The Lessons That Daniel Everett Learned

Over the course of his travelogue “Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes,” Daniel Everett learned many things through his experiences with the Piraha. Aside from being able to learn more about himself, Everett and the readers were able to learn more about the Piraha language and culture through Everett’s experiences. Despite the vast differences in culture and language that there may be between that of the Piraha and Western society, as Everett states “After all, it is our common genome that unites Homo Sapiens into a single species and produces other similarities among us, including many of our needs, desires, common experiences, and emotions” (Everett 255). Because of this, from the experiences detailed within this travelogue, Everett and the readers can get a better understanding of how similar we really are as humans despite the vast differences in culture and language that there may be. Everett further elaborated on this through the statement “This view of this book is that every language and culture pair shows us something unique about the way that one subset of our species has evolved to deal with the world around it. Each people solves linguistic, psychological, social, and cultural problems in different ways” (Everett 277). From this statement, I find it to show that although Everett understands that each society’s language and culture adapts to the demands of its own environment and problems, and thus these aspects of language and culture can have great variances between different societies, a similarity that can be seen within every culture is the way that each society has to adapt to its own unique circumstances. In this way, “Groups like the Pirahas offer novel, deeply useful, and alternative examples of how to deal with perennial and ubiquitous problems” (Everett 277). Thus, even though each society adapts to the unique conditions imposed on it through its environment and the problems that it is faced with, many problems are universal across societies. Although these problems are universal, because every society adapts to its own unique environment and problems, they are not handled in a universal way. Because of this, many societies essentially develop their own unique ways to address these universal problems. From these quotes, I believe that it greatly shows how Everett learned from his experiences, as he also teaches the readers, that although other societies may be drastically different from our own, we are all the same. For this reason, Everett shows that it is essential to both respect other societies, regardless of how different they are from our own, and the necessity to try to understand other cultures and languages to better understand humanity as a whole. In this way, over the course of Everett’s travelogue, I believe that both Everett and the readers learn to respect the differences that people may have as we are all inherently the same.