Real World Weirdness - The Tribe that Doesn't Count

No, I don't mean that they're unimportant. I literally mean they don't do the whole 1-2-3 business. An aside on a web forum post I was reading introduced me to the Pirahã (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_people). They're a tribe of hunter/gatherers in the Amazon, who'd probably be much like any other such tribe (there are a lot, though fewer than in the past) except that they seem to eschew pretty much all forms of abstract thought. Not that they're stupid--they're great at concrete stuff like day-to-day survival. But they have no religion, no fiction, and no mythology, at least as far as researchers have been able to determine. Their language is one of the simplest known, and seems to lack recursion--you can't embed one sentence into another like you can in english and every other known language. And they can't count. Their language has no numbers, of course, but other languages also lack these, and speakers of those languages have no trouble counting. They borrow number-words from other languages if they have to, but they can count just fine using those borrowed words. These guys seem to be unable to learn to count, or at least unwilling to.

Now I don't know why this is, or even if it's really the case or if these guys are just putting on an act to fool those weird pale people who have nothing better to do than to ask random rain forest tribespeople about their personal beliefs. Still, the idea is intriguing, and it suggests a whole range of fictional scenarios based on this concept.

• First of all, this is a good example of "alien" thought patterns (albeit in humans). Perhaps a race of non-humans is completely incapable of abstract though, while still being intelligent. They might be somewhat like this. I am reminded of the Garuda in Perdido Street Station, who, while very different from the Pirahã, are nonetheless very concrete thinkers. A Garuda criminal refers to himself as being "Too Abstract."
• One article I read mentioned that only men had been interviewed. Perhaps in a fictional culture the women do all the abstract thought, and for all we know are accomplished mathematicians and theologians.
• An article mentioned that the children are largely raised by other children, not by their parents, and have a sort of subculture of their own. Maybe the kids are the philosophers of a culture, and become more focused on daily life when they reach adulthood. There could even be a rite (possibly involving magic) whereby they formally give up their childish thought patterns and devote the rest of their lives to living in the moment. This reminds me of an alien species I read about in a SF novel ages ago, which had a life cycle similar to that of butterflies. The larvae were sapient, and had developed space travel, while the adult forms were largely mindless and devoted only to reproduction.
• The Pirahã apparently only cat-nap, and don't sleep for long periods at a time. Why is this? I can understand the need to not be unconscious for hours on end in a dangerous environment like the jungle, but their neighbors manage to get by just fine sleeping at night like we do. Perhaps there's a connection. I don't know if anyone's done research on what this type of sleep pattern does to peoples' thought patterns.
• Despite not believing in gods, they do believe in spirits of a sort, all of which are actual physical objects. They also believe that these spirits can possess them in some way and change them at a fundamental level. As a result of these changes, they often change their names. This makes me think of a novel called "Vaccuum Flowers" in which it was common to "reprogram" people with different skill sets and even personalities. When the police raided a place, they would reprogram some of the people they caught into more cops, for instance. Or, imagine a world in which aliens were taking over some segment of the population, sometimes switching hosts. These aliens would have different ways of viewing the world than humans do, and might act somewhat like the Pirahã.

The real world is, most likely, not this strange. The most reasonable explanation I encountered is that the Pirahã were as they were for cultural reasons, and felt that their way of life was superior to that of outsiders, and refused to change for that reason.

Still, it's things like this that give ideas to fiction writers. I hope that I'll continue to find real-world wierdness and it'll be come a recurring feature of this blog. I will share my ideas with others, for their benefit and my own.