Peripheral Visions

least four dimensions: adults and children, females and males, Iranians and Americans, affluent urbanites and villagers, with differences of language and religion falling along the same cleavages. We were joined in the performance of a ritual, in spite of the fact that we did not share a common script or common doctrines. What was happening had different meanings to each of us. The contrasts were as great between the sophisticated urban people and the villagers, who were all nominally Muslims and Iranians, as between the American outsiders and our hosts. Men and women, nominally sharing the same culture, must bridge comparable gaps, yet for better or worse they have always done so, for all human beings live with strangers.
    Occasions like this encounter in a winter garden provide the frameworks for future learning. Both on the scene and in memory, similarities are tasted and compared. Vanni was learning something about my stance that would affect her play with neighbor children in the alley behind our house. By now she has forgotten that day, but she would have remembered it over the next few months, and other experiences would have been matched with it and sorted out in her learning. She was going through the process of immersion in a second culture early in her learning of a first and having to adapt not only to what adults can explain but also to things for which they have no words. Children cope superbly where anthropologists must grope. I believe that participant observation is more than a research methodology. It is a way of being, especially suited to a world of change. A society of many traditions and cultures can be a school of life. Even as a two-year-old in that scene, Vanni had to improvise not one but multiple roles.
    The quality of improvisation characterizes more and more lives today, lived in uncertainty, full of the inklings of alternatives. In a rapidly changing and interdependent world, single models are less likely to be viable and plans more likely to go awry. The effort to combine multiple models risks the disasters of conflict and runaway misunderstanding, but the effort to adhere blindly to some traditional model for a life risks disaster not only for the person who follows it but for the entire system in which he or she is embedded, indeed for all the other living systems with which that life is linked.
    Adaptation comes out of encounters with novelty that may seem chaotic. In trying to adapt, we may need to deviate from cherished values, behaving in ways we have barely glimpsed, seizing on fragmentary clues. The improvisatory artist cannot be sure whether a given improvisation will stand as a work of art or be rejected as an aberration. Trusted habits of attention and perception may be acting as blinders. Resources we have relied on to shape our lives may turn out to be dangerous addictions or spin into new shapes as the earliest versions of emerging patterns. Essential themes are not clearly marked but rather visible only out of the corner of the eye.
    Under the pressure of the moment, needing to respond, it is easy to be captured by some central point of focus. A dead sheep. The spilling of blood and its impact on a small child. But there is always more in any episode, much of it at the very edge of awareness, most of it in flux, the relationships within any cultural tradition between old and new barely visible.
    This same ambiguity sets new tasks for parents and teachers. Instead of passing on hallowed certainties and maintaining the status quo, they must make childhood an open-ended introduction to a process of continual change in which self-observation can become the best of teachers. If we knew the future of a particular child, we might be able to prepare that child with all the necessary skills and attitudes, and we might say at a given moment that the preparation is completed and it is time for real life to commence. That situation, however, is long gone, if indeed it ever existed. Rarely is it possible to study all the instructions to a game before beginning to play, or to memorize the manual before turning on the computer. The excitement of improvisation lies not only in the risk involved but in the new ideas, as heady as the adrenaline of performance, that seem to come from nowhere. When the necessary tasks of learning cannot be completed in a portion of the life cycle set aside for them, they have to join life’s other tasks and be done concurrently. We can carry on the process