Daniel Everett
Linguist, anthropologist, and author whose work explores the relationships among language, culture, and cognition. Drawing on decades of field research in the Amazon, he writes about how human beings communicate, think, and understand the world.
Biography
Daniel Everett went to the Amazon in his twenties to translate the Bible into Pirahã. Over the next four decades he lived among them for some eight years. The Pirahã did not convert; he did, in the other direction, and left an atheist and a scientist.
He grew up in Holtville, California, on the Mexican border—the son of a waitress and a father who worked variously as a cowboy, mechanic and construction worker. He experienced a religious conversion at seventeen and trained as a missionary Bible translator before being assigned to the Pirahã.
His research on Piraha—a language with no numbers, no fixed color terms,and no creation myth—produced the first well-documented case of a human language without recursion, a feature long held to be universal. It challenged the theory of universal grammar and set off one of the longest-running disputes in modern linguistics. His conclusion is that language is not a genetic instinct but a cultural tool: something humans invented, as they invented the bow and arrow, and something that can be reinvented or lost.
His fieldwork has extended to more than twenty languages of the Amazon, along with languages of North and Central America. Among his discoveries are Oro Win, a language no outsider had previously recorded, and sound systems that had been predicted to be impossible. He has also argued that language was invented not by our own species but by Homo erectus.
He holds a doctorate and a master’s in linguistics from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas in Brazil, both based on field research among the Pirahã. He has held professorships at Campinas, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Manchester and Illinois State University, and spent over a year at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. He is Trustee Professor of Cognitive Sciences at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where he served as Dean of Arts and Sciences from 2010 to 2018.
He has published fifteen books and more than 120 scientific articles. His books have been translated into eighteen languages.
In the field
I had gone to the Amazon initially to be a missionary. But as the years went by, my interest in linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy grew. I spent more and more time on field research and its lessons for understanding the human condition. The Pirahãs were a major influence on my ultimate decision to abandon missions and religious beliefs in favor of understanding the lessons from field research.
“Everett has forced many researchers to reevaluate basic assumptions about the relationship among culture, language and cognition.”
Research & positions
- Position
Trustee Professor of Cognitive Sciences
Bentley University, Waltham, Massachusetts.
- Education
ScD and MA in Linguistics
Universidade Estadual in Campinas, both in field research among the Pirahã of southwestern Amazonas state, Brazil.
- Fieldwork
Languages of Amazonia
From years of immersion among the Pirahã to research across more than twenty Amazonian languages, fieldwork has been central to his exploration of language and culture.
Praise“The most important—and provocative—anthropological field work ever undertaken.”
Tom Wolfe
The Grammar of Happiness
A documentary following Daniel Everett back to the Pirahã community and exploring what their language may reveal about the relationship between language and culture.