Peripheral Visions

other, parent and observer, teacher and student. I have been fortunate in living several lives simultaneously, the effect of layers of commitment. There is even room for awareness of the process of learning.
    This is an old way of organizing attention for women, not a new one. Women were being pulled in different directions and into patterns of multiple attention long before contemporary conflicts between home and career. They get married and begin to attend to the needs of a husband; then he is jealous of the baby when the baby comes. When the second baby comes, the first baby is jealous of the second baby, the knee baby is jealous of the breast baby, and the husband is jealous of everybody. Women have been trying to balance multiple claims and demands from before the beginning of history, for women’s work has always embraced the array of tasks that can be done simultaneously with caring for a child. This has meant taking on whatever could be done with divided or fluctuating attention, could be set down to respond to interruptions and picked up again without disaster. It is not surprising that such work, so easily deferred and juggled, is often treated as having negligible value, yet it must be done and has always included many of the tasks that were central to survival. Women must be one thing to one person and another to another, and must see themselves through multiple eyes and in terms of different roles. Women have had to learn to be attentive to multiple demands, to tolerate frequent interruptions, and to think about more than one thing at a time. This is a pattern of attention that leads to a kind of peripheral vision which, if you limit roles to separate contexts, you may not have. Sometimes this multiplicity can be confusing and painful, but it can also become a source of insight.
    Men have been the ones who went out to the hunt or to battle, the first to step voluntarily into unexplored regions and confront alien ways of being. The tasks that have tended to become exclusively male, like hunting and warfare, require sustained concentration, so men have been trained in the importance of single-mindedness, of narrowly focused attention.
    Attention involves mobilizing mental capacities to function adaptively in a given situation. Just as situations vary, so do styles of attention. The ability to concentrate exclusively on one thing is essential in the modern world for both men and women, but so is the skill of attending to more than one thing at a time. Ideally, each individual would cultivate a repertoire of styles of attention, appropriate to different situations, and would learn how to embed activities and types of attention one within another. Most drivers are aware of doing this, for instance, for the kind of attention that works best on an open road in the country is wrong for urban traffic, yet both demand focusing straight ahead, and scanning to the sides and the rear, often listening to tapes as well. Over time, all of us develop more than one such pattern, yet in turning from very concrete skills like driving to more metaphorical issues, the discussion of attention often becomes lopsided, emphasizing the need to focus and resist distraction.
    The division of labor that requires different kinds of attention from men and women originally made very good biological sense. Among the San people such as the !Kung of the Kalahari (also known as Bushmen), the women are either pregnant or nursing (each child for three years or more) for most of their adult lives, but this does not prevent them from making a full contribution to subsistence tasks. The San used to be called a hunting people, when anthropologists focused almost exclusively on the male half of the societies they studied, but eventually they noticed that some two-thirds of the diet was actually provided by women’s gathering and proposed that the San be called a hunting-gathering or a foraging people.
    If you are a San hunter, a man, you go out with a small group of companions armed with poison-tipped arrows, hoping to track and wound a large grazing animal, an antelope or a giraffe. (I am writing here in what anthropologists call the “ethnographic present,” for the game is mostly gone and this old foraging life is largely a thing of the past.) It would take the poison many hours to work on the animal, but unless you as hunter arrived quickly when it collapsed, other predators or scavengers would get to the meat before you. The San are