to go but actually we wouldn't have as much time to work on this specific question if we had gone because we would have all of these other research areas that we'd be you know trying to write up findings for we have compiled about 800 sentences and pretty soon we'll have I think around 1500. well here's a snake yeah here's what's his name is almost bitten by a snake and he tells the story of uh we arrowed the snake the first step is to build a large Peter hard database once the database is complete over a million possible Peter har grammars will be written some with recursion and some without a computer will then test each grammar against the recordings in the database job find the grammar that best fits the Peter ha language if this grammar lacks recursion Daniel Everett may have the evidence he needs while the MIT computers grind through 30 years of recordings our film crew is returning to the Peter Hall besides delivering Everett's message we have also been asked to collect more recordings but when we arrive what we find is totally unexpected since visiting two years ago the peterha village of pikia has been transformed the Brazilian government has built a health clinic toilets and permanent houses here this remote corner of the Amazon even has electricity [Music] but perhaps most significant is the presence of a school Peter Hart children are learning Portuguese and how to count um [Music] [Music] Facebook [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] for many Outsiders such change poses a dilemma on one hand it empowers the Peter ha on the other the unique culture may be lost well we lose the language we lose a part of our culture we lose a unique product of human creativity aggregated over time by a society we lose a source of data on how the mind works I think that the scientific Community should make it a priority to document things that are highly informative and that are in danger of disappearing such as endangered languages [Music] not practice the book guy boy [Music] have remained resilient and vibrant for all of their history they have rejected every attempt by missionaries to convert them every attempt by the government to subjugate them this is the biggest challenge that Peter half faced in their entire history and it's difficult for me to predict what's going to happen my bet is they're going to stay strong but I could be wrong [Music] [Music] all right after filming we play Dan's message to the Peter half this may be the last time the tribe will ever see him foreign [Music] ERS have finished analyzing the Peter hard database okay so we finished analyzing our Corpus of around a thousand sentences and the answer is as Dan was hypothesizing I'd say we we don't have evidence for recursion in this you know the simplest thing I can say is in our uh analyzes of this Corpus there's no there's no clear evidence of recursive structures [Music] so you know in particular we don't see evidence of several Hallmarks of recursive structures cross linguistically such as uh conjunction so that's something that would translate as and in the language so where we could have John and Bill and Mary and and Fred were doing something similarly or the word or there's no no John Orr Mary this seems to be something different about this language such that it's not doesn't have a complex syntactic structure number one for Everett's critics such findings don't settle the debate for several problems with that one is that that method of testing grammars has absolutely no successes supported so we can dismiss it secondly there is no question that the languages based on a recursive procedure will you will you convert chomskins probably not is my guess they won't be converted you know I doesn't feel like they're convertible to me so why is this interesting well what's interesting about cross-linguistic variation it shows us the ways that we can be different humans can be so similar and yet so different in the way that we communicate [Music] when done Everett first entered the Amazon 35 years ago little did he realize that it would end in such controversy although science is beginning to validate his ideas Dan remains unlikely to see the Peter haar again [Music] in response to his message his old friends have recorded one of their own [Music] to him [Music] My Hope for the Peter high for the future is that the future is the way they want it to be it's not my place to say whether they should adapt more or adapt less we all change and the pinahan I want them to be healthy and happy what I would want for any group of people [Music] um [Music] foreign

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Id: _LAR6eeiVtY

Length: 49min 13sec (2953 seconds)

Published: Sun May 28 2023