Actually he was a linguist interested in the Piraha because their language seemed unique (thats correct, unique)
Which led him to become an anthropologist
And live with them
Discover they had no religion
Lose his own religion
And become a member of their tribe

Read Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes, which is the traditional "good nite" of the tribe (Triple Canopy Humor)
[amazon.com]

@Davesnothere OK, I stand corrected, linguist. My point remains, he wasn't a missionary who went there to try and convert them.

@LimitedLight

There is also a colloquial usage of the term Missionary, which implies not religion, but outreach by "western Society" to uncontacted tribes.

"Everett has conducted field research on many Amazonian languages, focusing on their phonetics (sound production), phonology (sound structures), morphology (word structures), syntax (sentence structures), discourse structures and content (how people communicate culturally relevant information by stories), pragmatics (how language is constrained by some social settings), ethnolinguistics (how culture affects linguistic forms), historical linguistics (the reconstruction of the origin and dispersion of languages by comparing data from other languages), among other areas. He has published a grammar of the Wari' language (with Barbara Kern), a grammar of Pirahã, and grammar sketches of other languages."

Definition of missionary
: a person undertaking a mission and especially a religious mission

It is thus quite easy to see How Daniel could use that term meaning he was representative of the western world and english language becuse such research trips are Missions, and routinely called thus. I do not recall him using the term and I am not interested in listening to an audio snippet from the book for 10 min to see how the term might have been used.

Daniel never was a religious missionary out to spread the faith.

"Daniel Leonard Everett (born 1951) is an American linguist and author best known for his study of the Amazon Basin's Pirahã people and their language.

Everett is currently Trustee Professor of Cognitive Sciences at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. From July 1, 2010 to June 30, 2018 Everett served as Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley. Prior to Bentley University, Everett was Chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. He has taught at the University of Manchester and the University of Campinas and is former Chair of the Linguistics Department of the University of Pittsburgh. He is married to Linda Ann Everett.

In 2016, the University of Chicago press published Everett's book Dark Matter of the Mind: the Culturally Articulated Unconscious."

@LimitedLight Thanks for the clip.
Apparently my memory is faulty, I do not recall that line at all. I read the book when it was new, must have developed a cognitive bias since then on this point.

As far as going out on (( "Going on a dig", "out on a research expedition" (perhaps becoming a bit archaic). More recent, "out into the field:.)) I have also heard the term mission outside of my military service (where it is very common) as well as in, not in relation to religious work. I would assert that was a lynchpin in my bias.

Thanks for clarifying that.

@LimitedLight Your work sounds interesting as well.

@Davesnothere, If you would take the time to listen to the video before commenting on it you would hear that his linguistic mission was to translate the Bible, and tell them about Jesus. Sounds like a religious missionary to me.

@mcgeo52 I commented on my recollections of the book, saw no need to watch the film clip at that time.

And actually I do not see it that way. I think he was using the religion to fund researching the language. His mission, even as stated, was not to convert the Piraha, but to translate the Bible Into Piraha language. That required him to learn Piraha language.

That is also where his religious belief unravelled, because they did not have terms for a lot of things, like God.

The OP reads "Former Christian Missionary"
As if his purpose for being in the jungle was to convert the Piraha, it was not. It was to learn thier language.

[daneverettbooks.com]

@Davesnothere
"The Pirahas believe only what they see. What a setback for my missionary objectives."

His purpose for learning the language was to translate the Bible into their language and convert them.

@mcgeo52 In the begining his purpose was to learn the language to put the bible in Piraha in order to eveangelize the Piraha.
We agree on that. Right?

Does not making him the missionary, but the missionaries enabler, a linguist whos work would allow such a thing.

"His purpose for learning the language was to translate the Bible into their language"
The latter part "and convert them" was a goal ONLY POSSIBLE with the language understood, and was the setback which caused his own de-conversion.

To me you are painting him with the brush of what he would have done had he not broken out of religion himself, and faulting him for that. Almost like future crime.

His ambition was to learn the language. which he could then use to evangelize the Piraha, or more likely better allow them to be eveangelized by the Church.

