On a Saturday morning in August 1980, at 6:30 a.m., Everett woke in his hut on the Maici River in the Brazilian Amazon to Pirahãs shouting that Xigagaí, a spirit from above the clouds, stood on the beach threatening them. He joined the crowd gathering on the riverbank, where his language teacher, Kóhoi, insisted that the spirit was visible on the beach. Everett, however, saw only empty sand. His six-year-old daughter, Kristene, also saw nothing. The two returned to their house, puzzled.

Reflecting on this incident years later, Everett thinks of how the cultural differences between himself and the Pirahãs fundamentally altered their perception of reality. He suggests that cultural expectations and experience shape perception so profoundly that true objectivity is impossible and that “even perceptions of the environment [are] nearly incommensurable cross-culturally” (xvii). He recalls the Pirahã parting phrase, “Don’t sleep, there are snakes” (xvii), which reflects their values of self-hardening through minimal sleep and constant vigilance against jungle dangers. At first, this seemed surprisingly harsh to Everett, but as he discovered how the Pirahãs laughed and talked for much of the night, he learned important lessons about enjoying life, even through difficulties. 

Everett arrived among the Pirahãs when he was 26, now over 30 years ago. He faced many hardships, including contracting malaria repeatedly and facing death threats, but he also formed deep friendships and learned priceless lessons. His family’s lives, including his children and grandchildren, were also shaped by the Pirahãs. Everett learned about life, language, and thought during his time in the jungle, but most importantly, the Pirahãs demonstrated how to face existence and mortality with dignity and satisfaction, without religious consolation.

On December 10, 1977, Everett prepared for his first flight to the Pirahãs as a Summer Institute of Linguistics missionary. The Pirahãs had rarely been studied, and their language was not believed to be related to any other living language. Everett would first have to learn Pirahã from scratch in the hope of translating the Bible and converting the Pirahã people. 

Everett flew from Porto Velho to Posto Novo in a small plane that made him terribly airsick. Upon landing in the jungle, Everett immediately noticed that the welcoming villagers seem remarkably happy. As soon as he got off the plane, Everett began attempting to communicate. Within an hour, he confirmed that Pirahã has approximately 11 phonemes and follows a subject-object-verb sentence structure.

The Pirahãs assigned Everett the name “Xoogiái,” after a villager he resembled, and he learned the names of several men, including Kaaboogi (later called Xahóápati), Kaapási, Xahoábisi, and others. The women refused to speak to him directly but giggled at his attempts to communicate. Everyone directed him to work with Kóhoibiíihíai, nicknamed “Kóhoi,” who began teaching Everett Pirahã the next morning. Everett was initially optimistic with his quick progress and fascinated by Pirahã, which has a number of linguistic quirks, such as lacking phatic communication—expressions like greetings, thanks, or apologies. Everett also observed Pirahã culture, including playing tag with river porpoises and going about their daily routines of fishing and foraging.

After 10 days, the Brazilian government ordered missionaries off reservations. Hoping to secure research authorization, the Institute enrolled Everett at the State University of Campinas in a graduate linguistics program. Everett received permission from FUNAI (Fundação Nacional dos Povos Indígenas, or National Foundation of Indigenous Peoples) to return to study the Pirahã, but he also found the graduate program to be incredibly academically and intellectually rewarding. Soon, he was preparing his family for an extended stay in the jungle with the Pirahã. His wife, Keren Everett, was “the most committed missionary [Everett] had ever known” and enthusiastic about the adventure (16), even as they faced the challenge of preparing their three children, ranging in age from seven to one, for a six-month stay in the Amazon. They spent months making preparations, stocking up on everything from food and medicine to schoolbooks for the children and gifts for birthdays and holidays that would be celebrated in the jungle. However, no preparation could prepare them for all the challenges they would face.

In addition to the difficulties of family life, Everett describes the challenges of monolingual fieldwork. Constantly being surrounded by foreignness exerts an intense “strain” on the fieldworker; everything is difficult to understand or completely incomprehensible “because it is so unexpected and outside your frame of reference” (17). Pirahã is tonal, has few distinct sounds making words similar, and lacks features common in other languages, including comparatives and color terms. Everett shared no common language with the Pirahãs, meaning that nothing could be translated or explained to him. Nevertheless, he remained optimistic and made good progress, including learning that the Pirahã term for their own language means “straight head,” while their term for foreign language means “crooked head.” Everett closes the chapter by noting that Amazonian realities would soon interrupt his linguistic focus.

Everett describes the physical challenges of Amazonian life, including temperatures reaching 110˚ Fahrenheit and humidity that renders perspiration ineffective. He calls the Amazon an “awe-inspiring force” (23), with rainforest that spans nearly 3 million square miles across 40% of South America. The Amazon River flows over 4,000 miles from Peru to the Atlantic, with a delta island larger than Switzerland.

