Peripheral Visions

that showed a little boy and a little girl sitting at a kitchen table, with the little boy putting a piece of bread into a toaster, was cited as undermining traditional concepts of the family. This may seem extreme, yet these parents were right in their understanding of how people think and learn. Not only does such a picture undermine traditional concepts of the family but it undermines traditional concepts of God, for male dominance over females has long provided a model for the relationship between God and humankind. They would also be right to resist the metaphor of the dryad, along with any other suggestion of sacred presence immanent in the natural world, as undermining the idea of God as transcendent, ruling from outside and above.
    Family systems, the organization of institutions, the way we run our country, the way we respond to other cultures and races, and the uses of political and military power—all these things are based on interlocking sets of metaphors. Our many relationships are isomorphic: they have the same form. There is a pattern that connects, and it is a pattern of dominance and exploitation, taught again and again in the most ordinary human arrangements. That pattern is expressed in the fierce and ultimately self-destructive attack on this planet that we cannot rule because we are a part of it.
    Developing visions that protect the earth is going to take long-term work, not just on what we do with sewage, or how we deal with smoke coming out of factories, but on how we handle our interpersonal relations. In effect, because knowledge and perception are so dependent on available models, they cannot be changed without a commitment to changing basic patterns of social life. This is the most significant sense in which we are our own metaphor.
    How ironic it is that, in the story of the Garden of Eden that is so often seen as having crystallized for millennia the notion of human dominance over the natural world, the Fall is a punishment for eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Yet even after they have eaten that fruit, it is clear that Adam and Eve do not understand God or apple trees or serpents or even each other. Expelled from the garden, they set forth on the path of misunderstanding—and denying—their own desires.

Joining In
    I N THE P HILIPPINES THEY DO A DANCE called the tinikling . Two people kneel holding opposite ends of thick bamboo poles, using them to beat out a rhythm, two beats apart, one beat together, while dancers run in, stepping between the poles on the beats apart, nimbly leaping out when the bamboos come crashing in toward their ankles. Filipinos are skilled at making sure that foreigners try their hand—or their shins—just as they are skilled at making sure, preferably before a large, convivial audience, that foreigners eat balut , fertilized duck eggs incubated to the point at which the embryo ducks, still soft boned, have recognizable bills and feathers. In this society where shaming is a pervasive and effective sanction and the statement “I was ashamed” an often given reason for action or inaction, considerable graceful skill is available to chivy or wheedle overbearing foreigners into feeling obligated to make fools of themselves. When you watch Filipinos dancing the tinikling , what you see is skill, one of those dances in which virtuosity is central. Under the pervasive charm, the “smooth interpersonal relations,” as social scientists translate the delicate Pilipino word pakikisama , there is plenty of malice to enjoy pratfalls or occasional hits of the loosely held bamboos.
    When Barkev and I got married in 1960, one set of dancing styles held sway in the United States, with variations depending on age and class. By the end of our years in the Philippines and in Iran, dancing in the United States had changed radically, ceasing to be an activity in which a male led and a female followed, one which a well-bred young lady could neither initiate nor decline, and became something that men and women, boys and girls, did in their own individual styles, with very loose patterns of coordination, sometimes alone, sometimes with partners of either sex. “Knowing how to dance” still included the possibilities of virtuosity, aficionados going to clubs night after night, but gone were the anguished failures of stepping on a partner’s toe or losing one’s place in a complex jitterbug step. Many of my generation never made the transition to dancing to rock