Peripheral Visions

interact in harmony. Robert Edgerton has described how even the severely retarded, unable to learn language, show a capacity for friendship, loyalty, and caring that makes one ask how to prevent schooling from destroying values rather than how to inculcate them, for social life has a model of harmony at its very inception. Without it we would not have survived all these millennia.
    All too often, members of one group look at another from the outside, misjudging patterned and adaptive behavior as lazy, ignorant, or licentious. In Iran I collected lists of Iranian behaviors that were irritating or worse to Americans—and similar lists of American behaviors offensive to Iranians—then tried to find ways to make each one intelligible by explaining where it fit into larger patterns. This was in the days before self-serve gas stations in the United States, so Americans arrived in Iran with the expectation of finding “service stations” where gas would be pumped for them, windshields cleaned, and a wide range of services available. Gas stations in Iran sold gasoline only, and the attendants were there as cashiers. If they gave personal assistance with the pumps, they expected a tip. Americans sat luxuriously in their expensive cars, expecting to be waited on, then drove away without giving the attendants anything, so the attendants dragged and tended to shortchange to get what was due them. Two cultures, each seeing only a part of the other’s pattern and attributing it to character flaws, arrogance, dishonesty, laziness. “Typical,” each would say of the other. “Just like them.” All too many Americans responded to the small book I wrote about contretemps of this sort and how to avoid them, Why should we understand their culture? Let them learn to understand ours. But my first task was to demonstrate the very presence of order.
    It is the business of professional anthropologists to winkle the patterns out of voluminous notes and months of work and to analyze them. The question for everyone, living in a world of constant contact between cultural groups, is how to become routinely sensitive to patterns, even with minimal cues, suspending judgment and looking for how they fit together.
    I know only two ways to prepare others for that kind of attention. One is by offering early and often the experience of difference, always in the context of the expectation that there will be a pattern to observe. The United States presents unprecedented opportunities for learning about the range of human potential, if only we look with open eyes. The other is by offering early and often the experience of making and looking at art, which demonstrates that two people can look at the same mountain and see something different. Rudyard Kipling once wrote a poem in which he described heaven as a sort of celestial artists’ colony; I thought of it often when I was at the MacDowell Colony, where “…each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,/Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They Are!” Kipling’s God sees a world we can never see, but we can sense its mystery by being open to alternative visions, including those offered by the telescope and the microscope along with those offered by painters and poets and other cultures.
    Did sunflowers look to van Gogh the way they look in his paintings? Not exactly, clearly, but they apparently did look different to him, and in interpreting that difference and translating it to the canvas he constructed a greater difference. Of course we cannot see either sunflowers or paintings as he saw them, and our way of seeing is different again from the way his contemporaries saw. It is fashionable today to attribute the unique vision of someone like van Gogh to organic causes, yet van Gogh changed sunflowers forever. They keep on changing. Today we increasingly see van Gogh’s paintings framed in dollar signs, and those who see them framed in yen must see something else. At the same time, having once seen a few paintings by van Gogh, we can recognize others.
    The special case of the artist’s idiosyncratic vision expressed in work after work provides a partial parallel to the stylistic coherence that allows one to say that a particular wooden bowl was carved in the Trobriand Islands, or that a particular rug is the work of Qashqai weavers, or to divine the cultural background of a particular street merchant or the underlying vision of home sustaining a