Peripheral Visions

themselves from the book but would not have read it on their own. Today we can insist that research on such topics as drug reactions be conducted with samples including females as well as males so that we can distinguish differences from similarities, so I felt it was important that I attempt to make the resources offered by my work available to men. I want to thank those readers who urged me in that direction.
    It was not until after the appearance of Composing a Life , when I began to be invited to speak to groups of educators and faced their questions, that I fully realized that I had written, unlabeled, a book about learning from experience. I am in debt to those who asked questions I had not yet begun to think about, for they made me aware of the ferment in the field of education and set the course of this new book.
    A central theme of this book was first stated in a paper given just before I went to Iran at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in 1971 on conversations involving participants with disparate codes, later published as “Linguistic Models in the Study of Joint Performances,” in Linguistics and Anthropology in Honor of C. F. Voegelin , M. Dale Kinkade, K. L. Hale, and Oswald Werner, eds. (Lisse: Peter de Ridder Press, 1975), pp. 53–66. An account of my research with Margaret Bullowa’s project on child language learning at MIT was published in “Mother-Infant Exchanges: The Epigenesis of Conversational Interaction,” in Developmental Psycholinguistics and Communication Disorders , Doris Aaronson and R. W. Rieber, eds., Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences , vol. 263 (1975), pp. 101–113.
    Several chapters of this book are derived from lectures of mine that have circulated in taped form or from previously published essays, heavily revised and reshaped. Chapter 1 is partly based on a keynote address given in 1992 to the Western States Communication Association Convention and published in transcript form as “Joint Performance Across Cultures” in Text and Performance Quarterly , vol. 13, no. 2 (April 1993), pp. 113–121. Chapter 2 is based in part on my essay “Insight in a Bicultural Context,” Philippine Studies , vol. 16, no. 4 (1968), pp. 605–621, and a further portion of the same essay appears at the end of Chapter 10. Chapter 6 was published in an earlier version as “The Construction of Continuity” in Suresh Srivastva and Ronald E. Fry, eds., Executive and Organizational Continuity: Managing the Paradoxes of Stability and Change (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992). Chapter 8 includes portions of an unpublished paper, “Notes on the Problems of Boredom and Sincerity,” distributed to participants in Burg Wartenstein Symposium No. 59, Ritual: Reconciliation in Change , July 21–29, 1973. Chapter 9 combines a lecture given to the Isthmus Institute in Texas on the Gaia hypothesis in 1990 and a keynote address given at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education in the same year. Chapter 11 incorporates a paper given at an American Anthropological Association Symposium on multiculturalism at the association’s annual meetings in November 1992. Many of the vignettes about differences between Iranian and American cultures that occur throughout the text were first presented in a booklet called At Home in Iran (Tehran: St. Paul’s Church, 1973 and 1976).
    Any author must make decisions about how often to supply references. On the one hand, full references are valuable to protect the rights of other writers and researchers and to provide resources for those who follow similar paths. On the other hand, an excess of scholarly machinery creates a block between writer and reader. My own policy is to provide footnotes only for exact quotes and for information that I myself have obtained from a single, specifiable source. The same philosophy has led me to use spellings of Persian or Hebrew words that I believe will offer comfort to the reader rather than erudition. I have felt it necessary to include from time to time examples from a kind of society I have never myself studied, and these have been drawn primarily from the superb body of ethnographic work on the !Kung San of the Kalahari. Among the more accessible books on the San are:
    Richard B. Lee, The Dobe Ju/’hoansi (Fort Worth, Tex.: Harcourt Brace, 1993). A first edition in 1984 was titled The Dobe !Kung .
    Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Harmless People (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,