Peripheral Visions

Israel, with immigrants from all parts of the Jewish Diaspora, is a melange of cultures, so a unifying contrast with non-Jews is important.
    In Iran, Persian speakers agree in defining themselves as sharply different from Arabs, the foreign overlords of the far past, in spite of centuries of influence and borrowing in both directions. More recently, the prototypical foreign culture was different in different parts of the country. In Tehran, France once provided the model for emulation or rejection. In the south, near the oil fields, it was Britain. In the north, it was Russia. All these countries exerted influence, spreading in different ways across the country. Qarbzadegi , or “West strickenness,” was a widespread disease. In Tehran there was a famous princely family in which the paterfamilias had had many wives and children, systematically sending his sons and daughters as they grew up for education in various countries and professions. Each became bicultural in a different way, and the family was positioned for survival in any change in the tides of foreign influence.
    When we were in Iran, American models had become important, both as a beacon and as a threat. During the Islamic revolution ambivalence about the United States was crystallized in the imagery of the Great Satan. Yet when we arrived, Iranians in conversation with Americans were all too ready to disparage their own tradition, so I learned to press for the positive values behind statements like “We Iranians are too smart for our own good” or “too cynical ever to trust each other.” Negative self-images are hard to shed without projecting hostility on the image of an inimical “other.”
    The Philippines has been under an even stronger American influence since the United States took over from Spain in the first years of this century. There was so much superficial Americanization that it was hard for new arrivals to get the early and vivid experience of difference which leads to learning, yet every descriptive statement about Philippine culture seemed to be implicitly contrastive. To write “Filipinos often take siestas,” omitting to mention that they sleep at night as well, is to describe not Filipino sleeping habits but rather the differences between Filipino and American sleeping habits. It would almost have been possible to create the unstated assumption that Americans never sleep when it’s dark by commenting, “Filipinos sleep at night.” Worse still, such descriptive statements seemed to whisper the introduction “The trouble with the Filipinos is that unlike Americans…” Recent rising levels of self-confidence and assertion, as well as dawning deference from some Americans, may reverse the direction of the comparison: “The trouble with Americans is that unlike the Filipinos, they…” In other situations it may be “Unlike the British, Japanese, Native Americans…,” and so on. In a world of increasingly dense flows of information, “others” are all around, the hidden disparagements are revealed, the old forms of projection and distancing no longer work.
    When I remember that first Feast of Sacrifice I observed in Iran, I am struck by the ambivalence of my hosts, differentiating themselves from their own traditions yet still drawn back into them. City people learn to imagine themselves in other shoes. Sometimes villagers see even their richer and more powerful countrymen from the city almost as another order of being, unaccountable and impossible to empathize with.
    A certain amount of friction is inevitable whenever peoples with different customs and assumptions meet. It is familiar enough between genders or across class lines in a single society. What is miraculous is how often it is possible to work together to sustain joint performances in spite of disparate codes, evoking different belief systems to affirm that possibility. As migration and travel increase, we are going to have to become more self-conscious and articulate about differences, and to find acceptable ways of talking about the insights gained through such friction-producing situations, gathering up the harvest of learning along the way.
    A few weeks before leaving Manila, I wrote an article for publication there, as an experiment in talking about the bicultural situation and the kinds of misperceptions it can produce. I used the sequence of experiences I had had with cultural attitudes toward death to illustrate the fact that complementary themes