Full Circles, Overlapping Lives: Culture and Generation in Transition Hardcover - 2000

Excerpt

Chapter 1


We live with strangers. Those we love most, with whom we share a shelter, a table, a bed, remain mysterious. Wherever lives overlap and flow together, there are depths of unknowing. Parents and children, partners, siblings, and friends repeatedly surprise us, revealing the need to learn where we are most at home. We even surprise ourselves in our own becoming, moving through the cycles of our lives. There is strangeness hidden in the familiar.

At the same time there is familiarity hidden in the strange. We can look with curiosity and respect at the faces of men and women we have never met. Learning to recognize these strangers with whom we share an increasingly crowded and interdependent world, we can imagine ourselves joined in a single family, perhaps by a marriage between adventurous grandchildren.

"I loved him, but I couldn't really know him. So I learned to stop and think before I let myself get all upset." This was my sister Nora, who had lived in Thailand with a Thai partner. "Then, when I married an American, I found I had to keep on the same way." Living with someone from another culture had taught her not to expect to understand her husband. Strangeness and love are not contradictory; to live at peace we need new ways of understanding these two realms, each one embedded in the other.

Strangers marry strangers, whether they have been playmates for years or never meet before the wedding day. They continue to surprise each other through the evolutions of love and the growth of affection. Lovers, gay and straight, begin in strangeness and often, for the zest of it, find ways to increase their differences.

Children arrive like aliens from outer space, their needs and feelings inaccessible, sharing no common language, yet for all their strangeness we greet them with love. Traditionally, the strangeness of infants has been understood as temporary, the strangeness of incomplete beings who are expected to become predictable and comprehensible. This expectation has eased the transition from generation to generation, the passing on of knowledge and responsibility, on which every human society depends. Yet the gap between parent and child, like the gap between partners, is not left behind with the passage of time. Today, in a world of rapid change, it is increasing, shifting into new rhythms still to be explored.

I have learned to work on the assumption that my daughter and I were born in different countries-not according to our passports but because our country has changed, making me an immigrant from the past. But she, in her twenties, has the same comment about today's teenagers: they have grown up in a different country from hers. She cannot look inward, drawing on memory to understand them, but must learn from them, warned only by her own wry memories of the incomprehensibility of adults.

Differences of age and sex crosscut all human lives with the experience of Otherness, that which is different, alien, mysterious. These differences, occurring within the household, offer a chance to learn about strangeness in a familiar setting, so we can say with Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker: "Oh, strangers aren't so strange to me. I've known them all my life." In a world where waves of strangeness rise or enter constantly, these are important lessons to learn. When we encounter new immigrants from other faiths and continents, we can reassure ourselves by remembering the utter strangeness that coexists with love within every household. We can even learn to look at the sun or the moon, a tree or a snail or a forest pool with affinity and greeting, then look again and acknowledge their strangeness.

When you pass strangers on the street, the unfamiliar faces blur. When you let your lives touch and make the effort of asking questions and listening to the stories they tell, you discover the intricate patterns of their differences and, at the same time, the underlying themes that all members of our species have in common.

I have tried in this book to suggest a way of thinking about differences by setting the heightened differences between generations, produced by social change, alongside other kinds of differences, all in stories and fragments of stories, lives in motion. The strangeness of others is most off-putting when it is experienced as static, most approachable when it is set within a narrative of continuing development. The people in this book, named and unnamed, will strike the reader as both strange and familiar, individuals growing through their own eras of knowing and unknowing, as they work out courses through an unknown landscape, the changing shapes of lives.

For nearly a decade I have taught a course at George Mason University on the way lives differ from culture to culture, using autobiography and ethnographic life history. There I get a cosmopolitan medley of students, from eighteen-year-olds to those returning to school at midlife for a second career and sixty- and seventy-year-olds pursuing learning in retirement. Reading the papers my students write, stories drawn from their own lives and from the interviews they conduct, I have had the privilege of moving through multiple lives. In the spring semester of 1996, I was invited to Atlanta to teach a version of my life history course at Spelman, a historically black women's college. During the planning for my visit, however, I balked at the probable makeup of my class, the lack of a kind of diversity I needed, that would allow members of the class to learn from one another. What I balked at was not that all the students would be female or "of color" but that they all would be at the same stage in their lives. Instead of worrying about whether I was the only white person in the room, I was worried that everyone else there would be less than half my age. Since I would be teaching about life histories, I wanted students who had experienced aging and childbearing, but I had another concern as well. I wanted to use differences of age within the group to set the stage for learning from one another and opening up further differences within the group, even as we read life histories from other times and cultures.



