Peripheral Visions

cultural knowledge in this way, resolving the conflict seemed to me to justify it.
    What Becky and Shahnaz had already learned about what to value, where they could safely go, and who to interact with had established a framework for their future explorations and so for future learning. One day at a student gathering at our house, a woman in one of Barkev’s classes invited Vanni, age three, to stay overnight at her house. Vanni went and got her pajamas, and I found the two of them standing, embarrassed and awkward, by the front door. It had never occurred to the student that a three-year-old would be willing to set off to spend the night with a near stranger. It had never occurred to Vanni that this friendly woman, a guest of her parents, would extend an invitation that was not intended to be accepted. Should I tell Vanni that the invitation was false? Insincere?
    “Sweetie, Mahin invited you to her house as a way of saying how much she likes you. But she didn’t expect you to actually come. She probably isn’t set up for overnight guests. Besides, you both have to go to school tomorrow.” That much had to be said; my problem was to find the tone to convey the fact that Mahin was entirely sincere in the warmth of her invitation but not in its substance. The true message depended on a combination of her words, her understanding of the context, and what she took for granted about human nature. The explanation would have been unnecessary with an Iranian child. I wanted Vanni to retain her freedom but to put it in cultural perspective.
    If you ask Iranians about Iranian national character, they will often speak of distrust or cynicism, two words that translate the Persian badbini . This is a traditional negative orientation to unfamiliar places or persons or ideas. I used to warn new arrivals in Tehran that they might be shortchanged in little neighborhood shops: viewed as predatory, they would be objects of predation. But if they kept returning, they could gradually become part of the community. Within the circle of trust, to those defined as insiders, Iranians are extraordinarily trusting, but this is obscured when they are describing their culture to Western researchers—outsiders. Like the stereotypes I heard in the Philippines, this stereotype conveys only one side of the coin. And, as in the Philippines, the negative stereotype generated in this way may be played back as self-condemnation. It is Iranians who will tell the foreigner never to trust anyone.
    In small-town America today, most people still leave their doors unlocked. For all the folklore about disruptive outsiders, new arrivals are not automatically categorized as dangerous. But levels of diversity and miscommunication are rising all over America, gradually shifting people into the defensive modes you can see in the cities, where strangers are guilty until proven innocent. Even as I write this, some twenty years away from having my own child to protect, I reflect that the sense that children are under threat has become so strong in America today that I would probably inhibit a child’s exploration in new ways, ways that would surely convey a habit of suspicion, not only as a situational adaptation but as an element of character. Learning at that profound level shapes all subsequent learning—a one-year-old’s attitude toward strange adults, for instance, is recycled in attitudes toward teachers, acting as a filter for the opportunities of school.
    Experiences spiral through the life cycle, presenting the same lessons from new angles: parenthood offers a new view of childhood, so does grandparenthood and so also the roles we are sometimes offered in relation to the children of friends. Observing infants, strange as visitors from another planet—and the even less intelligible infants in other cultures—is one way of making one’s own early learning accessible to awareness and change. Other lessons of childhood are examined and reappraised in psychotherapy. It is possible even for childhood to be twice-learned, seen from the outside as well as from the inside.
    I arrived in Iran from a period of research on mother-infant communication. When Vanni was born in 1969, I had decided that since my attention was going to be divided for some time to come, I would arrange my professional work so that the resonances of research and motherhood would be a source of insight, so I started working at the Research Lab of Electronics at MIT, where another