Peripheral Visions

these mutilated images that redouble the Spanish preoccupation with suffering, about the limits of empathy across cultural lines. This cristo has drops of blood carved in the wood, running down its side.
    In the summer of 1967 I was living in the Marikina Valley, at the edge of the Manila metropolitan area. A village had grown up along a lane branching off the main road, substantial concrete-block houses with tin roofs trailing off into huts built of wood and thatched with palm. Walking back and forth along the street to the household I had joined for the period of my research, I was gradually meeting my new neighbors, greeting and stopping to chat in one of the many tiny housefront stores.
    Ordinary greetings in Pilipino, the national language of the Philippines, based on Tagalog, take the form of questions: “Where are you going?” “Where are you coming from?” As with the English “How are you?” however, which is not really a request for information, the polite answer, “Just over there,” can be edged into richer conversation. Curious about me, children gathered to stare, and other adults drifted into the conversation. I was trying to understand how the community and the city beyond were seen by the villagers. Long-term residents near the highway, whose rural community was slowly being engulfed in metropolitan expansion, still spoke in terms of living in a barrio . Those who had recently migrated from the country to work in the shoe factories of the Marikina Valley maintained the mores of the province but saw themselves in the context of the city.
    One day, in the late afternoon, when street life had resumed after siesta, I stopped off to talk to a neighbor named Ana, and as we sat chatting we were joined by an older woman I had not seen before, Aling Binang, who had recently returned from the country. Ana had heard of the death of Aling Binang’s twenty-year-old son some six months before and started to question her about it. After a while, Aling Binang began to weep, tears running one after another down her face, but the painful give-and-take of question and answer went on and on. I was careful not to interrupt the flow of a conversation both women seemed ready to prolong, but inside I felt outraged, very sorry for Aling Binang, and embarrassed by the tactlessness of Ana.
    That evening, I found that I had to untangle two different reactions, writing a description of the conversation and, carefully separated, an expression of my feelings as a member of another culture. Each person is calibrated by experience, almost like a measuring instrument for difference, so discomfort is informative and offers a starting point for new understanding. Indeed, what I had seen and heard would not have pushed me to reflection and generalization were it not for the urgency produced by the sense of difference.
    A few weeks later, a death occurred farther down the single street, where the houses were poorer and more rural in style and where my comings and goings had so far taken me less often. The family I was living with would be going to the paglalamay , “vigil” or “wake,” and they urged me to come. I did my best to prepare for my part, asking a series of questions about what would be happening, and got instructions on how to give an abuloy , a “contribution” of less than a dollar, to the young woman whose mother had died. We went together to the house, staying until late in the night.
    Again, I wrote two kinds of notes. One narrative describes the body laid out in its coffin, surrounded by funeraria lamps. The relatives had gathered, and neighbors were coming and going, expressing condolences and offering money and then standing and gossiping. Boys and girls were playing word games and flirting at the door, and gambling tables and barbecues were set up outside, with general merriment continuing through the warm night, noisily audible in the room where the body was laid out, overlapping and intermingling. The other kind of notes concerned my own feelings: my reluctance even to go to this house, “intruding” on the grief of others; my almost paralyzing embarrassment over the act of giving the abuloy . Living in the village without a husband and children, I was often grouped with younger unmarried people; on that evening this meant joining them in their noisy word games, laughing and imitating animal noises, the equivalent of Old MacDonald had a farm, moo-moo and cock-a-doodle-doo, only a few yards from a