Peripheral Visions

for active understanding.
    I am grateful to friends and acquaintances in each of the societies discussed here, who offered me their hospitality and the opportunity to try to understand their lives. It would not be possible or appropriate to list them all, and some appear only under disguised first names, but there are a few key people, some of them no longer living, and institutions that must be thanked explicitly.
    In Israel, I wish to express my gratitude to Phyllis Palgi and her husband, Yoel; Mordechai Kamarat; Joyce and Louis Miller; Ran Avrahami; and Aharon Shavit. Among institutions I am especially grateful to the Hebrew University Secondary School, where I was a student on my first trip; the Barcai Institute for Family and Marital Therapy, which arranged my first return; and the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, where I was a guest in 1989. Some of my work in Israel was funded by grants from the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation and the Foundation for Mental Research to the Institute for Intercultural Studies.
    In the Philippines I was associated with the Anthropology Department of the Ateneo de Manila University and the Institute for Philippine Culture directed by Frank Lynch, S.J., a scholar of Philippine values. My husband was associated there with the Harvard Advisory Group Interuniversity Program on Management Education, supported by the Ford Foundation. I also want to express gratitude to Jaime and Maribel Ongpin.
    In all discussions of Iranian culture, I am indebted to other members of a national character study group that met with me and Barkev for several years in the seventies, especially J. W. Clinton, H. Safavi, M. Soraya, and M. Tehranian. Some of these ideas have also been developed in discussions with other anthropologists working in Iran, especially William Beeman. In Iran I was associated with Damavand College and Reza Shah Kabir University, now no longer in existence. My husband taught at the Iran Center for Management Studies, and I am grateful to many of his colleagues there, especially Habib Ladjevardi. My initial work in Iran was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation. St. Paul’s Church in Tehran published my booklet on cross-cultural misunderstandings, for which I drew on discussions with members.
    Each of these experiences in faraway places was followed by a period of considering American society with new eyes, realizing that the same lessons were available here, for a rapidly changing society embracing many cultures and traditions—multiple systems of meaning—is a school of life. Since the Iranian revolution in 1979, I have been writing primarily about the United States. In the United States I have had the benefit of participating in several communities of thought and conversation, including the annual conferences of the Lindisfarne Fellowship, founded by William Irwin Thompson. I have found it especially useful when face-to-face meetings were supplemented by the virtual communities of computer conferencing, as they were in the Learning Conferences sponsored by Shell, Volvo, and AT&T and in the Global Business Network, established by Peter Schwartz and Stewart Brand.
    The intellectual roots of this book are in anthropology, and although I provide references below for a few specific works referred to, the habits of thought and observation of cultural anthropology are largely taken for granted. Every reader comes from a somewhat different background, however, and some of the familiar furniture of my own mind may be unfamiliar to others. This is particularly likely to be the case with two intellectual pioneers whose thinking I encountered so early in life that it has largely meshed with my own. Thus, I want to acknowledge here the contributions of my parents, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, whose ideas may appear sea-changed, having been synthesized over time with other ideas and influences. I have written elsewhere about both of them and nursed their intellectual legacies. Here I simply speak from what has become a part of me.
    This book owes a part of its genesis to reactions to my previous book. I knew when I wrote Composing a Life that most of its message was applicable to men as well as women. However, our society tends to regard women as exceptions to the full human condition and men as representative, so it was somewhat mischievous of me to write a book about human beings in the form of a book about women, and some men have complained that they gained valuable insights about