EDGE: CROSSING CULTURES

The other line of thought which is not unrelated, came about when I was working on Peripheral Visions, which emphasized learning in situations of cultural difference. You go to another country, you live with another group of people — they see the world differently and you learn not just to see it differently but also that there is more than one way to see it. You move up the logical ladder and think about thinking, in that context. It suddenly occurred to me that given the rate of cultural change, the cultural difference between generations offers an analog to cultural difference between groups from different countries.

That's the abstraction. Now I'll give you an example: I think of my daughter and myself as having been born in different countries. We were actually born 30 years apart in the United States of America. That means we were born into massively different cultural environments. What occurred to me, and this is something I've felt for a very long time — is that you can use what people learn in the home, especially from age differences, to deal with other kinds of diversity. After all, we learn more at home before we get to school than we learn in school. And we learn about the nature of learning, fundamental things about relationships, so that we need to be more systematic in using learning within the home for the insight it offers to understanding things outside the home. Including learning to learn, of course. So my argument is that one way to learn how to adapt if you go and live in Japan, or in Kenya, or in Venezuela, is to talk to your grandparents about how they've adapted to change in this country, and notice what it takes to communicate effectively across that generational gap. And then to realize that unfamiliar groups are different in the same kinds of ways, that you know how to bridge the gap, so that there's no need to be put off by the sense of strangeness — you can learn how to deal with strangeness in the home.

Okay, so this book is a sort of marriage of those two themes, that came out of my teaching at Spelman College, which is a historically black liberal arts college in Atlanta, in which I had traditional undergraduate students and a group of older women. We had in the same room two different generations of African-Americans who have experienced massive cultural change between those generations. The older women all grew up in the legally segregated deep south, and lived through the years of the civil rights movement, and the younger women were all born after it was over. So we had that historical and age difference to work with, along with the issue of communication between black and white, because I am white. For more perspective we could set other versions of the life cycle in different cultures next to our own. So that was a moment when the thinking that went into Full Circles really crystallized.

BATESON: The issue of people watching their children grow up culturally different from them? It's world-wide. And the issue of learning to live side by side with population groups that are racially and culturally and religiously different is world-wide. In Germany, for instance, not only are parents puzzled by their own children, they are puzzled by the influx of a Turkish work force who are Muslims. England now has a substantial black population — an Afro-Caribbean and an African population, so in addition to being puzzled sometimes by their own children, they are puzzled by their neighbors. It is inside the family that we can learn that it is possible to deeply love someone without complete understanding, so it should be possible to practice civility and respect without complete understanding.

You always have to talk about people starting from the specifics. And then you have to say, well, how does this specific story concerning a computer programmer from India, say, who has settled in Germany, encapsulate a truth that is relevant to a Greek who immigrates to Australia? Some people don't even do that with their own lives. They have an experience and then they just leave it behind instead of reflecting on it and learning from it.

The other theme that is very important, is the effect of ongoing learning through the life cycle. Changes in the nature of authority, where the people in authority are of necessity continuing to learn. It makes for a different kind of classroom, a different kind of campus, a different parent-child relationship. We are moving increasingly into the era of the pluralistic family, where it isn't just that women and children have rights, it is that they have knowledge and skills that they bring to decision-making, which changes the whole nature of decision-making and interaction within the family.