ANT215H5 Lecture 8: ANT215_LECTURE 8
LECTURE 8: THE PIRAHAS AND THE GRAMMAR OF HAPPINESS -
ch. 7 and 17
• these people live an incredibly happy life
• worth considering how this comes about/happens
• Everett started off as a missionary, wide-eyed naive kid then develops into an
atheist and a well known researcher and scientist
• Translate the bible
• Their language does not conform to the expectations based on underlying core
set of principles that they all share; fundamentally similar because they are all
built out of Universal Grammar (UG) that constrains the shape of any human
language, serves as a guide for children learning the language.
• Born with an innate set of principles
• part of a larger group in the 19th century called the Muna
• no counting and no numbers
• no clear ideas about correct and incorrect
• no colour words
• no quantifiers
• they do not talk about unexperienced events; events that they have no
experienced themselves. absence of colour words etc. fit into this because they
involve generalizing beyond the immediate, perceptual here and now of
particular events.
• they avoid generalization i.e. “all monkeys”
• any use of “all” is a generalization. like colour words
• What are its guiding principles?
• Challenges some basic assumptions of academic science and of linguistics
• Doesn’t have any recursion (repeated application); not part of UG
