Questions from the Everett book:
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Who are the Apuriñas and what is their relationship to the Pirahã?
They are a group of people who settled just up from the Pirahã in the Apurinian Indian settlement. They thought they were friends to the pirahã, but the pirahã acutally thought of them as inferior and did not believe they had actually land ownership. They ended up attacking and killing some of them due to problems with traders. o
What does FUNAI invite Daniel Everett to do?
Help to define the boundaries of land for the Pirahã as their own reservation. Questions from the video:
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Do you feel that Chomsky and his ideas about Universal Grammar were evaluated fairly in this video? Why or why not?
I do feel like they gave it the best way to evaluate his ideas in the video. Is it completely fair? Probably not, but the way that they evaluated his claims and did not allow for an open discussion was fair. I think by using the computer and software systems to evaluate the claims, data, and run all the tests was about as unbiased as you could be. The software would analyze the data, without bias, and just tell you what the results are. Like running math problems in excel, it is going to tell you the answer and not round or give an “opinion” on what the number is really.
I think more data needs to be collected and analyzed but I do think that this was as fair of a judgment, given the situation, as they could have made. o
How do you feel about FUNAI's efforts to modernize the Pirahãs' lives?
I feel it is a big ignorant and also I feel it is a bit ethnocentric of them to try and view the Pirahãs way of life as incorrect. I loved how Daniel Everette states in the video that it was hard to elicit anger or happiness from them because they live so in
the moment and day to day of their lives. I feel like we could actually learn a valuable lesson from them and their ease of life. It sounds like he himself did learn some things and it sadly led to the end of his marriage/religion. Having been through a similar situation with my own family, I related really strongly to this video and weeks lesson.
