A New Book and Film About Rare Amazonian Language In his 2008 memoir, "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes," the linguist Dan Everett recalled the night members of the Pirahã - the isolated Amazonian hunter-gatherers he first visited as a Christian missionary in the late 1970s - tried to kill him. Dr. Everett survived, and his life among the Pirahã, a group of several hundred living in northwest Brazil, went on mostly peacefully as he established himself as a leading scholarly authority on the group and one of a handful of outsiders to master their difficult language. His life among his fellow linguists, however, has been far less idyllic, and debate about his scholarship is poised to boil over anew, thanks to his ambitious new book, "Language: The Cultural Tool," and a forthcoming television documentary that presents an admiring view of his research among the Pirahã along with a darkly conspiratorial view of some of his critics. In 2005 Dr. Everett shot to international prominence with a paper claiming that he had identified some peculiar features of the Pirahã language that challenged Noam Chomsky's influential theory, first proposed in the 1950s, that human language is governed by "universal grammar," a genetically determined capacity that imposes the same fundamental shape on all the world's tongues. The paper, published in the journal Current Anthropology, turned him into something of a popular hero but a professional lightning rod, embraced in the press as a giant killer who had felled the mighty Chomsky but denounced by some fellow linguists as a fraud, an attention seeker or worse, promoting dubious ideas about a powerless indigenous group while refusing to release his data to skeptics. The controversy has been simmering in journals and at conferences ever since, fed by a slow trickle of findings by researchers who have followed Dr. Everett's path down to the Amazon. In a telephone interview Dr. Everett, 60, who is the dean of arts and sciences at Bentley University in Waltham, Mass., insisted that he's not trying to pick a fresh fight, let alone present himself as a rival to the man he calls "the smartest person I've ever met." "I'm a small fish in the sea," he said, adding, "I do not put myself at Chomsky's level." Still, he doesn't shy from making big claims for "Language: The Cultural Tool," published last week by Pantheon. "I am going beyond my work with Pirahã and systematically dismantling the evidence in favor of a language instinct," he said. I suspect it will be extremely controversial. Even some of Dr. Everett's admirers fault him for representing himself as a lonely voice of truth against an all-powerful Chomskian orthodoxy bent on stopping his ideas dead. It's certainly the view advanced in the documentary, "The Grammar of Happiness," which accuses unnamed linguists of improperly influencing the Brazilian government to deny his request to return to Pirahã territory, either with the film crew or with a research team from M.I.T., led by Ted Gibson, a professor of cognitive science. It's scheduled to run on the Smithsonian Channel in May. Dr. Everett acknowledged that he had no firsthand evidence of any intrigues against him. But Miguel Oliveira, an associate professor of linguistics at the Federal University of Alagoas and the M.I.T. expedition's Brazilian sponsor, said in an interview that Dr. Everett is widely resented among scholars in Brazil for his missionary past, anti-Chomskian stance and ability to attract research money. "This is politics, everybody knows that," Dr. Oliveira said. One of the arguments is that he's stealing something from the indigenous people to become famous. It's not said. But that's the way they think. Claims of skullduggery certainly add juice to a debate that, to nonlinguists, can seem arcane. In a sense what Dr. Everett has taken from the Pirahã isn't gold or rare medicinal plants but recursion, a property of language that allows speakers to embed phrases within phrases - for example, "The professor said Everett said Chomsky is wrong" - infinitely. In a much-cited 2002 paper Professor Chomsky, an emeritus professor of linguistics at M.I.T., writing with Marc D. Hauser and W. Tecumseh Fitch, declared recursion to be the crucial feature of universal grammar and the only thing separating human language from its evolutionary forerunners. But Dr. Everett, who had been publishing quietly on the Pirahã for two decades, announced in his 2005 paper that their language lacked recursion, along with color terms, number terms, and other common properties of language. The Pirahã, Dr. Everett wrote, showed these linguistic gaps not because they were simple-minded, but because their culture - which emphasized concrete matters in the here and now and also lacked creation myths and traditions of art making - did not require it.