Anxious tribalism and the loss of the metanarrative seen in Daniel Everett's mission amongst the Pirahã

The observation that “postmodernity” is damaging tribal identity and its overarching narrative of life is a threat to the tribe’s very existence and causes considerable discomfort. Hunt (2016) describes awareness of this as “anxious tribalism” that is becoming evident in Western consciousness and which is entering the discourse of public missiology. It has been apparent that such anxiety has been growing for some time as Christianity has become aware of its relationship with colonialism and subsequently with structuralism and patriarchy.

Tribal anxiety is a reflection of the feelings abroad in a globalizing culture and is increasingly evident within Western cultures where religious communities need to engage with competition from marketing, media, and virtual identities and it is apparent in the loss of confidence in the Christian public voice.

Hunt suggests that as old identities are lost, new tribes arise from the debris of lost identities. “The emerging new tribes seek to assert an identity with the characteristics of pre-modern tribes” (2016: 132). These appear as groups of like-minded people who have embraced each other with “a priori recognition” rather than as the former tribes that had birthed their members from within or even recruited them from without. In this respect the new postmodern formation of the tribe has the same fixed identity as its premodern cousin.

To broaden his observations of tribal anxiety beyond the religious world, Hunt cites the “new atheist tribe” as being a group that is unwilling to tolerate religion within public discourse but which forms a new exclusive grouping that has its own rules and belief patterns. This new tribe has the tribal features of like-mindedness and right thinking, mimicking its religious birth parent whilst having no belief in a deity.

Hunt writes, “these new tribes emerge to secure an identity for their members in the midst of instability, and play themselves out in public discourse as they try to secure a place in the larger narrative of the nation and the world” (2016: 134). Anxiety remains because of the barely conscious awareness that the narratives of these new tribes are not as primal as they claim but are in fact chosen and constructed. This is the new awareness of the constructivist thinker who has lost an earlier positivist way of thinking and is no longer satisfied by critical realism. Such anxiety comes not only to the new atheist, the Muslim essentialist, or the reborn community, but to every enlightened thinker who notices that they are being pulled into competing narratives. It is actually the failure of the universal narrative that was once imagined to exist.

This loss of an overarching narrative in missiology is exemplified at large in the clashing of worlds between the missionary Daniel Everett late in the 20th century when he encountered the Pirahã in the Amazon jungle. He came to this “unreached tribe” as a white Western missionary with a belief in the essential universality of language and in the Christian metanarrative. It appeared to Everett that he had found a people group who were untouched by Western values, religion, and trading habits and who defied his theories of language and faith.

This article is a discussion of the loss of the metanarrative by discussing Christian missiology and universal language and its impact on both the larger tribe (the missional perspectives of Everett) and on the smaller tribe (the Pirahã). It offers an introduction to Everett’s thinking and begins to open up the theological issues encountered by him, including their implications for missionary engagement.

Everett’s worldview was challenged by his encounter with the Pirahã and he needed to change his global paradigm. This was a cosmic shift, brought upon by an increasing tribal anxiety. Although he came amongst the Pirahã as a representative of the wider developed world with its international money systems and universalizing constructs and notion of being linked to catholic (universal) faith, he felt his constructs and faith systems were unsustainable. He might have been faced by a tiny tribe that was completely unknown and “primitive” in its dealings with each other or with neighboring tribes, but they represented a lost innocence that was ultimately deeply challenging to him.

As a former SIL missionary, Daniel Everett went on to become an author and academic best known for his study of the Amazon Basin’s Pirahã people and their language. In 2008 he published “Don’t sleep, there are snakes: life and language in the Amazonian jungle” and then in 2012 he published “Cognitive fire: language as a cultural tool.” Essentially Everett, faced by the question of whether language is innate or universal, has concluded the former. On his journey through life he has found a Christian worldview impossible to sustain as his universal constructs have become less credible to him.

