London Calling - II

(The second in an esteemed series, written by the venerable Mr. Eugenides.)

re·cur·sion (rĭ-kûr'zhən) n. Mathematics

1. See recursion.

2. A formula that generates the successive terms of a recursion.

I won’t be revealing too much of my personal life if I tell you, dear readers, that I work in finance. I suppose by giving out this information you could correctly infer that I’m probably scrabbling around rather indecorously for another job, desperately trying to sell a House/Ferrari/Polo team at a 97% discount-to-list and facing imminent divorce unless I can find a way (legally) to settle an egregious Bliss Spa account. But what you perhaps don’t know is that my presence in this industry is a minor miracle because I’m not terribly good with figures. In fact, I’m almost 105% numerically dyslexic. I was thinking about this recently and I’ve become increasingly convinced that I might actually be Pirahã.

Let me explain; the Pirahã people are an indigenous hunter-gatherer tribe of Amazon natives, who mainly live on the banks of the Maici River in Brazil. The Pirahã people don’t call themselves Pirahãs but instead the ‘Hi'aiti'ihi’, roughly translated as 'the straight ones'. I’m definitely straight (boarding school adjusted) and there are other characteristics I share with the tribe:

1. The Pirahã have no concept of God or religion. They believe in spirits, though these are not the same kinds of spirits as in other cultures. These ‘spirits’ can be jaguars, trees, or other visible, tangible things.

2. The Pirahã take short naps of 15 minutes to two hours through the day and night, and rarely sleep through the night.

3. They often go hungry, not for want of food, but from a desire to be tigisái (hard).

But back to numbers; the Pirahã do not count. Despite efforts to teach them, some researchers, such as Prof. Peter Gordon of Columbia University, claim they are incapable of learning numeracy. His colleague, Prof. Daniel L. Everett, on the other hand, argues that the Pirahã are cognitively capable of counting but they simply choose not to do so.

Being concerned that, because of this cultural gap, they were being cheated in trade, the Pirahã people asked Everett to teach them basic numeracy skills. After eight months of enthusiastic but fruitless daily study, the Pirahã concluded they were incapable of learning the material and discontinued the lessons. Not a single Pirahã had learned to count up to ten or even add 1 + 1.

Everett argued that they are unable to count for two cultural reasons and one formal linguistic reason. First, they are nomadic hunter/gatherers with nothing to count and hence no need to practice doing so. Second, they have a cultural constraint against generalizing beyond the present which eliminates number words. Fourthly, since numerals and counting are based on recursion in the language according to some researchers, then the absence of recursion in their language entails a lack of counting.

Come to think of it, set against a background of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, AIG, GM, et al, as you watch the impending implosion of more hedge funds and assorted financial institutions, I suspect you might think there have been more than a few of us Pirahã with seats at the high table of global finance.

‘Wither this economy’? I am continually asked. I’d love to give an elegant synopsis in reply, but I’m afraid I find it very difficult to generalize beyond the present.

Have a great Holiday break.