Brazillian tribe without a language for numbers, colors, or desire for material wealth lives on.

I think the rest of the world could learn something from this simple yet complex tribe. Great read!

Well, it appears they are not to be infiltrated by any outsiders. I guess they would be oblivious to certain media spin efforts, such as Fox News... What a refreshing notion...not a blind consumer in the bunch...

Fascinating read. Thanks for posting this.

A life without envy. Imagine.

wow. this is cool. probabl;y the most peaceful way of life, not too complicated.

Thanks for posting,very interesting.

Spellbound by this article . . . and I'm only half way through.

(Excerpt: "Inspired by Sapir’s cultural approach to language, he hypothesized that the tribe embodies a living-in-the-present ethos so powerful that it has affected every aspect of the people’s lives. Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Pirahã do not think, or speak, in abstractions—and thus do not use color terms, quantifiers, numbers, or myths. Everett pointed to the word xibipío as a clue to how the Pirahã perceive reality solely according to what exists within the boundaries of their direct experience—which Everett defined as anything that they can see and hear, or that someone living has seen and heard. “When someone walks around a bend in the river, the Pirahã say that the person has not simply gone away but xibipío—‘gone out of experience, . . .’

"Can't count past 2."

Sounds like the place George Bush must have come from before he was thrust into this society.

excerpt

Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive scientist, calls Everett’s paper “a bomb thrown into the party.” For months, it was the subject of passionate debate on social-science blogs and Listservs. Everett, once a devotee of Chomskyan linguistics, insists not only that Pirahã is a “severe counterexample” to the theory of universal grammar but also that it is not an isolated case. “I think one of the reasons that we haven’t found other groups like this,” Everett said, “is because we’ve been told, basically, that it’s not possible.”

this item is not here to make it to tv, there is already a light version of it close to doing just that right now, it is for your reading enjoyment...

=)

Thanks for posting this. This is interesting on so many levels! I remember reading it in The NewYorker a while back and have been thinking about it recently. I send all my New Yorker Mags To the troops so I no longer have my copy.

Very interesting.

this is sorta fascinating. thanks for adding it.

If you support Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar, i suggest you read this...

oh my, THE most interesting article ive read!