When I was 26 , I moved to the Amazon , from California , in order to study the language and culture of a people that were believed to be unrelated to any other people . I flew in a small missionary plane , a bumpy nausea-inducing ride , to meet the Pirahã people for the first time . My body was weak ; my brain was taut with anxiety and anticipation . The Pirahãs are unrelated to any other . They speak a language that many linguists had unsuccessfully attempted to understand . My task would be to understand where little understanding currently existed . This encounter with these ‘ others , ’ so unlike myself , was to be the defining experience for the rest of my life . One of the greatest challenges of our species is alterity , ‘ otherness. ’ All cultures for reasons easy enough to understand fear other cultures . War and conflict have defined humans for nearly two million years . When we encounter others unlike ourselves , we frequently become uncomfortable , suspicious . A new neighbor from another country . A friend of our child who has a different color . Someone whose gender is not a simple binary classification . This is an old problem . Jesus himself fell under suspicion for befriending a woman thought to be a prostitute , Mary Magdalene . She was unlike the religious people of Jesus 's day . An ‘ other. ’ Those unlike ourselves may eat different food , be unintelligible to us when speaking to those more like themselves , build different-looking homes , or , in the view of some who most fears otherness , simply live ‘ wrongly. ’ To some , others are not only suspect , but their differences are morally unacceptable . When I first entered the Amazon as a missionary , this was my belief . Everyone needed Jesus and if they did n't believe in him , they were deservedly going to eternal torment . In my encounter with the Pirahãs , though I was uneasy , I realize now , ironically , that I was actually the dangerous one , the one who came with insufficient respect , with an ego-centric and ethno-centric view of my own ‘ rightness. ’ How fortunate for me that this gentle people disabused me of so many of my silly beliefs . Though this years-long encounter with the Pirahãs was to improve my life globally , it certainly did n't seem that way at first . During my first day among the Pirahãs I was taken by a young man to a fire by his hut . He pointed at a large rodent on the fire with its tongue still hanging out and a small pool of blood at the edge of the fire . The hair was burning off of the fresh kill . The young man uttered a then-unintelligible phrase : Gí obáaʔáí kohoáipi gíisai ? Later I learned that this meant , `` Do you know how to eat this ? '' And I also learned that if you do n't want any offered food , you can simply say , `` No , I do n't know how to eat it . '' No one loses face . It is an easy , polite structure that allows you to avoid foods you do n't want . Many other cultures , Western cultures for example , do n't tend to be this polite . We often simply offer people things to eat and get offended if they refuse . Unlike among the Pirahãs , there is a more portent pressure in some Western cultures for a guest to eat whatever the host offers . For almost all of us , we experience the world first through our mother . All that we touch , taste , hear , smell , see , and eventually come to know and understand begins with her and is mediated by her . As we develop of course we notice others close to our mother - our father , siblings , and others . But until our first experiences as individuals begin outside the home , our values , language , and ways of thinking all result from interactions with our mother and the select small group she is part of . These early apperceptions shape our subsequent lives . They lead not only to an individual sense of identity but also to a conception of what a ‘ normal identity ’ is . This is all very comfortable . We learn early on that new behavior and new information entail effort . Why listen to dissonant jazz when the steady 4/4 beat of country or rock is familiar ? Why eat haggis instead of pot roast ? Comfort food is just food that requires no gaining of acquired tastes . Why learn another language ? Why make friends of a different color , a different sexual orientation , or a different nationality ? Why should a professor make friends with a cowboy ? These efforts go against the biological preference for expending as little energy as possible and maintenance of the status quo . The work of learning about otherness is worthwhile , but this is not always obvious initially . Linguists recognized long ago that the first rule of language is that ‘ we talk like who we talk with ’ . And other behavioral scientists have realized that ‘ we eat like who we eat with ’ , ‘ we create like who we think with ’ , and ‘ we think like who we think with ’ . Our earliest associations teach us not only how to think , create , talk , and eat , but to evaluate normal or correct thinking , talking , eating , and creating based on our narrow range of experiences . The crucial differences between others and our in-group are values , language , social roles , and knowledge structures . All else emerges from these , or so I have claimed in my own writings . Each builds on the others as we learn them in the context of familiarity , a society of intimates ( i.e . our family or our village ) . This leads to a conceptualization of our own identity . For example , I know in some way that I am Dan . Yet no one , not even ourselves , fully understands what it means to be ourselves . The construction of our identity through the familiar leads us to think of what is not us , not our family , not our norm . Inevitably , as our experience expands we meet others that do not fit neatly into our expectations . These are ‘ the others. ’ In 1990 , Columbia University psychologist Peter Gordon accompanied me to several Pirahã villages in order to conduct a pilot