Peripheral Visions

moved tentatively. This is probably as independent-minded a group of professionals as one would be likely to find, but they do echo trends in the culture of the arts. We are not in a period when being an artist implies a lot of marijuana or absinthe. In this crowd no one even openly smoked cigarettes, there was talk of aerobic exercise and of the dangers of food additives, and everyone seemed to work very hard and to be rather self-contained, cautious about emotional involvements that would consume precious time and energy. One person passed through, found himself unable to work in the long hours alone, made an effort to involve others, then departed. Watching novelist after painter after composer finding the way into this evanescent community, working out the local conventions, I was struck by how easily we met and how quickly we became attached to one another. Yet on the evenings when colonists presented their work, I was startled by the weird and wonderful ways of seeing the world hidden behind the affable faces around the dinner tables.
    The easiest way to live in a strange community is to become a member of a household, often taking on a local identity by formal adoption and the granting of a name. In Israel, a society adept at absorbing new immigrants, the first question I was asked when I told people that I was going to stay to complete my senior year in high school was whether I had taken a Hebrew name, so of course I did so. Called Galila, I went to stay with a German Jewish family with three children, the oldest a girl of my age, with whom I shared a bedroom, the other two young enough not to know English, ideal teachers. Certainly I was unusual—there were not many sixteen-year-old gentile girls on their own in Jerusalem—but I had the benefit of the many conventions for dealing with new Jewish immigrants and with “the stranger within the gates.” The absorption of immigrants is such a constant preoccupation in Israel that it is recognized as a major function even of military training.
    In Iran, I went with Vanni to live for a while in a large traditional household. The first thing the mother did was take me to the bazaar to buy cotton print fabric for an appropriate chador, since the black veil I arrived with was too urban. She was prepared—indeed determined—to correct my etiquette and make sure that as a member of her household I behaved modestly. When I said good-bye I spoke the appropriate words and invited her and all her family to come and stay with me in Tehran, but I wondered if I could possibly welcome even one of them as they had welcomed the two of us.
    Every household or society has some capacity to make a place for new arrivals, if only for the newborn. Most can absorb some other kinds of immigrants. Often new relationships are modeled on biological ones through various kinds of adoption. Sometimes anthropologists forget that they have not gotten unique access to a fixed system: the flexibility had to be there for them to take advantage of. Kinship may seem to be a fixed way of organizing society, with relationships biologically determined, but this is partly illusion—it looks that way to outsiders, especially those who have grown up in nuclear family households with only the most tenuous awareness of other kinship ties, but everywhere there is some flexibility so that outsiders can somehow be tucked in.
    Among the San, because there is only a very small supply of names in use, an outsider can work with the coincidence of names to establish relationships. The anthropologist’s choice of a name sets up ties. If she meets a man whose mother’s name is the same as the name she has adopted, she might call him son for purposes of play or persuasion.
    In the Philippines, one Spanish custom that has been taken up with enthusiasm is compadrazgo : at significant ritual initiations, like baptism and marriage, everyone acquires godparents who have obligations to the godchild but are also now linked to the biological parents and to each other as compadre and comadre , co-father and co-mother. A whole new and powerful kinlike network can be constructed by recruiting ritual kin for the several children of a family, useful for politics or business. And indeed it is not necessary to wait for a ritual: I have been addressed as kumare (comadre) by analogy, felt flattered by it, and known it would have a cost. Anthropologists who are adopted into the communities they visit find that if they try to