Peripheral Visions

work and styles of music and dance, postures and rhythms and whether people perform separately or in unison. There is probably a relationship too between performance styles and learning styles, a match in which one supports the other. What I learned in afternoon classes in ballroom dancing was all too congruent with the assumptions of the time about propriety elsewhere. In times of change such congruence is replaced by a disruptive mismatch, in which song and tapping feet suggest a way of joining in that is contradicted in more formal settings. The successfully learned skills of the dance floor or the street corner can either undermine or enrich the more slowly changing classroom.
    Dance styles reflect the everyday experience of encounters with others in which we do not “have all the moves,” often because newcomers have no way of discovering a stable set of rules or because the rules have changed overnight. Arriving as a stranger at one of New York’s airports, the passenger from London or Taiwan or Houston does not know the New York regulations for tolls and taxis, the names of bridges, or what the ride is likely to cost; the driver, newly arrived from Tehran or Manila, may barely know the geography; the two may have no language in common. Not all rides are completed without friction, but an amazing number are, some of them with laughter. In between, of course, some passengers are cheated and some cabdrivers are mugged.
    In Tehran I spent weeks unraveling the rules for fares and pickups in the multiple-passenger taxi system that was a major source of irritation for foreigners, but I still found myself running into new rules applying to such issues as large bundles or traveling companions. In the end I discovered a solution for situations of ambiguity that let me gracefully pay the small extra amount that was possibly illegitimate without brooding on it all day. If the driver asked for an additional payment that went beyond the rules as I knew them, I would pay it, saying to him, “ Halalet basheh ,” “Let it be permitted to you,” a formula meaning that whatever had been taken was religiously permitted and would not be counted as theft. It meant I would not stand up and denounce the offender on the day of judgment. It was the perfect solution: if the driver was indeed trying to cheat me, he would laugh and I would have gotten a bit of my own back; if he was innocent, he would protest. Either way, I would know the rule for next time; either way, I went on without feeling ripped off. I didn’t have all the moves, but I had one that would do.
    One of the oddities of American society today is that standards and regulations have changed and multiplied to the point where no one is in compliance with all of them. Even those who have never paid a household worker without withholding taxes or been present where marijuana was being smoked have driven a little over the fifty-five-mile-per-hour limit. Even those who are careful to express emerging forms of respect may be haunted by words or behavior from the already obsolete understandings of a decade ago. Of course faculty date their students, an administrator at Amherst said, how else can they find someone to marry? Even those who try to follow all the tax regulations hesitate to try to learn them, so they become dependent on some accountant’s asking the relevant questions.
    This is not a matter of accepting the wish to comply for the deed and doing better next time. No one says, halalet basheh . As a result, we have a society in which virtually everyone is vulnerable to the tyrannies of selective enforcement, and an IRS audit or a passing patrol car makes the most conscientious citizen nervous. Day after day, we are forced to play without knowing the rules in situations where small mistakes cannot be laughed off or used for further learning. One effect is to discourage participation. Another is to undermine integrity, which cannot easily flow from intention to performance. We play Wonderland croquet, and the Queen of Hearts is waiting to say, “Off with her head.” This particular kind of ambiguity may or may not trigger the development of schizophrenia in the organically vulnerable, but it clearly inhibits learning.
    The new styles of dancing were developed at the peripheries of society, among those for whom inclusion is problematic—African Americans, the young, and the poor. Reflecting our common dilemmas, they go on to offer a model that includes