Peripheral Visions

artistic traditions happen more and more often, in circumstances that do not label one side as dominant or superior, and urban children have heard rumors of multiple forms of traditional wisdom. They will need a new kind of openness and responsiveness to discover all they must learn along their way.
    For when great changes and revolutions occur, whether they are social or technological, they must be lived out by men and women who matured under the old order. We know that the people of the Soviet Union were not educated for democracy, so we must hold on to the hope that somewhere in their growing up they encountered themes that will help them in devising new forms of civility as adults. Similarly, we know that the black and white populations of South Africa have not been educated to regard each other as fellow citizens, so we must pin our hopes on their capacity to transfer patterns from one context to another. Even when hate becomes obsolete, it is harder to adapt without habits of questioning and independent observation, just as it is hard to learn any new skill when existing skills are based on a rote learning of technique. It may be that both kinds of learning occur only in the context of a certain degree of self-confidence and self-respect, and must be carried by some affirmation of continuity. We know that today’s children are being educated by parents who have not yet learned to live lightly on this earth. Fifty or even twenty years from now, they may find themselves living differently, feeling either harassed and deprived by new circumstances, or perhaps experiencing an unpredicted homecoming and sense of peace.

    Beyond either relativism or the search for absolutes, learning can be practiced as a form of spirituality through a lifetime. We started from participant observation and the necessity for improvisation, asserting the need to act and interact with others without complete understanding, learning along the way, and we argued that improvisation can be both creative and responsible. We have explored ways of embracing myths and metaphors and multiple layers of truths, education through lessons that are different at every encounter. The self is constructed from continuing uncertainty, but it can include or reflect a community or even the entire biosphere, can be both fluid and stable, can be fulfilled in learning rather than in control.
    Again and again we have rejected the “rhetoric of merely,” the rhetoric that treats as trivial whatever is recognized as a product of interacting human minds that may then go on to some other product or point of view. Because it is not possible to stand aside from participation until we know what we are doing, it is essential to find styles of acting that accept ambiguity and allow for learning along the way. Perception, attention, grace, all of these, varied or sustained, provide materials for constructing both self and world, and patterns for joining in the dance.
    In Washington, DC, the Smithsonian Institution has an annual folk festival to which it brings Balinese dancers, shamans from the Orinoco, Tlingit storytellers, gospel singers from the Deep South, performing outdoors on the Mall. I have heard that they all stay in the same hotel, and I love to imagine the tentative explorations and conversations, the dawning recognitions of collegiality. We have that too. We call it boddhisattva.

Acknowledgments and Sources
    T HIS BOOK WAS MADE POSSIBLE above all by my experiences living in other cultures and by the hospitality and tolerance shown to me during these sojourns. Part of the pleasure of the writing has been revisiting notes and memories going back many years, bringing them out and considering the ways in which they illuminate the questions I am asking today. I was in Israel as a high school student in 1956–57, visited in 1988 after a thirty-year absence, and returned for six months in 1989 as a researcher. I was in the Philippines with my husband, Barkev, between 1966 and 1968 as a young professor and field-worker. We lived in Iran before the revolution, from 1972 to 1979, with our daughter, Vanni, teaching, researching, and planning for new and developing educational institutions. Each of the memories I have picked up along the way represents an encounter with a place and a time that goes beyond the particular but might have been invisible without the contrasts of strangeness, for one is forced by cultural difference to question assumptions and struggle