> their culture is concerned solely with matters that fall within direct personal experience, and thus there is no history beyond living memory. > one of the

> their culture is concerned solely with matters that fall within direct personal experience, and thus there is no history beyond living memory. > one of the strongest Pirahã values is no coercion; you simply don't tell other people what to do. > There appears to be no social hierarchy; the Pirahã have no formal leaders. Their social system is similar to that of many other hunter-gatherer bands in the world, although rare in the Amazon because of a history of horticulture before Western contact > They take naps of 15 minutes to, at the most, two hours throughout the day and night, and rarely sleep through the night. > The concept of drawing is alien to them and when asked to draw a person, animal, tree, or river, the result is simple lines.[7] However, on seeing a novelty such as an airplane, a child may make a model of it, which may be soon discarded. > According to Everett, the Pirahã have no concept of a supreme spirit or god,[9] and they lost interest in Jesus when they discovered that Everett had never seen him. They require evidence based on personal experience for every claim made.[ > Everett states that it has no relative clauses or grammatical recursion. Everett points out that there is recursion of ideas: that in a story, there may be subordinate ideas inside other ideas. > Pirahã has one of the simplest sound systems known. Yet it possesses such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations." > Daniel L. Everett, on the other hand, argues that the Pirahã are cognitively capable of counting; they simply choose not to do so. > The language may have no unique words for colors, contradicting Berlin and Kay's hypothesis on the universality of color-naming. There are no unanalyzable root words for color; the recorded color words are all compounds like mii sai[6] or bii sai, "blood-like," indicating that colors in the language are adjectival comparisons that are not consistently applied. And then finally: > Adoption of western culture > A 2012 documentary called The Grammar of Happiness which aired on the Smithsonian Channel, reported that a school had been opened for the Pirahã community where they learn Portuguese and mathematics. According to FUNAI the school is the responsibility of the Ministry of Education of Brazil.[10] In addition to a formal school being introduced to the culture, the documentary also reported that the Brazilian government installed a modern medical clinic, electricity and television in the remote area. Truly, the West subsumes all cultures it comes into contact with. There is no hope in trying to progress further, because it's like grinding two mis-matched gears together, to generate torque: all you're doing is forcing things that are not meant to be. What a depressing article.