Historical figures, including Mark Twain and William James, felt the Amazon’s pull. Twain planned to reach it from New Orleans, Louisiana, but became a Mississippi riverboat pilot instead. James traveled there in 1865 with biologist Louis Agassiz, an experience that led him to abandon naturalism for philosophy and psychology. Most Brazilians live 2,000 miles from the Amazon and have never seen the jungle, yet they fiercely guard national sovereignty over it, and the Brazilian conservation agency IBAMA (Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources) maintains a professional presence throughout the region.

The Amazon system contains two river types: muddy rivers rich in nutrients and dark-water rivers. Both support abundant insect life, but the muddy rivers are home to more abundant flora and fauna. The Pirahãs inhabit a 50-mile stretch of the Maici River, a dark-water tributary of the Marmelos River, which feeds into the Madeira River—the world’s second-longest tributary. The village that Everett spent the most time in, Forquilha Grande, is located upriver, near where the Transamazon Highway crosses the river.

Theories about Amazonian settlement divide into two camps. Archaeologist Betty Meggers argues that Amazonian soil could not sustain large prehistoric civilizations, leading to the creation of smaller hunter-gatherer groups. Other archaeologists, like Anna Roosevelt, contend that the Amazon sustained major civilizations and that human presence in the region extends much further back. Pirahã’s status as a language isolate—demonstrably unrelated to any living language—could support either theory. There is some evidence that the Pirahãs originated elsewhere, including Portuguese loan words for certain local monkey species.

During Everett’s first extended stay with the Pirahãs, Keren began to complain of tension, backache, and headache. That night, both she and Shannon, Everett’s seven-year-old daughter, were struck by severe fever. Everett misdiagnosed typhoid fever and began incorrect antibiotic treatment. Over five days, their conditions deteriorated rapidly. Keren began hallucinating, and Everett was frantic from worry and lack of sleep as he tried to care for his ill wife and daughter, as well as their two younger children.

Desperate, Everett borrowed a motorboat from a visiting Catholic missionary, who provided directions to Humaitá, the closest settlement with medical resources. It would require a 12-hour boat ride, followed by a hike through the jungle to then catch a ride with a larger boat to Humaitá. In her feverish state, Keren accused Everett of abandoning his faith and mission with the Pirahãs. There was already a plane scheduled to pick them up in a week’s time, but Everett felt he had no other choice but to get his family care as soon as possible. As he was leaving, an old Pirahã man requested trade goods. Everett responded angrily, incensed that the man could ask Everett to return with matches when his family was so gravely ill. 

Sunburned and running low on fuel, Everett nearly became lost on the river. Finally, he stopped at a caboclo house where a woman directed him to Pau Queimado, whose residents sent him to Santa Luzia. At Santa Luzia, men helped carry the family in hammocks down a jungle path to the Auxiliadora on the Madeira River. Everett and his family rested in the home of river trader Godofredo Monteiro until around two o’clock in the morning, when a passenger boat arrived. Keren was desperately weak and thin from her illness, but the captain of the boat refused to speed up the journey, claiming that if Keren was meant to die, she would.

After three nights, they reached Humaitá. A doctor quickly diagnosed severe malaria—the highest levels he had ever seen—and began intravenous chloroquine treatment. Everett and his two younger children had nowhere to sleep; Everett was running out of money and faced hostile attitudes from the hospital’s Catholic nurses. With Keren and Shannon relatively safe in the hospital, he decided that his best course of action was to take the two other children, Kristene and Caleb, on a five-hour bus to Porto Velho, where his mission headquarters could help them. 

Immediately upon arriving, the mission began a phone chain asking for prayers for Shannon and Keren and arranged a flight for Everett back to Humaitá the next morning. Everett returned to pick up his wife and daughter with pilot John Harmon and nurse Betty Kroeker. Upon seeing the patients’ critical condition, Harmon bypassed safety regulations to transport them to Porto Velho quickly. Upon arrival, Keren needed an urgent blood transfusion, and the doctor warned that she may not survive. He advised Everett to contact Keren’s family.

Keren’s parents, Al and Sue Graham, arrived from Belém and stayed in Porto Vehlo for six weeks as Keren and Shannon recovered. Everett sent his family back to Belém with Keren’s parents, and he returned to the Pirahãs alone. After nearly six months, Keren and Shannon had regained their health and strength, and Everett’s family returned to the jungle.

Everett was initially hurt by what he perceived as callousness from the Pirahãs while his family was ill. Reflecting on his ordeal, however, Everett realizes that Pirahãs regularly face death without medical resources, making his crisis ordinary by their standards. In the jungle, “[l]ife gives death no quarter” (58), and daily activities must continue. The Pirahãs love deeply and suffer when loved ones die, but their lives are ruled by “practicality.” 

