Peripheral Visions

always interpreted in cultural terms. It is only occasionally that we are reminded of how indirect most experience is. And it is even more rarely that we are reminded to accept responsibility for the way experience is constructed.
    Participation in interactions in which codes are not fully shared is not the exception but the rule, but life goes on. Theories of human social behavior and adaptation that obscure how often communication is communication across difference are like descriptions of the bumblebee, declared by the aeronautical engineer to be unable to fly. Everybody speaks a slightly different version of any “common” language (what linguists call an idiolect). In fact, one reason that it has become fashionable to think of language as innate is the observed diversity and irregularity of the speech environment children learn in—yet learn they do, less distressed by a variable reality than the linguist is by his theory. The visiting ethnographer, who feels like odd person out, projects a uniformity on the “natives” that complements her or his own sense of isolation. This is amplified by generalizations used in description, and further nuances are lost in popularization.
    When we think of communication and failures of communication across difference in this society, we tend to think in terms of social problems surrounded by rhetoric, particularly of racial or interethnic conflict. Gender, as described by Deborah Tannen and others, offers a slightly better model of communication across difference, contested but ongoing, since societies can split on ethnic lines but never entirely split on gender, in spite of misunderstandings. No solution to these issues is going to be perfect: there is too much accumulated discomfort, too many bruises, so progress alternates with phases of exaggeration and backlash.
    Much of the difference within any society has to do with where individuals are in the life cycle, which everywhere involves ongoing learning. Thus, an even better paradigm than gender might be those interactions between parent and child starting within weeks of birth, in which, although it is obvious that the child has not yet mastered the codes and patterns of the culture, the two learn how to sustain the joint performances that apparently provide contexts for learning. In the United States, different generations have matured under such different conditions that cross-generational communication is almost as problematic as interethnic communication. Notoriously, the grandchildren of immigrants are the ones who pull back from parental assimilation and seek their roots.
    The distinction between the process whereby children learn their “own” culture and the process of exposure to and influence by a foreign culture fades in a diverse society that depends on lifelong learning, in which every group is necessarily diverse. Thus, learning through the life cycle offers a model for studying internal diversity even in relatively stable and isolated communities. Participation often involves skills in coping with ambiguity. “Common sense” is often assumed to be truly common and to precede specialization, but it may be that “common sense” is mastered only in old age, when it is revered as “wisdom.”
    One conspicuous strand of contemporary debate attempts to inventory what every member of society needs to know, whether in curricula and proposed standard examinations, in such more fanciful forms as E. D. Hirsch, Jr.’s Cultural Literacy , or in the so-called canon. No one, it might be argued, is a full participant in American society who is not numerate and literate in English, does not know enough of the rules of baseball and civics to take sides, and so on and so forth, perhaps at very great length. Depending on how we define full participant , it may be essential to have read Melville or to understand the theory of relativity. It may also be necessary to know how to program a VCR or how to fill out an application for food stamps. No one, it might be argued, is a full participant in American society who does not have some basic knowledge of the histories and folkways of the diverse groups that compose that society. Some knowledge of Buddhism and some of Vodun. But are there any competent participants in American society? Young people must be prepared to feel like newly arrived immigrants through much of their lives. They need to know how to observe, how to learn, how to adapt, how to draw on other