THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 31, 1994 TAG: 9407270332
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JUNE ARNEY
LENGTH: Medium: 79 lines
PERIPHERAL VISIONS
Learning Along the Way
MARY CATHERINE BATESON
HarperCollins. 243 pp. $23.
THE SETTING IS a Persian garden gone bleak from winter; all leafless fruit trees and dirty snow beneath a leaden sky. Here a sheep receives a drink of water just before a gardener slits its throat in religious sacrifice.
In this garden author Mary Catherine Bateson first confronts her dual role as field anthropologist and mother. She is there as an observer of another culture but also as a teacher to her 2-year-old daughter. The product of her reflections leads to Peripheral Visions: Learning Along the Way - a book that takes us on an odyssey to the Philippines, Iran and Israel as Bateson pulls us into her vision of education and learning.
Peripheral Visions is a collection of stories and epiphanies across a lifetime. It offers us a new way to think about thought - a chance to re-create ourselves; a chance to break paradigms.
Bateson, daughter of anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson and author of With a Daughter's Eye, Our Own Metaphor and Composing A Life, was schooled at Radcliffe and Harvard and now teaches at George Mason University in Northern Virginia.
She is a trained observer of nuance whose realizations in the garden that morning in 1972 forever altered her understanding of how people learn.
``What I tried to do that day, stringing together elements of previous knowledge, attending to catch every possible cue and exploring different translations of the familiar was to improvise responsibly and with love,'' she writes.
Bateson's travels allow her to compare cultures with ease, for observations both simple and lasting. She challenges us to recognize that the key to learning is improvisation. She examines sex roles, parenting, the notion of self and rituals surrounding death. She shows us the depths of what we're taught by culture - that our very emotions are part of the programming.
``Meeting as strangers, we join in common occasions, making up our multiple roles as we go along - young and old, male and female, teacher and parent and lover - with all of science and history present in shadow form, partly illuminating and partly obscuring what is there to be learned,'' she writes.
The world views we learn offer both insight and blindness - usually at the same time.
``To get outside of the imprisoning framework of assumptions learned within a single tradition, habits of attention and interpretation need to be stretched and pulled and folded back upon themselves, life lived upon a Mobius strip.''
It is peripheral vision that helps us connect all that we learn, Bateson contends. Some things are like shooting stars - easier to see when observed out of the corner of an eye, she tells us.
Bateson tackles such philosophical puzzles as how experiences take on meaning with ease through alluring anecdotes. A tale she dictated to her mother as a child tells of a dreary kingdom where everything was gray until a princess taught people to see color.
She explains: ``I seem to have understood that for the individual color is an artifact of perception, but it didn't occur to me as a child that color is encountered through the understandings of a community.''
If there is a weakness in Bateson's writing it is that she is sometimes obscure, some of her passages muddled for meaning. The understanding comes later. And she has warned us of her plan early in the book: ``The process of spiraling through memory to weave connection out of incident is basic to learning, so that in this and perhaps other ways the text is demonstration of its subject matter.''
Ever so refreshing is Bateson's notion of learning as a lifelong process - one that societies should celebrate and reward. MEMO: June Arney is a staff writer. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket design and illustration by
ROBERTO DE VICQ DE CUMPTICH
by CNB