The book is his deconversion story as much as anything else.

Do you hold all people in such a fashion, that all the things they believed in should paint them now and forever as Born Again or what have you?

"In the past couple of years, my work has turned out to be quite controversial, much more so than I ever expected. In 2009, Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America dedicated about 100 pages to a discussion of my paper on the grammar-culture connection (Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Piraha: Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language, in Current Anthropology, August-October, 2005).

There are two books and a documentary are now dedicated to this controversy and my emerging theory of language as a cultural tool. The documentary is The Grammar of Happiness (in the US this will appear on the Smithsonian Channel). This will include interviews with a number of prominent linguists, psychologists, philosophers, and others, as well as a lot of footage of me and the Pirahas in the Amazon. The books are Language: The Cultural Tool – from Pantheon in the USA and Profile in the UK, and Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes. Another book, with my co-author, Dr. Jeanette Sakel, Linguistic Fieldwork: A Student Guide , in the Cambridge University Press “red series” (linguistic textbooks) discusses how to do field research, including how to study the interaction of culture and grammar."

Now does that sound like a linguist or a Christian Missionary to you?

"I came into Linguistics serendipitously. Although I have always been interested in languages, largely due to growing up on the Mexican border, hearing Spanish spoken all around me, in Holtville, California (where my dad worked as a cowboy, bartender, and mechanic), near Mexicali, Mexico.

I wasn’t particularly interested in science – I wanted to be a musician. But on a trip with my school band to Hollywood, I went to see the movie My Fair Lady (at the Egyptian Theater) and I was fascinated by the work of ‘Henry Higgins’ (coincidentally, the linguistic consultant for that film was Peter Ladefoged, who became a good friend and co-author, before his death in 2006). Higgins’s work attracted me intellectually and because it looked like phoneticians could get rich.

A few years later, I met a family of missionaries who worked in a tribal village in Brazil, among the Satere-Mawe. Eventually I moved to Brazil to be a missionary with SIL International
[sil.org]
(I no longer have any affiliation with that organization).

I completed an Sc.D. in Linguistics at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP). For much of my career I conducted research from a Chomskyan, formalist perspective (I wrote the article on Noam Chomsky for the MSN Encarta Encyclopedia.)

My current research is concerned with understanding how cultural values constrain language. I would eventually like to develop an approach to linguistics in the tradition of William James, where the notions of usefulness, coherence, and radical empiricism produce a view and practice of science different than the Cartesian-Popperian views of knowledge that have undergirded so much research in linguistics. I would also like to see the re-cultivation of a Boasian approach to the study of language as something embedded in a rich cultural matrix.

I have lived in jungle villages for nearly eight years of my life and have conducted field research almost every year since 1977."

THIS is the "Missionary" group he worked for
With whom he is no longer affiliated, and has not been for decades.
[sil.org]

I think painting him as a "Christian Missionary" regardless of his personal beliefs, both belittles and degrades him as a human. In the begining he wanted to have the Piraha "come to God", by the end he no longer believes.

@Davesnothere, I don't think it belittles him to be honest about the fact that his original intent was to be a Christian missionary. I think it actually speaks well of him that he was able to grow beyond that.

@mcgeo52The OP misrepresents him.
He is a linguist who TOOK FUNDS from a missionary organization, taking on their mission to put the bible into Piraha.
This required him to go there and learn both the language and the people, he himself was a believer raised in the faith.

To call him a Christian missionary" is to call him a servent of the church, and ordained or otherwise religious background out to convert a people, rather than a believing linguist who lost his belief when confronted by the reality of the Piraha.

Thanks. I like that -- 'holly ghost'. The holidays are coming.
We'll put it with the poinsettia fantasy. Ha, ha.

Don't try to tell that to a Mormon. They believe Jesus visited native in the Americas after the resurrection.

the gospels came about 100 a.d. long after he was gone

@twill From what I read there weren't just the four "gospels", but more than three of four dozen, and they told different versions and most contradicted each other. One they decided which four to use they tried to destroy most of the others.