Peripheral Visions

Christian ideas of the church as the bride of Christ. Whatever the arguments, they had the effect of preserving two extraordinary bodies of poetry and making sure that the Biblical canon included a record of sexual passion and of the alienation of old age, experiences that bridge many cultural differences. Their inclusion in the Bible, along with many less than edifying historical narratives, has meant that in tens of thousands of households children growing up with strictly censored reading could pass from one to another the guidelines to a somewhat broader education. The great poem in the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven,” might even be taken as a sort of rough index to a canon of human experience, every chapter of which is interpreted differently in different times and places, and some of which are excluded or denied. Sex. Birth. Dying.
    We possess after all the essential basis of commonality. Of all the texts that must be read to understand the human condition, the body is the most eloquent, for we read in all its stages and transitions a pattern that connects all human communities as well as differences that divide. People in different eras and places have read it differently, or made every effort to deny access to parts of the story, to its alternate readings, or to the wider learning that flows from it, so it becomes the justification for mutual suspicion and for alienation from the natural world.
    The Bible can serve another purpose today that is equally likely to be obscured, which is to provide contact with a different and alien culture. Damavand College, where I taught for a time in Iran, was derived from Presbyterian mission schools, and although it was formally nonsectarian its requirements might have been seen as preparations for evangelization. The basic concept of the core curriculum came from the Great Books curriculum of Robert Maynard Hutchins, with certain key changes. On the one hand, a set of Iranian and Islamic Great Books had been added. To balance this, the list had been trimmed down to reflect only one side of the Western tradition, the side that leads from Plato through Augustine and up to Pascal. The other side, which winds its way from Aristotle through Aquinas, was scanted, and the Great Books of natural science were removed. Science was represented by a single required course in biology; social science was represented by one course in anthropology and a variety of electives. The planners had removed many of the great debates of Western civilization that keep us thinking, but they had replaced them with the encounter of two cultures. The total had to be modest, for except in Islamic and Iranian subjects the students were reading in English, a second language for them.
    This curriculum gave me a rich reserve of case material for anthropology, for instead of presenting the classics as evidence of continuity in Western civilization, I could present them as evidence of the human range of variation. The Book of Ruth, so often read as a testimony of love and fidelity, proposes the idea of marriage not between a man and a woman but between a family and a woman, including the custom of the levirate, giving a widow to some other male in the husband’s clan to make a child in his name. In my classroom, the Greek polis illustrated not the various forms of government we know today but forms of government in face-to-face communities, tribal warfare, the overlay of patrilineal patterns upon matriliny. Text after text provided a context for obliquely discussing the institution of monarchy in a setting where explicit discussion of the Pahlavi dynasty and its doings was closely monitored. When students read the Gospels as texts describing Middle Eastern culture patterns, they could see them not as the foundations of foreign—Western and Christian—traditions but as local, acted out in contemporary behavior. At an Iranian dinner party, the room always has a high and a low end, and the appropriately modest guest will seat himself at the bottom of the room until the host calls him, Come up beside me…just as Jesus advised.
    Setting material about other cultures in the context of the life cycle also makes empathy easier, yet we do not read the texts of the human life cycle directly, just as we cannot read written texts from the past as their writers intended, for experience is always filtered through previous experience, and