During the rainy season, river traders routinely interrupted Everett’s research. These men were uniformly racist, comparing Pirahãs to monkeys and believing that Everett was the village boss. One night, a trader named Ronaldinho arrived. Everett warned him, per Apoena Meirelles, director of FUNAI, that selling cachaça, a sugarcane rum, to Pirahãs is illegal; he had to pay the Pirahãs for their labor with valuable trade goods. Everett went to bed but awoke around midnight to the shouting of drunk Pirahã men. They were plotting to kill Everett and his family in exchange for a shotgun that Ronaldinho offered. Shocked and frightened, Everett snuck to the men’s hut and, smiling innocently, confiscated their weapons while they stared drunkenly.

He locked his family in the storeroom and then approached Ronaldinho’s boat. Kóhoi, unarmed, intercepted Everett and threatened to shoot him. Speaking in Pirahã, Everett explained that the trader was cheating them with cheap alcohol. Kóhoi understood and redirected his anger at Ronaldinho, who panicked, cut his mooring line, and fled. Everett guarded his family overnight with a confiscated shotgun while listening to the men fight each other. The next morning, the hungover and bruised Pirahã men apologized.

Later, Everett spoke with Xahoábisi to understand why the Pirahãs became so angry. Xahoábisi explained that they were upset because Everett, an outsider, tried to control them on their own land. Everett realized that the Pirahã women had manipulated him into an authority role that the men resented, falsely claiming that previous missionaries prohibited alcohol sales. Furthermore, he had assumed that the Pirahãs saw him “as a protector and authority figure” (68), but that was clearly a dangerous misassumption. Everett left the meeting feeling “chastened and embarrassed” (68).

Weeks later, when another trader brought cachaça, drunk Kóhoi gave Everett all village weapons. Nevertheless, Everett and his family decided to travel upriver and stay with neighboring friends to avoid “being the target of drunken bravado” (69).

Everett was still early on in his stay with the Pirahãs, and he hadn’t yet thought deeply about their culture. He admits to a certain “disappointment” with the lack of exotic rituals and adornments he had expected from anthropological studies. Often, the Pirahãs seemed to spend their days doing nothing at all, but Everett was sure there was more to their culture than met the eye, and he resolved to study the Pirahãs more professionally, beginning with their beliefs, social structures, and identity.

Everett began cultural study by observing the Pirahãs build a hut. Pirahãs construct two types of shelters: the sturdier kaíi-ií and the temporary xaitaii-ií for beach shade. The kaíi-ií uses rot-resistant poles bound with vines, topped with palm thatch, and includes a raised paxiuba palm sleeping platform. These simple shelters illustrate important differences between Pirahã culture and Western values. In Western cultures, homes represent protection, status, and privacy, but none of these are important to the Pirahãs, where all villagers are equal, the community protects them, and one can easily walk into the vast jungle if privacy is required. 

The Pirahãs’ material culture ranks among the world’s simplest. Their most sophisticated tools are powerful bows over two yards long and arrows requiring three hours each to craft. They weave disposable baskets from wet palm leaves for single use, though they possess the skill to make durable ones. Necklaces serve primarily to ward off spirits rather than for aesthetics, showing little symmetry.

Although Pirahãs can make bark canoes, they prefer trading for sturdier Brazilian dugouts. When Everett arranged for a Brazilian craftsman to teach canoe building, they successfully completed one but refused to make another, stating that Pirahãs do not make canoes.

Though the Pirahãs know preservation techniques, they never salt or smoke meat for themselves, consuming everything immediately. They view hunger as strengthening and sometimes miss meals deliberately. Pirahãs sleep in short naps throughout day and night, and there is constant loud talking throughout the village. If a man returns from hunting at two or three o’clock in the morning, everyone will awaken to prepare and eat the food immediately. Historical sources like Curt Nimuendaju’s work confirm that Pirahã culture has remained largely unchanged since the 18th century.

Pirahã culture shows minimal ritual. Burial practices are simple and “ad hoc”—bodies are buried immediately in sitting or prone positions with few belongings, sometimes near riverbanks that later erode. Sex and marriage involve no ceremony; cohabitation establishes marriage, and affairs simply result in partner changes. Dancing represents the Pirahãs’ closest approximation of ritual, involving communal singing and clapping and sometimes Pirahã men impersonating the spirits.

Through his observations, Everett realized that “lack of concern for the future” is a key cultural value for the Pirahãs (78). He connects this idea to the immediacy of experience principle, arguing that Pirahã culture avoids formulaic actions referencing non-witnessed events.