I went to George Mason University, and later to Spelman College, to have the experience of teaching in unfamiliar regions and kinds of institutions. Mason is a newcomer to Virginia's state university System. Located in Northern Virginia, just outside the District of Columbia, where more and more immigrant groups have come to live, it attracts a wide variety of students-Dominicans and Somalis, Cambodians and Iranians-echoing the upheavals of recent history. Washington was a small town until World War II, when it became a community of migrants within America, and it is still full of transients passing through or recently returned from service overseas. The Mason campus is ringed with parking lots, and the student center is reminiscent of a mall, drawing in a population on the move.

Spelman, by contrast, represents over a century of tradition. It is an elite liberal arts college, one of a cluster of historically black institutions in Atlanta that affirm the commonalities of the African American community while at the same time providing a sheltered place to explore the variety within that community. Spelman's whole existence is a reminder of the values and dilemmas of difference that must be addressed in an interdependent world.

I first visited Spelman a decade ago, when a close friend, Johnnetta Cole, became its first black female president. I wrote about her in Composing a Life, using a series of conversations with four friends to explore the creativity of how women and men increasingly live, without scripts or blueprints, composing and learning along the way.

Spelman fits a model familiar to anyone who has explored American education, the private liberal arts college, designed to select promising young people after high school, give them both depth and polish, and prepare them to go out and live their adult lives, often with a stop off in graduate school. Spelman has struggled to give its students confidence as women and as African Americans, to help them claim and value their own variety and draw on the models and achievements of people of color in other countries and especially throughout the African diaspora.

Often white Americans lack a sense of the diversity within the black community, and becoming aware of that diversity with curiosity and respect is a first step into familiarity. Those who repeat the old alibi "They all look the same, you can't tell them apart" often leap to conclusions about an entire community from a single anecdote or the remarks of one person, assuming other kinds of homogeneity, economic, social, or political. No wonder the encounter feels uncomfortable-natural human groups are not monolithic, and the illusion of uniformity is daunting to outsiders. At the same time one of the great burdens on members of any minority in an integrated setting is the expectation that they will be interchangeable, with an implied obligation to represent the group.

There is a more subtle dynamic than similarity when groups withdraw from the majority and hang out together, and this is the pleasure of differing among themselves. It is true that social scientists can predict much of what each of us is likely to think or do from a set of descriptors-age, gender, class, ethnicity, and background-but there is a core that is distinctive and individual for every person. That core of individuality shines out when I am with others who are similar but not the same. Ironically, we seek out similarity to discover and celebrate uniqueness. In any group that has been subject to prejudice and stereotyping, members need to look newly and clearly not only at themselves but also at one another, finding not only strength but also variety.

There is a bewildering array of genetic and cultural diversity on the Spelman campus. Although most Africans brought to the Americas as slaves came from West Africa, Africa is the seedbed of all human diversity, including to this day a wide range of ecological adaptations and traditions as well as different physical types, from the smallest stature to the tallest, from the very thin and long boned to the most ample of curves, across a range of coloration. The ancient diversity of the continent has been amplified in the diaspora by the reunion with other human strains long dispersed to Europe and Asia and the Americas.

No human skin is either truly black or truly white, but some of these women are so dark that their skin almost matches their graduation robes, while some come closer to the white dresses beneath them. Here, where social convention defines almost everyone as belonging to one "race," the students play with their differences from one another and enhance them by their choices, using variations of dialect and pronunciation to set different moods. It has been important to learn not only that black is beautiful but that there is a whole spectrum of African American beauty. The poet Langston Hughes saw it and found it sweet: chocolate, brown sugar, caramel, peach.



I went to George Mason University, and later to Spelman College, to have the experience of teaching in unfamiliar regions and kinds of institutions. Mason is a newcomer to Virginia's state university System. Located in Northern Virginia, just outside the District of Columbia, where more and more immigrant groups have come to live, it attracts a wide variety of students-Dominicans and Somalis, Cambodians and Iranians-echoing the upheavals of recent history. Washington was a small town until World War II, when it became a community of migrants within America, and it is still full of transients passing through or recently returned from service overseas. The Mason campus is ringed with parking lots, and the student center is reminiscent of a mall, drawing in a population on the move.

Spelman, by contrast, represents over a century of tradition. It is an elite liberal arts college, one of a cluster of historically black institutions in Atlanta that affirm the commonalities of the African American community while at the same time providing a sheltered place to explore the variety within that community. Spelman's whole existence is a reminder of the values and dilemmas of difference that must be addressed in an interdependent world.

