Peripheral Visions

pack I was in trouble. Regular rest stops were called, and each time we stopped I lay down and fell asleep for the few minutes available. There were magnificent views, but I did not see them, staring at my feet and stumbling from fatigue. The day ended with the celebration of the first evening of Hanukkah, with lights lit in tin cans and the group singing folk songs. I managed to keep going until the afternoon of the second day, to a point when I couldn’t get up. By then we were on a well-marked trail to that night’s resting place, so two of the boys stayed behind with me for an extra hour and then we walked the remaining distance, I leaning on their shoulders, arriving after dark.
    The next day I started out walking on my own again, and the going was not so steep. At midmorning, someone asked me whether I would carry his camera and step out of the line from time to time to take pictures, and I felt absurdly honored to be able to contribute in some way to the group. Euphoric with fatigue, I tried to sort out my feelings, with two quite different sets of emotions running simultaneously. The Israeli sequence was informed by the socialist ideology of the youth movement, with its emphasis on solidarity, mutual help, and commitment to the group. As long as I tried my hardest it was not inappropriate to receive help, but Israelis sometimes give very short shrift to those who do not do their best. At the same time, I could review my emotions as an American teenager, feeling humiliation and resentment of those who had helped me and discovered my weakness. Part of me felt deep love for and closeness with my comrades. Part of me wanted to withdraw and avoid them in the future.
    Beyond my feelings about my collapse, I found myself thinking in two ways about the question of whether it could be right to risk burdening others and about the meaning of helping. Training patterns in the Israeli youth movements and in the army are said deliberately to create situations in which members of the group learn to take responsibility for one another and to share burdens. Just as my experiences in the Philippines gave me a second way of thinking and feeling about death, my experience on that hike into Sinai has informed my feelings about all those circumstances in which one part of a community supports another, providing education or welfare or health care. Receiving help can be bitter, a shaming reminder of inadequacy, but that experience taught me that real help does not treat need as the result of irresponsibility or malingering and is generous enough to make it possible to contribute in turn.
    I have often chosen to go into unfamiliar settings in spite of the discomfort involved, gaining a sense of perspective in my life that has a very different kind of value from the production of books and articles. Still, I have wondered how I would have reacted to Martin’s death in Manila or my failure to keep up with my Israeli friends if they had occurred soon after arrival in a strange environment. It is not easy to use the crises of one’s own life as the stimuli for new ethnographic insights, yet we all arrive as strangers at the moments of crisis in our lives, having to improvise responses from previous learning. This must be labor; this is bereavement.
    Arriving in a new place, you start from an acknowledgment of strangeness, a disciplined use of discomfort and surprise. Later, as observations accumulate, the awareness of contrast dwindles and must be replaced with a growing understanding of how observations fit together within a system unique to the other culture. Having made as much use as possible of the sense that everything is totally alien, you begin to experience, through increasing familiarity, the way in which everything makes sense within a new logic. Eventually an ethnographer will hope to develop a description of a whole way of life that will convey this internal consistency, in which the height and placement of a chair, the adult response to a crying baby and to voices raised in dispute, and the rules about when to relax and the rhythms of the day can be integrated, although never perfectly. The final description should deal with the other culture in its own terms. Yet it is contrast that makes learning possible.
    When I first arrived at the MacDowell Colony, I put up a picture in my studio of a row of big brown bats on a calendar Vanni gave me and a clipping from the Sunday Times about crashing amphibian populations, sent