An emotion is not a definite thing, an object that can be captured and categorized with certainty. Feelings are ephemeral and evasive, transforming or slipping away in response to our notice of them. They are here, then not here, flickering in and out of existence more easily than a faint scent on a shifting breeze.
We encounter emotions with what the Piraha people of South America describe as xibipiio. What’s more, xibipiio can be understood as an emotional state in itself.
What is this xibipiio?
It is, and then it isn’t.
In the 1970s, Daniel Everett traveled down to Brazil in order to find a remote culture, and convert it to his religion. He arrived with the conviction that there are universal human truths, frames that everyone lives with that inevitably direct them toward the teachings of Christianity.
The Piraha, however, didn’t respond to his missionary tactics. Instead, they showed Everett that there’s more to human experience than can be represented in any single book of ideology. Instead of converting the Piraha, Everett found himself deconverted. He abandoned his Christian scriptures for a less resolute life, exploring the subtle mysteries of words as a professor of linguistics.
He discovered that truth is not solid and certain, like a rock. It is xibipiio.
The concept of xibipiio expresses the sensation of something flickering in and out of existence, like a shaft of light piercing a thick but wavering canopy, a wave rising and falling on a river, or a visitor arriving and then leaving again. Xibipiio is all about a thing going away as soon as it is noticed, or returning as soon as it is missed.
Everett discovered that the Piraha language contained no words for specific numbers, and yet, the Piraha lived richly from the resources available to them. The Piraha way was strikingly indefinite, with relationships coming and going, without rigid kinship systems or sexual identities.
The databases of Silicon Valley lack the variable imagination necessary to grasp the social innumerate social networks of the Piraha.
Yet, the digital corporations craft their architectures of Big Data with missionary zeal, demanding a world without xibipiio, in which a variable can be only zero or one, yes or no, here or gone. They seek to reduce the complex subtleties of our emotions to stiff mathematical formulas that can pin down a rush of passion to the geometries of an electronically scanned facial expression.
They forget that smiles and frowns alike are not sedentary landscapes, but move as fleeting waves that flow into each other. They are reactions to reactions to reactions, powerful in their change rather than in their arrival.
“There is no such thing as universal grammar,” Everett cautions. Neither is there any such thing as universal emotion.
We can develop an extensive vocabulary of emotional experience, but we must not forget that our expressions of emotion are not the emotions themselves. Our words point to feelings that, by the time we speak of them, have gone.
