Peripheral Visions

of the way as armored cars firing blanks rolled back and forth, people would draw me into storefronts, taking my hand or my arm: step back, be careful. These encounters on the street were an acknowledgment of me as a person and outweighed the risks, which were really rather minor. If this wandering looked like courage, it was a courage arising from a contingent sense of self, not an invulnerable one, for to me separation was the greater danger. If it looked like folly, it was folly arising from need.
    Within the framework of Western assumptions, we begin to know a little about how the self is differentiated from others, how it takes shape for males and females, the kind of resilience associated with it. A wide range of pathologies have been associated with flawed attitudes toward the self: lack of self-esteem on the one hand and narcissism on the other. Physical violence and sexual abuse deform the sense of self, or split it into multiples. So do insult and bigotry. So does invisibility or the realization that in a given context one is inaudible. We think of the self as a central continuity, yet recognizing that the self is not identical through time is a first step in celebrating it as fluid and variable, shaped and reshaped by learning.
    In Iran, looking for a school for Vanni, I visited a kindergarten. The teacher announced that it was time to draw and walked around the room with a cardboard box from which she gave one colored pencil (no opportunity to choose) and one piece of paper to each five-year-old. After a while she announced that drawing time was over and walked around the room again, this time carrying a wastebasket into which she put the drawings. Coming from the land of the decorated refrigerator door, where we have been taught to applaud each child’s efforts as a way of building self-esteem and independence, I was appalled.
    Respect for children as individuals and support for their emerging creativity continued to be the criteria for my selection. At the same time, I reflected that Western ideas of the individual are not universal and that American styles of child rearing are not noted for promoting cooperation and sensitivity to others. Particularly for boys, we value separateness: separateness from family, from community, and from the natural world, which we feel free to dominate and exploit. Even though girls are expected to retain a sense of connectedness, they are disparaged for it, while all too many boys are pushed into proving themselves by aggression and competition.
    To find really profound differences in concepts of the self or the individual, I would have to look beyond the cultures in which I have worked; for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are similar in supposing a self separate from God, free to choose obedience or not. I would have to look instead at hunting-gathering cultures or at the highly elaborated psychologies of Buddhism or Hinduism. Even so, there was enough variation in my experience to make me aware of differences. Israeli teenagers learning mutual support in the desert had first taught me something about different constructions of the self, and that in turn allowed me to understand what I was hearing when American brides complained of the intrusiveness of Iranian in-laws treating their time and property as common to the household.
    Because the self is the instrument of knowledge, different concepts of self offer different criteria for truth, whether social or private. Authenticity and sincerity are not private but interpersonal, with very different meanings in different cultures. Like the concept of zero in mathematics, a concept of self is pivotal in organizing experience, useful as an idea as long as it is not mistaken for a thing. Yet even though we regard the self as logically central to any way of experiencing the world, we are trained to look through it like a pane of glass, only noticing when it becomes blurred or cracked. The Western insistence on a separate self carries its own blindness, its own nonrecognition of necessary connection, its own inconsistencies. The very self we set out to affirm can become a hostage to fortune.
    The self is learned, yet ironically it often becomes a barrier to learning. The illusion of autonomy confers a sort of immunity, often tenaciously defended, to the effect of new contexts and relationships, yet in order to move through society, we are asked to put the tenuous certainties of the self at risk again and again. The self