study of language learning among Pirahã children . We set up cameras on a hut , in full view , with the permission of its occupants , and started filming . We both were in the film , talking to the adults about their beliefs and children 's behavior . After we were done filming , we noticed something that we had not seen before , because it was happening behind us . A toddler , perhaps a year and half old , was playing with a sharp kitchen knife with a 30cm blade . He was swinging it nonchalantly , almost stabbing himself in his face , legs , and midsection ; occasionally swinging it close to his mother 's face and back . We initially assumed that the mother did n't see her toddler 's dangerous toy . But then , as she was talking to another woman , the camera recorded the baby dropping the knife and starting to cry . Barely glancing backwards at her child , the mother casually leaned over , picked the knife up off the ground and handed it back to the baby , who returned gleefully to his quasi-stabbing of himself . This was a confrontation of values for Peter and myself , underscoring the otherness divide between the Pirahãs and us . Was n't the Pirahã mother concerned about her child 's welfare ? She was indeed . But to the Pirahãs a cut or non-life-threatening injury is the price that occasionally must be paid in order to learn the skills necessary to survive in the jungle . Would a Dutch mother give her child a sharp knife as a toy , believing that any piercing of the child 's flesh would be compensated for by its contribution to the child 's development ? Could she even respect this other ( m ) otherness - the otherness at the root of our lives ? When I first encountered the Pirahãs , I learned the language by pointing and giving the name in English . I would pick up a stick and say , `` stick . '' The Pirahãs , most of them anyway , would give me the translation in their language . Then I might let the stick drop to the ground and say , `` the stick falls to the ground '' or , `` I throw the stick away '' or , `` two sticks drop to the ground , '' and so on . I would transcribe the responses and say them back at least three times to the speaker , making sure I had them right . I was able to follow their translations and also write down their comments . But the occasional speaker would ignore my request and instead say something that turned out to be even more interesting . Ɂaooí Ɂaohoaí sahaɁaí ɁapaitíisoɁabaɁáígio hiahoaáti , which means : `` Do not talk with a crooked head . Talk with a straight head . '' The Pirahãs wanted me to talk like a person , not like a bizarre foreigner . Like an American tourist in France , the Pirahãs could not understand why I could n't speak their language . Then one day a missionary plane had brought us some supplies in the jungle . Among those was lettuce . I was so excited to have greens . The Pirahãs eat no greens and think of them as worm food . I was cheerfully eating lettuce from a bowl when a Pirahã friend walked up and said , `` That 's why you do n't speak Pirahã yet . We do n't eat leaves . '' In other words , the Pirahã man believed that language emerges from culture as well as the entirety of our behavior as members of a society . This is a belief I have come to as well . They felt we could not learn their language at native level unless we became also part of their culture ; and native level is what matters to them , there are no prizes for merely speaking their language intelligibly . This was against everything I had been taught about language in university courses , and it underscored the gap between them and me . Languages and cultures interact symbiotically , each affecting the other . Our sense of self and of society emerges from our enveloping culture and from the language and accents we hear most during our childhood development . The speed of our conversations and the structures of our interactions with others are formed in local communities of people like ourselves . The most comfortable conversations are with people who sound like you , put their phrases together as you do , and who reach similar conclusions . There are many ways in which we confront otherness . Strangers are not always people . Nature is often a foreigner to most of us and we can learn by submitting ourselves to it . One reason that I annually read the American Henry David Thoreau 's Walden , my favorite book in all of American literature , is that Thoreau was so articulately different from me . That is irrelevant to Thoreau 's account of his year alone . His year was a brilliant experiment . Thoreau did not remain at Walden . He returned to take up a fairly boring life as a handyman in the adjacent city of Concord , Massachusetts . Yet , the book he wrote is full brilliant observations based on the concepts of American Transcendentalism : the idea that people and nature are inherently good and that they are best when left alone by society and its institutions . Transcendentalism implies that as we come to know ourselves and remove the otherness of nature by experiencing it with all our senses . That our sense of oneness with others , as embodied in that very nature , grows . Thoreau 's insights into his lessons from nature – as the stranger - teach us about what it means to live as a human , to be independent , and to occupy a part of the natural world . Through Thoreau we encounter the strangeness of a solitary life in nature . Oneness with ourselves and nature – and the others that are strange to us but are , like us , just part of nature – requires slow work of contemplation and experience that at once embraces the otherness of nature . It demands working towards removing this sense of otherness and embracing it as part of the oneness that we seek with the world around us . Otherness , as I see it , is the spark of original thought and greater appreciation of nature , while the sense of oneness is the paradoxical goal of encounters with otherness . We need a sense of oneness of ourselves with nature to clearly see otherness , and we need otherness to build a more encompassing and panoramic sense of self and oneness with the world . Thoreau ignored society to know himself . Most of us ignore ourselves to be part of society . Thoreau eloquently expressed the loss that , being carried away by the demands of others and society , brings us to our sense of self . We think of conformity rather than our own unique identity and so blur who we are as individuals . Thoreau captured this well when he exclaimed that , `` the one is more important than the million . '' That is , it is only as we each individually appreciate our oneness with the world , nature , and the other as part of this oneness that we can achieve the best individual life , and thus society . Thoreau ’ s hut Walden stands still as light in the heart of the forest , a small cabin where one can sit and think and read and wonder about the reasons for living . Jungle nights were this light in my life , as I sat around campfires , talking in a language that was so hard for me to learn . Albert Camus said that the biggest mystery of philosophy is why not everyone commits suicide when honestly contemplating the futility of life . As a possible answer to his own question , Camus in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus , held up poor Sisyphus as an example of a good life . Sisyphus , after all , had an objective , one that entailed a measurable daily activity that always ended in the accomplishment of getting that rock up the hill . But Thoreau perspective rejects Camus 's analysis . He saw no reason to count familiarity or predictability of social life , foods , or accomplishments as among the goals of life . They teach us little and change our behavior insignificantly . His example was that we learn most when we insert ourselves as aliens in new conceptual , cultural , and social environments ( in his case , the absence of society ) . I am convinced that our lives become richer when they are less predictable . This is not to say that our lives are always predictable in the absence of the other . Otherness renders our expectations less fixed and requires more thinking , planning , and learning . The Pirahãs would disagree . They believe that it is homogeneity that gives us comfort and keeps us strong physically and psychologically . Otherness vs. predictability , which is more desirable ? In essence , we need both even if we ’ d construct a greater sense of oneness that embraces the unexpected . The two greatest forces of preserving and constructing cultures are imitation and innovation . When our environments , culturally and physically , are constant , innovation is rarely useful . Like biological mutations , cognitive and cultural innovations are usually unsuccessful . The effort to invent will usually isolate us as strange and less successful than those who merely imitate . Failed innovation in a society that most values imitation emphasizes our own ‘ otherness ’ and provides us with little advantage . As environments change – such as the ecology of the Pleistocene that so shaped our Homo ancestors , climate change today , the shifting political boundaries , or the intrusion of others into our environment – innovation becomes a more important force , providing new solutions to new problems that imitation alone is unable to provide . The Pirahãs live in an environment that has changed little over the centuries . They value conformity and imitation over innovation . Consequently their language has changed little over time . Records of their culture and language from the 18th century show a people identical to the people we encounter today , three centuries later . In environments that , especially culturally , change at light speed we need to learn to think , speak , act differently , and innovate in multiple areas simultaneously as the changes we encounter transform our familiar environment into ‘ an other ’ . Every day brings problems that we never faced before . Diversity of experiences and encounters with others inspire new ways of thinking and new forms of living . If we all look the same , talk the same , value the same things , paint the same pictures , dance the same dances , and hear the same music then we are simply imitators falling behind the challenges of our world . This applies to all of us whether we are hunter-gatherers in the Amazon or advertising agents in New York City . It blinds us to new forms of beauty . What we see around us , with the rise of anti-immigration political movements in Europe and the USA is , at least partially , a fear of otherness . Our preference is for conformity and imitation ; our fear then itself arises from that preference in contrast to otherness and the greater steps towards an ever more encompassing oneness of the type that motivated Thoreau . However , the ultimate engine of innovation is otherness – of people , food , environments , art , and culture – it strengthens us and prospers us . Our languages and cognitive abilities expand as we learn new vocabularies and new values by talking to people and experiencing their relationships to nature that are unlike our own . Human language emerged within the Homo line because it was the only creature to embrace otherness as to actively explore for the sake of exploration ; to seek encounters with otherness . As Homo erectus sailed to islands beyond the horizon it invented symbols and language to cope with the greater need for communal efforts to expand experiences . Language change is an indication of cultural change ( and cultural change will change language ) . Together , they amplify our species ability to innovate and survive . All that we are is the result of our human embrace of the other , the love of alterity that makes us distinct from all other creatures . Alterity is one of our greatest fears . And yet it should be our greatest treasure .