Peripheral Visions

do everything they would have done as a dutiful daughter or son there may be little freedom to circulate and little time for keeping notes. Yet even an assigned role in the system does not eliminate uncertainty about appropriate behavior—after all, those who claim these roles by right of birth vary as well. Any viable culture must deal with at least some kinds of difference, only occasionally extruding someone who cannot be absorbed. Most societies do far better than the industrial West, for instance, at finding places for those who are retarded or mentally ill.
    There is a section in the Passover Haggada that explores the Biblical injunction to explain the exodus from Egypt to “thy son,” pointing out that the next generation is not all the same, varying in age and character and (the text omits this) gender. Each child is different from the others, and the same child will be different from year to year, so the ritual presents a series of examples. The first son—the “wise” son—asks, “What are the testimonies, statutes, and judgments which the Lord our God hath commanded you?” The phrasing of the question implies that this son has already studied and understands the richness and complexity of the tradition he is asking about. He asks with considerable maturity, as a child approaching full participation, and the answer he is given, one rather obscure detail of the Passover regulations, evokes by example the whole context of study. The second son is described as wicked or boorish. He is common enough in modern society, rejecting what he sees as meaningless ritual, saying, So what? “What is this to you?” He phrases his question as a nonparticipant, indeed as a nonbeliever, and his father answers in terms that exclude him, “It is because of what the Lord did for me when I went forth from Egypt.” Here we are, in a text that goes back two thousand years, imagining a son who neither has learned the tradition of his community nor desires to be a participant—a dropout, in fact.
    There are two more sons, one who is innocent (often translated “simple”) and who receives a simple answer, and one who doesn’t even know enough to ask, but is told nonetheless. This fourth son is perhaps an infant, addressed as part of the ritual with information he cannot yet decipher, like little Becky solemnly told again and again that the apple is red. Everyone at the table has been in the position of the fourth son, and everyone is in some sense invited to consider each of the other roles and to strive for the first, the role of the wise and understanding (and studious) son.
    At ordinary family meals, in work and play as well as in rituals, the need to sort out who is included and who is excluded is perennial, but there is still ambiguity. In most household activities there is a place for those who are not expert. Even in the most specialized workplaces, in operating rooms and on flight decks, there are differences in kind and degree of expertise. Any human community must find ways to include some who are highly intelligent, some who even as adults barely understand the rules of the culture, and some who rebel or deviate. One of the greatest mistakes made by social scientists is overstating the degree of sameness—of homogeneity—needed for a society to function. Some degree of heterogeneity, if only of age and sex, is necessarily allowed for, and many societies go on to provide niches for visionaries and schizophrenics, the ill and the handicapped, foreigners and visitors.
    In societies that do not rely on schooling to educate the young, most learning occurs through participation; it must be true therefore that some participation is possible without knowing the whole complex set of rules. Because we associate learning with schooling, we tend to think of learning as taking place in specialized settings where there is a very clear distinction between a teacher, who knows, and students, who do not, moving through the system in approximately uniform age cohorts and emerging to full participation (commencement) after they have achieved a uniform level of competence. It is on the projected model of this kind of homogeneous adult competence that ethnographers seek out as informants in the field “fully enculturated adults,” those paragons who are able to judge whether sentences are grammatical or to tell whether a given marriage is appropriate. The fact that few adults fit this model in our own society has become