Early in life Everett married Keren Graham, the daughter of the missionaries with whom he worked. He completed a diploma in foreign missions from the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago in 1975. He and Keren subsequently enrolled in the Summer Institute of Linguistics (now SIL International), which trains missionaries in field linguistics so that they can translate the Bible into all the world’s languages.

Everett had some initial success learning the language, but when SIL lost their contract with the Brazilian government in autumn 1978, he enrolled at the State University of Campinas in Brazil, under the auspices of which he could continue to study the Pirahã. In this period, Everett was able to focus on the theories of Noam Chomsky. His PhD dissertation, “A Lingua Pirahã e Teoria da Sintaxe,” completed in 1983, was written under the direction of Dr. Charlotte Chamberlland Galves. This dissertation provided a detailed Chomskian analysis of Pirahã.

Everett served as a missionary with the Pirahã for the next decade but gradually lost his Christian faith during his time with them. At the same time he concluded that Chomsky’s ideas about universal grammar, and the universality of recursion in particular, are falsified by the Pirahã. These objections have been constantly refuted by Chomsky.

His 2005 article in Current Anthropology, titled “Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã,” caused a controversy in the field of linguistics. Though a supporter of Everett in the early part of Everett’s career, Chomsky subsequently refused to further discuss Everett’s works.

It would appear that for Everett, the notion of language as being innate is a challenge to the Christian call for universal mission. It is these two universals that are compared in this study that suggests the connection between Everett’s loss of belief in a grand narrative of universal language and his loss of confidence in the Christian metanarrative, though this connection is not inevitable. It can, however, be posited that Christianity is a universalizing construct based on “the word,” though it is also mediated through ritual, anthropology, worldview, and ecclesiology. Everett is not only of interest for his anthropological reflections which challenge dominant theories of language, but also for his challenge to Protestant Christian faith. Influenced by the Pirahã’s concept of truth, his belief in Christianity slowly foundered. He says that he was having serious doubts by 1982, and had lost Christian faith by 1985. He would not tell anyone about his atheism until the late 1990s. When he finally did, his marriage ended in divorce and some of his family broke off all contact. Subsequently these relations were restored as the family came to terms with his emerging worldviews.

In terms of origins, Everett is suggesting that there is no one origin of human language. Theologically speaking, if there is no Babel (Genesis 11:1–9) when common language was dispersed, then there is no Pentecost (Acts 2:1–13), when God’s common communication is given as a gift. Clearly these biblical stories can be read at various levels, but even if they are not taken literally, their suggestion that humans have a common language or a universal grammar (either as a literal linguistic expression or of symbolic brotherhood) is comforting . Their fragmentation for Everett is likely to have been connected.

Maybe Everett was showing his dissatisfaction with his earlier Protestant faith that not only wished to communicate to unknown tribes in order to present the “universal truth of Holy Scripture” but which had a theological perspective of original sin from which the human race needs to be saved. After spending years with the Pirahã people, Everett became convinced that they had no interest in origins (why would you want to know where the trees come from?) and they had no concept of their own sinfulness (why change us if we are happy as we are?). His gospel of a loving but unseen God meant nothing to a people who believed they had everything in an eternal present and who were content with their lifestyle.

The Pirahã people call themselves the “iaachehe” which means “the true ones.” They use whistling or humming to communicate as well as spoken words. Their language has very little room for the past or for the future and dwells mostly in a continuous present tense. Everett believed that these were the happiest people on the planet, a people who have constructed a form of communication intuitively and whose culture is also vastly different from more competitive or materialistic versions found in the capitalist world. They appear to be essentially non-hierarchical and non-competitive. They also seem content to hunt and gather and to sit around the fire relaxing.

