Peripheral Visions

and idealizations, blurred by caricatures and diagrams.
    In the past, we might have climbed as children onto a big four-poster used in turn for birthing, lovemaking, and dying. In other cultures we might have grown up seeing human bodies of every age: torsos as distinctive as faces; breasts of many forms and stages, from the barely budding to the flat, long breasts of multiple lactations; penises as varied as noses. Living in a palm and bamboo hut or under a roof without surrounding walls, we would have listened at night to the sounds people make when their bodies are busy with the primordial efforts of pain or pleasure. We might have seen the interiors of human bodies as well, in places where custom demands the dismemberment of the newly dead. In the modern West, however, even intimacy is categorized and filtered through abstractions.
    Anthropologists are trained to be participants and observers at the same time, but the balance fluctuates. Sometimes a dissonance will break through and pull you into intense involvement in an experience you had distanced by thinking of yourself as coolly looking on. Or it may push you away when you have begun to feel truly a part of what is happening. I was in that garden as a learner, an outsider, and yet, because I was there as a parent, I was simultaneously a teacher, an authority. Trying to understand and remember what I saw, I was also trying to establish an interpretation that would be appropriate for Vanni, one that would increase her understanding of the living world and her place in it and also bring her closer to the Iranians she would be living among for several years. At least, I wanted to leave her unfrightened. Out of that tense multiplicity of vision came the possibility for insight.
    That day in the Persian garden has come to represent for me a changed awareness of learning pervading other activities. Meeting as strangers, we join in common occasions, making up our multiple roles as we go along—young and old, male and female, teacher and parent and lover—with all of science and history present in shadow form, partly illuminating and partly obscuring what is there to be learned. Mostly we are unaware of creating anything new, yet both perception and action are necessarily creative. Much of modern life is organized to avoid the awareness of the fine threads of novelty connecting learned behaviors with acknowledged spontaneity. We are largely unaware of speaking, as we all do, sentences never spoken before, unaware of choreographing the acts of dressing and sitting and entering a room as depictions of self, of resculpting memory into an appropriate past.
    This awareness is newly necessary today. Men and women confronting change are never fully prepared for the demands of the moment, but they are strengthened to meet uncertainty if they can claim a history of improvisation and a habit of reflection. Sometimes the encounter takes place on journeys and distant sojourns, as it has for me in periods of living in Israel, the Philippines, and Iran. Often enough we encounter the strange on familiar territory, midway through familiar actions and commitments, as did the Iranian gardener whose cosmopolitan employers had become half foreign to him. Sometimes change is directly visible, but sometimes it is apparent only to peripheral vision, altering the meaning of the foreground.
    What I tried to do that day, stringing together elements of previous knowledge, attending to catch every possible cue, and exploring different translations of the familiar, was to improvise responsibly and with love. Newly arrived in Iran, I had no way of knowing what was going to happen, not even a clear sense of my own ignorance. Even so, I was trying to put together a way of acting toward my child and my hosts that would allow all of us, in courtesy and goodwill, to sustain a joint performance.
    Vanni of course was generating a novel performance too, trying to figure out who to be and how to react, the complex perennial task of childhood. She got some of her cues from me, but she also kept a watchful eye on the children of the gardener: the oldest, who watched as he had many times before, with a sense of occasion and none of horror, and the younger ones gleaning the confidence that this was an ordinary, unfrightening process taking place in front of them, but a solemn and even festive moment as well, one that would be repeated and explored in play.
    So there we were, nine people differing in at