Piraha tribe: The happiest folk in the world?
The amazing story of Daniel Everett
Joam Chomsky had his office next to his. When Daniel Everett was working on his linguistic work about the Piraha language, he still felt part of the scientific community at the MIT, the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since then, many things have changed: Chomsky calls him (who is meanwhile teaching as a linguistic professor at the Illinois State University) a charlatan: Everett’s (first) wife divorced him after forty years of marriage, his kids partly took distance from him and his faith has left him irrevocably. In short: Everett’s life has taken a complete other turn than he could have imagined in the year 1977, when he hit the road to the Amazonas to meet the Piraha indigenous people. The Indian tribe of about 350 people has turned upside down all his basic beliefs, and today, the “New Yorker” as well as the “Spiegel” report about him: The former missionary has kicked off a linguistic debate that goes far beyond the expert groups.
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