As survival experts in their own domain, the Pirahã understand the behavior of local animals and how to catch and avoid them. They can walk into the jungle with no clothes, tools, or weapons, and walk out several days later laden with fruit, nuts, and meat. Those who have observed the Pirahã notice that they seem to live like small children do, without a concept of time zones other than the present and without a history other than that which is open to direct recall. It appears that there is no social hierarchy and that tribal customs are achieved by consensus and not by a leader’s decision or by the coercion of a fellow member of the tribe. No one tells another what to do. In fact, in Everett’s account of his time spent amongst the Pirahã (2008), he observed the change of sexual partners, when one female from a hitherto stable heterosexual union attached herself to another man whilst her partner was away hunting. This was traumatic to the jilted party when he returned from the hunt, but it was then completely ignored by the tribe. Life went on with this new liaison that had been immediately accepted by the culture. Similarly he noted an example of child rearing, when a mother allowed a small child to wield an extremely sharp weapon without offering any inhibition nor suggestion as to the dangerous consequences.

This apparent resistance to learning was seen in the Pirahã rejection of storing food or of learning to preserve it by salting or smoking it. Nor was there much interest in farming, though they did grow manioc plants from seeds they had previously spat out. However, they would then make only a few days' worth of manioc flour at a time. At times they would go hungry, but then Everett discovered that this was intentional, from a desire to be tigisái (tough). Normally they would not store food but would eat it when they got it. In terms of trading, the Pirahã were observed to trade Brazil nuts or sex for machetes, gunpowder, powdered milk, sugar, and whisky.

In terms of spiritual or religious belief, it seemed to Everett that the Pirahã had no concept of a supreme spirit or God. Their beliefs were founded on what was visible and what was tangible. When Everett detailed that he had never seen God they showed an immediate disinterest in the story of Jesus, because they believed it was not true. However, it became apparent to Everett that the Pirahã did believe in spirits that could take on the shape of the environment in the form of wild animals, trees, or even people. In a religious ceremony he observed one person dressing up as the god figure or spirit and the others treating that masked figure as having a different power and quality and as being other than human. This was an event and a piece of theatre that Everett was unable to get them to reflect upon. Similarly on another occasion he recorded the Pirahã telling him that one of the “beings that lives above the clouds” named “Xigagaí” was standing on a beach shouting at them and saying that he would kill them if they went into the jungle, and yet Everett and his daughter could see nothing in the place where they perceived Xigagaí to be . When Everett attempted to discuss this claim the Pirahã insisted that Xigagaí was still on the beach in full view. Some of these spirits were deemed to be malevolent and many of the Pirahã wore necklaces to ward off evil spirits.

Another complexity about the Pirahã was their seeming unwillingness to embrace a new idea or to learn, at least from Everett and his Western insights. This was hugely challenging to him, though at times he was impressed by their stubbornness in holding onto their own tenets or their originality in discovering alternative ways of expression. For example, they had no word for “left” or “right” and instead used a concept that meant “next to the river,” a means of giving direction that made sense in a part of the world where the river flowed in curves. Everett was less impressed by their inability to understand any notion of the past or the future. The forest and jungle had always been there as far as the Pirahã were concerned and they were not going to get worried by any claim that the foresters were approaching to cut down the rain forest. Similarly their language seems not to have any words describing precise color, only compound words relating one substance to another (e.g. bii sai meaning “blood-like”).

Similarly Everett found that the concept of drawing pictures was alien to the Pirahã and when he asked them to draw a person or an animal, a tree, or even the river, they simply drew lines. Such artistic expression or creativity was simply alien to them. Everett was pleased to notice that a child might make a model of something that was new like an airplane but that the novelty would soon wear off and the model would rapidly lose its fascination and become discarded.

Debate surrounds whether or not the Pirahã are able to count. Professor Peter Gordon from Columbia University deems them unable to handle numerical values whilst Everett believes that they simply choose not to count because of their internal satisfaction with how they are currently operating (Everett, 2007). The Pirahã language does not have words for actual numbers, only terms for “a small amount” or “a larger amount,” showing a lack of awareness between several or many. Therefore when the Pirahã asked him to give them classes in Brazilian numbers, he spent an hour every night trying to teach them how to count for eight months. Reflecting on this he wrote,

In other words, the Pirahã seemed not to be anxious about anything except for their internal phobias. Being part of a remote and isolated tribe has meant that they are not bothered by outside competitors to any great extent. Although they have experienced warfare with other tribes they remain secure in their territory and find sufficient food stocks in the river and the jungle. Their relatively unreflective culture immunes them from feeling challenged by alien constructs and they are quite able to deflect concepts that do not readily fit into their world. Thus the precision of numeracy, color identification, geographical direction, or virtuosity all remain foreign and unnecessary to them.

