We are barely bodies is a portrait of the Pirahã people of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil.
In 2016 and 2017, the artist Julien Bismuth accompanied the Brazilian anthropologist Marco Antonio Gonçalves to the land of the Pirahã, an isolated semi-nomadic group who has resisted assimilation since their first encounters with Portuguese missionaries in the 17th century. They are known for their singular language which can also be communicated as a whistled, hummed, or shouted sequence of tones. They also have a deliberately minimal material culture, an absence of what we call social, political, or economical hierarchies, and a complex and profound cosmology and philosophy of life.
In 2005, the American linguist Daniel Everett notoriously cast the Pirahã people of the Amazon rainforest into the spotlight by claiming that their language contradicted Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar, and labeling them the “happiest people in the world.”
We are barely bodies starts as a silent film, accompanied by a captioned text by Gonçalves on the cosmology and way of life of the Pirahã. The elusive eloquence of the silent footage resonates against the complexities of their world as described by Gonçalves. The film begins with a single phrase, “I am barely a body,” that the anthropologist encountered on his first visit to the Pirahã in 1985. Gonçalves elucidates how this phrase connects to their cosmology and to their layered worlds of spirits and other beings. Though image and text never coincide directly, their interplay creates a window into the world of the Pirahã.
This is a link to the video:
https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/813667100