I first visited Spelman a decade ago, when a close friend, Johnnetta Cole, became its first black female president. I wrote about her in Composing a Life, using a series of conversations with four friends to explore the creativity of how women and men increasingly live, without scripts or blueprints, composing and learning along the way.

Spelman fits a model familiar to anyone who has explored American education, the private liberal arts college, designed to select promising young people after high school, give them both depth and polish, and prepare them to go out and live their adult lives, often with a stop off in graduate school. Spelman has struggled to give its students confidence as women and as African Americans, to help them claim and value their own variety and draw on the models and achievements of people of color in other countries and especially throughout the African diaspora.

Often white Americans lack a sense of the diversity within the black community, and becoming aware of that diversity with curiosity and respect is a first step into familiarity. Those who repeat the old alibi "They all look the same, you can't tell them apart" often leap to conclusions about an entire community from a single anecdote or the remarks of one person, assuming other kinds of homogeneity, economic, social, or political. No wonder the encounter feels uncomfortable-natural human groups are not monolithic, and the illusion of uniformity is daunting to outsiders. At the same time one of the great burdens on members of any minority in an integrated setting is the expectation that they will be interchangeable, with an implied obligation to represent the group.

There is a more subtle dynamic than similarity when groups withdraw from the majority and hang out together, and this is the pleasure of differing among themselves. It is true that social scientists can predict much of what each of us is likely to think or do from a set of descriptors-age, gender, class, ethnicity, and background-but there is a core that is distinctive and individual for every person. That core of individuality shines out when I am with others who are similar but not the same. Ironically, we seek out similarity to discover and celebrate uniqueness. In any group that has been subject to prejudice and stereotyping, members need to look newly and clearly not only at themselves but also at one another, finding not only strength but also variety.

There is a bewildering array of genetic and cultural diversity on the Spelman campus. Although most Africans brought to the Americas as slaves came from West Africa, Africa is the seedbed of all human diversity, including to this day a wide range of ecological adaptations and traditions as well as different physical types, from the smallest stature to the tallest, from the very thin and long boned to the most ample of curves, across a range of coloration. The ancient diversity of the continent has been amplified in the diaspora by the reunion with other human strains long dispersed to Europe and Asia and the Americas.

No human skin is either truly black or truly white, but some of these women are so dark that their skin almost matches their graduation robes, while some come closer to the white dresses beneath them. Here, where social convention defines almost everyone as belonging to one "race," the students play with their differences from one another and enhance them by their choices, using variations of dialect and pronunciation to set different moods. It has been important to learn not only that black is beautiful but that there is a whole spectrum of African American beauty. The poet Langston Hughes saw it and found it sweet: chocolate, brown sugar, caramel, peach.



Curiosity and respect. We all fall short in these disciplines. I like to go into unfamiliar contexts and watch and listen, but I cannot attend at that depth all the time. No one can. In the same way, I cannot discipline myself, either spiritually or professionally, to look with wonder at every person on a bus, saying, This is my sister or my brother who is also profoundly different, trying to understand the complex mix of stress and contentment, estrangement and kindness in the faces. Even in the classroom, where I often have more students than I should in courses designed as seminars, some of the faces blur. We have become accustomed to hearing about culture shock, but it is also useful to think in terms of culture fatigue. I feel it too and treasure solitude. The familiar is comforting. It is easy to understand the temptation to blur one's eyes and work with stereotypes, to put aside the effort of response and recognition.

We carry with us from the far past, when such things often made for survival, the potential for rage and competition, the habit of suspicion and dislike of the unfamiliar. Certainly the capacities to learn and to create, the need to love and to be loved, are deeply rooted in human biology, but each of these has built into it an affirmation of the known that stands ready to reject what is new and strange. Social convention smooths over differences, providing scripts and costumes that allow us to meet one another in familiar roles, to say what we are expected to say and to anticipate the responses of others, but some of this harmony is illusory. Freedom reveals the underlying differences and allows them to develop. Particularly today, familiar gender roles and stages of the life cycle are shifting, so that it is no longer possible in families to rely on assumptions about the behavior of a son or a mother, a twelve-year-old or a fifty-two-year-old. A rapidly changing world requires improvisation as we find ourselves onstage without a script, perhaps with grace, perhaps in awkwardness and anger.

