Peripheral Visions

was told to expect in every class. In any case, what was going on with mothers and infants was beneath his attention.
    If you try to untangle the actual patterns of learning and attention in that classroom, some interesting paradoxes emerge. At ten months of age, before speaking her first word, an infant knows a great deal about her world and what is expected of her. In some sense, Becky knew she was supposed to demonstrate independence. Shahnaz knew she was supposed to stay close to her mother and avoid strangers. She recognized that the flimsy cotton rug on the floor established a geography in the room, a boundary to the contained and hospitable space of the familiar that it was inappropriate to cross. Shahnaz could recognize the very minimal evocation of these rules in a thin cotton rug, which Becky simply ignored.
    The mothers, unself-conscious about their own behavior, wanted their daughters to show up at their best. Parvaneh was giving Shahnaz contradictory messages, one with her restraining hand and the offering of food, the other with her words, urging Shahnaz to go join the students. Iranian courtesy is full of invitations that are not meant to be accepted, but Iranians enjoy the tension this creates, and Shahnaz, whether or not she yet understood her mother’s words, already understood how to understand them. Joan explained to me that she had selected typical American toys, which were in fact all “educational.” They were also all beyond Becky’s developmental level. She could enjoy handling the pieces of the puzzle but not fit them together, and it would be months before she could learn that an apple is “red.”
    Each mother was underlining fundamental lessons by her behavior, but these were not necessarily the lessons she would have said she was teaching: the Iranian mother was urging sociability even as she was emphasizing a bounded world of warmth and nurturance, surrounded by danger; the American mother was using educational toys to project exploration and competition. The mothers, of course, were improvising, for I had put them in a novel and somewhat embarrassing position, which they cheerfully accepted, using habit and common sense (both learned) to shape their behavior.
    The boundaries that little Shahnaz had learned to accept reminded me of a mental topography that gradually became clear in the Philippines. Like many languages, Pilipino has three kinds of demonstrative: this (here), that (nearby), and that (distant); here, there, and way-over-there. Wherever we went, we found we were warned of danger outside or beyond some perimeter. Around Manila, on the island of Luzon, we were told of the risks of travel to the big southern island, Mindanao, but when I told people I met in Mindanao of a plan to travel to the Sulu Archipelago, the scatter of small islands that trails off the southern end of the Philippines, they warned me to take care. For each island and in every Manila neighborhood I spent time in, there was an area “out there,” threatening and unsafe, providing a contrast to the safety of the familiar.
    Some Americans living in the Philippines simply synthesized these warnings to reach the conclusion that the entire country was unsafe, failing to notice that the warnings given by Filipinos, including lurid stories of crime and violence, implied a contrast between an area of safety and an area of vulnerability. Foreigners often made the same kind of mistake in Iran, listening to the cynical remarks of Iranians about others—particularly those in the public eye—and synthesizing these into the conviction that an entire people could be always devious and insincere. We fail to hear the implied comparisons: dangerous compared with what? insincere compared with whom? Outside danger may be a part of the comfort of home.
    The two infants, still limited in their interactions by the lack of language and only recently mobile, traced alternative theories of social life onto the floor of that dusty classroom, a topography of value and safety in space and human intercourse. The mothers too had quite different theories about what infants can and should learn. In Iran, children are characterized as innocent. Even in this society of sexual segregation, mothers traditionally took their sons with them to the bathhouse, where they would be surrounded by scantily clad women and sexual gossip, until they were visibly approaching puberty. Adult men remember listening and watching avidly, protected by