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I put quite extended statements by two of the women into the second chapter. In most of the book the life histories are partial and interwoven, but I felt that these two longer stories gave a particular kind of flavor, and bracketed the cultural differences between the two groups. One was from the oldest woman in the group, a woman named Marymal Dryden, talking about her first marriage and about the decision to leave that marriage. She's 70 now; when she left that marriage she already had two small children. Leaving was an act of considerable courage, partly inspired by the painting of a poor black woman sharecropper, whereas she said she saw herself as being drawn into a very comfortable but superficial middle-class life, and she left. That to me is an example of a creative act. Next to that is the story of a woman undergraduate, talking about her issues around bisexuality and the relationship she had with another girl as a high school student. The process of self-discovery was involved for both of these women. And both are fine story-tellers too.

EDGE: Let's go back and talk about how you got to the place where you began researching this project.

BATESON: I grew up in an anthropological family — both of my parents, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, were anthropologists. But I had no intention of being an anthropologist myself, although as a child I was always encouraged in being an observer as well as a participant. I had a lot of experience of moving back and forth between different households, where I was told to follow the rules of the household instead of saying, at home we do things differently. When I was 16 I went with my mother on a visit to Israel and decided to live there for a year. I learned Hebrew so I could enter a regular high school, and fell in love with the language and with the notion that when you move into a different language you are moving into a different way of thinking, acquiring a whole new world along with a new language. There's a lot of interest today in the biological potential for language, that most human beings have in common, but I am interested in the potential for cultural and individual distinctiveness that comes out of our biology and also underlies our creativity.

At the end of that year, when I went off to college, I had decided that what I wanted to study was linguistics, and that linguistics would allow me to explore this insight. Nobody had told me that this way of looking at languages was developed by anthropological linguists — people like Sapir and Whorf — and I happily chugged along, getting started in linguistics, and then realized that what I was doing was part of anthropology. In the meantime linguistics was going off into much more formalized fields that were not my primary interest. I was interested in how people communicate with each other, and the diversities among groups and how these are bridged. So when my husband and I went for a two-year stint in the Philippines I got a teaching job at a university in Manila that allowed me to teach some linguistics and some cultural anthropology, and that let me retool as a cultural anthropologist. Since then I've defined myself as a cultural anthropologist with a particular interest in patterns of communication, symbols, ways of seeing the world.


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