Over time, as human numbers have increased, we have arrived at a necessity for interdependence and empathy that goes beyond any selected for during evolution. Today the challenge is to learn and affirm new kinds of recognition both within the species and outside it. We cannot cure our estrangements and the suspicion they bring with them by ignoring difference or by imposing similarity. Somehow we must find the wisdom to live together in peace, cherishing a new generation of strangers. The homes in which we raise our children are parts of a single home we all share. Home does not refer now only to a household; it is a word that can be extended to a landscape or a nation or the planet we inhabit, any one of which could be turned into a wasteland. Crowded together and struggling to survive, we risk growing to depend more and more on ancient biological impulses to dominate and to react to the unfamiliar with fight or flight, instead of that other ancient impulse, curiosity.

My sister gained insight into strangeness at home by living abroad, but Americans do not need to travel abroad or even to walk out the front door to find themselves struggling to balance the impulse to reject and the willingness to learn. Diversity is native to every household and countryside. Home is the heartland of strangeness; perhaps, then, we can learn to think of home as the best place to learn to live with strangers.

Prejudice and stereotyping are ways of making intellectual and emotional sense of a puzzling world, easy solutions to the challenges of difference. They offer the assertion of commonality with one group, denying the differences that are there, and the definition of another group as inimical and Other. When a diverse community is caught up in turmoil and uncertainty, as Yugoslavia was with the breakdown of the Eastern bloc, tribalism is the great simplifier. Serbs and Bosmans and Croats, who had lived at peace, simplified a confusing world by projecting every threat onto the other groups, hoping that ethnic cleansing could create a home that was orderly and intelligible.

Similarly, Americans often deny the strangeness within the household by projecting its threat outside the walls, outside the town limits, across national borders. Statistics show, however, that danger lies inside the boundaries: within the secrecies of family life or in the crimes of neighbor against neighbor, black on black or white on white. Again and again we hear about the surprise and shock of family members and neighbors, unaware of living side by side with potential violence. We deny the ordinary violence between young and old, male and female, and fantasize instead about supercriminals and abductions by extraterrestrials.

Even as we deny the deep unknowing of the familiar, all boundaries are increasingly permeable to the unfamiliar, which enters, day after day, in news and music from around the world, through speakers and computers and televisions, and carried by the movements of peoples from place to place. The extreme example of trying to exclude all outside influences was the terrible bloodletting in Cambodia, but efforts to block immigration or to prevent schools from teaching about other cultures are expressions of the same impulse. The rise of fundamentalist movements in our day is, among other things, an effort to make behavior more predictable and orderly, to enforce a commandment not to grow or change or question.

Other kinds of rejection are less extreme but still costly. A lack of curiosity about new neighbors has often gone in both directions and been experienced as a lack of respect. We smell other people's cooking, find their garbage more offensive than our own, and take refuge in the suburbs, where differences of class and race and even age are sorted out by geography, as if into separate nations. When a new group enters a community, kinds of dissonance that have always existed may begin to be blamed on simple but deceptive concepts like race. A girl who would have achieved only average grades under any circumstances may become a bigoted adult if many of those who surpass her have a different color skin. A boy who might have been harassed for his expensive clothing whenever he walked into a working-class neighborhood will cherish a different anger if he is harassed in a foreign accent. No wonder we project differences outward.



There is a necessary counterpoint between accepting new encounters with the strange and acknowledging the intimate strangeness of the known. In Atlanta before the Summer Olympics were held there, the city worried about how to welcome visitors from all over the world-but at the same time it was forced to become more sensitive to differences already present between rich and poor, racial antagonisms, and the possibility of homegrown terrorism. Bridging the new South and the old, becoming steadily more cosmopolitan, the city offered a test case not for unity in diversity but for civility in diversity.

When I have lived abroad I have learned to be apprehensive when someone says, We've invited the Smiths-you'll like them, they are Americans too. When my daughter was young I learned not to say, You'll enjoy playing with Bobby, he's just your age. Just because someone shares some characteristic-has the same color skin, speaks the same language with the same accent, recalls the same kind of education-does not mean that she or he sees the world in the same way. Likeness does not meaning liking.

Yet we do use our similarities as links, and rely upon them. It can be painful to find that someone who seemed familiar and trustworthy has become a stranger-or has always been one behind the mask of familiarity and convention. Family members shock each other by revealing conversions or drug addictions, sudden violence or unsuspected talents and longings. Husbands or wives come home to discover that a spouse has packed and moved out; grandparents fall in love or take off on global travels; sons and daughters, claiming new sexual identities and preferences, inform their parents that now they have discovered who they really are. Because we deny the constant possibilities, we have few conventions to deal with them. The myth of mutual understanding transforms the evolutions of others into occasions for guilt-how could I not have known?-or rage.

