Composing a Life

knowledge of the culture as well as a commitment to change. I remember she once described to me the creation of a sign to represent the Persian word
khastegari
, the formal courtship in which the groom pays a series of visits to the home of a potential bride. The proposed sign was a crooked and beckoning finger, followed by a gesture of putting on a ring; Julia had successfully advocated a different sign, the peremptory beckoning replaced by hands on the heart.
    As a young woman, I was uncomfortable with the marriage customs of my own tribe and with the multiple divorces of my parents, so I “married out” after a year of living in Israel in my first extended experience of another culture. Barkev was born in Syria, but his cultural tradition is Armenian. Unlike Johnnetta’s husband Robert, Barkev came from outside my academic community. He had been an engineering student at Northeastern and later a student at the Harvard Business School, the place we used to call “the other side of the river.” I learned to speak and write Armenian and to cook Armenian food, and Barkev became a social scientist. Both of our families were supportive, unlike Johnnetta and Robert’s families. They were breaking much more explicit taboos. “My God, what am I gonna tell my mom,” Johnnetta remembered thinking. “It’s not just that he’s white, the man’s a radical!”
    “One of my strongest recollections,” she continued, “is the night when Robert Cole drove to Jacksonville to meet my mom. Somehow it was known—we’ve never been able to figure it out other than wiretapping of our phone—that Robert was coming. The threats began—that the Afro would be bombed, that someone in our family was gonna suffer—anonymous phone calls, voices that seemed white. That night my head hurt so bad I went to sleep and said wake me up when he comes. I woke up next morning to find I had slept through his arrival. My mother and Robert had found a bottle of scotch, and in the course of killing it they decided they could live with each other, though following that my mother decided it was more than she could ask me to take on and asked me not to marry him. We were being pressured from both sides. Up till the night before, I thought my mother was going to continue to disapprove, but the night before, she said, ‘I don’t care, I’m coming to this wedding.’
    “This was 1960, when all of the standard hostility was being joined with new black consciousness. My mom just said, ‘Look, society’s gonna kick your butt if you do this.’ And then his family were incredibly opposed to it. They sought advice, went to their minister, talked to their neighbors, and just decided no good could come of this. But on the other hand, they loved their son and over the years we got pretty close, although getting close to his folk is about 1,500 yards away from what I would call close. From the perspective of someone born in a very loving black household, this is pretty cold stuff.”
    Marriage is not the ideal way to learn about cultural difference, since the contrast between cultures can easily become confused with the contrast between male and female, and any two-way comparison can be interpreted as better and worse, high and low. When I am teaching anthropology, I try to encourage students always to think in terms of three cultures, their own and at least two others—not one other, because they could too easily reduce true human diversity to a single dimension of difference, us and them, civilized and savage. The stereotypes of savages or primitives do not stand up to the awareness of the diverse forms of adaptation of preliterate societies, with their distinctive ingenuities and elaborations. Neither does the stereotype of civilization, which is constantly shifting and revealing an endless series of problems.
    If I thought I knew the ideal way of being human, I would teach that instead of the discipline of anthropology. The Presbyterian mission in Iran that gave birth to Damavand College, where I taught for a while, had the cable address INCULCATE; I guess they thought they knew. Most higher education is devoted to affirming the traditions and origins of an existing elite and transmitting them to new members.
    When I think about the real achievements I made at Amherst, it is striking to see how many of them involved a further opening up of the college: opening up through increased interchange with other institutions in the Pioneer Valley that