Sunday, April 04, 2010

Daniel Everett in the (Wisconsin) news

Daniel Everett is coming to Wisconsin. Just got passed this announcement:
On April 13, 2010, the Marquette Linguistics Club will be hosting Dr. Dan Everett for a talk at 5:30pm in Todd Wehr Chemistry 100. The event will be free, open to the public and Dr Everett will be discussing (among other things) his book Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle.
I imagine a couple of carloads will head over from Madison for that.

But there's more. Everett also gets a big write up in the April edition of Freethought Today, publication of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, a piece called "The Pirahã: People who define happiness without God." The April issue isn't on-line yet, but this is basically his talk from their annual convention held last November. Long story short: You can add to the very long list of things Everett says the Pirahã do not have, namely any belief in the supernatural.

2 comments:

NW said...

Who else has done first-hand research with these people? Do we have decent records of his interactions with them? I don't take issue with him saying they don't have supernatural beliefs; the tribe just seems extremely peculiar.

Mr. Verb said...

There's extremely little other work in fact. You might look at set of earlier posts about his work, starting here: http://mr-verb.blogspot.com/2007/06/recursion-in-grammar.html