We could instead learn to temper love like steel, with curiosity and respect, both softening and strengthening it. We could come to revel in how little we know of one another, harvesting insight, transferring it to other contexts. A New England couple, living and gardening in voluntary simplicity, once described to me the annual vacation they allow themselves, always to someplace new, carefully researched and studied in advance. Every day of their trip, they keep separate journals, and during the months that follow they read them aloud to each other, each discovering that what the other saw and noted was different and perhaps surmising differences of experience in familiar surroundings as well, to enrich the simplicities of home. For them this is a way of recycling the luxury of travel.

Travel can be used to open eyes to the mystery of what is close to home, as it did for the generation of Americans who served in the Peace Corps and brought home a new understanding of themselves and their own traditions. Often in my writing and teaching I use examples drawn from places that seem remote, from my years of living, as an anthropologist, in Iran or the Philippines or Israel, or from the research and writing of other anthropologists. But I have come to realize that this practice is deceptive unless I also propose the discovery of difference a single breath away. The exotic is fascinating, but my examples are no more than travelers' tales unless we use them to discover-and be enriched by-the strangeness that lies closer to home. It is a mistake to think travel is necessary in order to encounter the vivid heterogeneity of humanity, or, having encountered it, to reaffirm those things that unite all human beings more fundamentally than their individual and group diversity.

All of us live today at a crossroads where the most ancient of human paths converge. Parting and coming together is the story of our species, a small group that grew and slowly spread across Africa and around the planet, diverging and inventing different ways to survive in different environments. For millennia our species became more scattered, changing gradually so that pockets of population in different places diverged, both in the way they looked and in the skills and knowledge they passed on. But virtually as soon as this process of divergence began, the reunions also began, as groups long separated met, in either conflict or new learning.

In this time of accelerating convergence we have access to a greater range of what it means to be human than ever before, but the willingness to learn and to be changed is still fragile and vulnerable to fatigue and fear. It is this willingness that we need to conserve and foster above all. We need to evoke and support it in early childhood and even in the classroom. We need to affirm its continuing presence in the responsibilities of adulthood, and in the estrangements of dying. Above all, we need to understand how we can learn from one another.

Today lives move in new contours and follow unaccustomed rhythms. Their overlapping patterns offer challenges both to participation and to observation, the interwoven disciplines of curiosity and respect. The risk is that by denying so much of the strangeness we see close to home, we are caught off guard and meet it gracelessly, finding it inimical. Everyone has the chance to discover the patterns that order multiple ways of being human: through the arts, through the media, through conversations with the neighbors. At the same time one becomes aware through reflection of a more intimate diversity: within the self, now and across the life span, and within the household.

I went to Mason and then to Spelman to learn: above all, to learn more about myself. Learning, I become someone new. Now we need a new definition of the self- I am not what I know but what I am willing to learn. Mystery waits in the mirror. Curiosity and learning begin before breakfast. Growing, we move through worlds of difference, the cycles and circles of a life, fulfilled by overlapping with the lives of others.

Media reviews

Praise for Full Circles, Overlapping Lives

"Mary Catherine Bateson has examined lives across races and cultures and has produced a wise and beautiful book. Anyone--from parent to policy maker--who needs to know how human beings tick will be richly rewarded by what Bateson has thought through so carefully and presented so elegantly."
--Roger Wilkins, author of A Man's Life

"Provocative and surprising, Full Circles, Overlapping Lives has Mary Catherine Bateson's unique signature: her uncanny ability to find the strange in the familiar, the ordinary in  the exotic. With insight, grace, and generosity, Bateson witnesses the cross-generational    dialogue in a classroom at Spelman College where young African-American women and their elders search for meaning and understanding in each other's life stories."
--Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot, author of Respect: An Exploration

"With her customary wisdom and subtle wit, Mary Catherine Bateson helps us think about the great divide that we all live with but few discuss: the enormously different life experiences of members of different generations. Drawing on the deeply personal and self-revealing stories both of young women just starting out and of women who have lived long, varied lives, she takes us on a stirring journey through the wonder and challenge of life and self in our fast-changing world."
--Deborah Tannen, author of You Just Don't Understand

"A wonderfully knowing and engaging book by an anthropologist who has learned a lot from her students and tells us what it means to be an American--and how a nation's citizens vary in accordance with their age, their particular experiences."
--Robert Coles, James Agee Professor of Social Ethics, Harvard University