Such anxieties as they do have seem strange to external eyes. They are reluctant to sleep in the belief that snakes will bite them and as a result seem to only nap for brief quarter-of-an-hour periods or at night for periods of up to two hours, constantly waking each other up with chatter. Their tribal identity has protected them from wider existential anxiety or even from anxious tribalism, though for the outsider looking in, there seems much to fear because of the lack of provision for the future. Maybe such an Eden-like world can exist without reference to any other culture but from a wider angle it is apparent that the larger rain forest is being rapidly destroyed and their habitat vanishing. The ease with which the Pirahã might find sustenance is satisfying but the need to trade more carefully is a skill that will one day be required if they are to engage with the culture beyond the rain forest. In the meantime though, they exhibit an innocence which is naive to any onlooker from without, and live protected from anxiety. This of course could be constructed as being a culture of world denial.

It would appear that anxious tribalism seen in the diminishing faith constructs of Everett and in the fading world of the Pirahã could alternatively be the precursor to a healthy symptom of growing self-awareness that ultimately promotes new identity, or conversely it can be a chronic condition that immobilizes and prevents growth. In the instance of Daniel Everett it might be considered to ultimately have been a healthy symptom in that after experiencing a period of painful reflection, he went on to develop a new narrative in which he could reinvent himself. This notion of a reconstructed self after significant change is the focus of Schrag’s study into how the postmodern self is the story that “I tell about myself” (1997). Conversely, whilst the Pirahã have remained blissfully immune from tribal anxiety, it would appear that this is a short-term state of unsustainable happiness that will shortly be destroyed. There is a wider world beyond

the rain forest and there will be a time when innocence encounters a hostile predator. Therefore a degree of tribal anxiety would have been of some considerable developmental value to a tribe that is under imminent threat.

There are also some missiological lessons to be learned from this reflection. One is the practical importance of discerning worldviews in order to assist the nature of the encounter (Trull, 2015) and the other is the theological importance of working with the notion of missio Dei.

Trull’s study used the work of Kraft (2008) and of Hiebert (2008). Kraft noted that “worldviews can be changed but seldom (if ever) exchanged or replaced” and Hiebert built on this by seeing the Christian missiological encounter as being one that endeavored to transform a worldview. Trull endeavored to be true to the fact that “there is no single Christian worldview” (Kraft, 2008: 30) but that there is nonetheless an “underlying biblical story” (Hiebert, 2008: 265). He did this by investigating three key components of a worldview, namely the spiritual realm, the physical realm, and the interaction between the two. Such an approach with the Pirahã would have identified whether Everett was able to share an overlap in his faith constructs with the community he had chosen to live amongst.

Secondly the notion of missio Dei is of help in that it carries considerable value in encountering a people group that is beyond the understanding of the encountering Christian presence. It allows for a long-term approach to that encounter that keeps the responsibility of it as one that is shared between the Christian presence and God. It also emphasizes the absolute value of humility in that the mission of God is never fully known by the individual Christian and in the current culture of tribal anxiety it urges the missioner to be wary as to the various transitions taking place in the self and in culture. Indeed, such humility is not a reason to be silent about faith but it is a necessary virtue that must be evidenced as the gospel is shared in prophetic dialogue (Bevans and Schroeder, 2011; Bevans, 2012).

Third, these accounts of fading tribal certainties and increasing tribal anxieties can be refuted by deeper learning, but the question remains as to whose construct is being challenged (and thereby made anxious). Is it the universal construct of global Christian faith and universal grammar or is it the hope of an original Edenic innocence that appears to be vanishing in the new dawn of corporate belief systems?