"[T]hree themes were mentioned as threads intended to bind together the whole. The action of mutual expectation between India and America, or between any two different perspectives, was one theme; the relation between ideal and experience was a second; ambiguity and the sacred was a third. These three threads are tightly woven together: the sacred is an ideal manifested ambiguously in experience; it is born in the thought that arises between two separate consciousness - male and female, East and West, wild and cultured, human and divine. No one being may hold it within himself. Another name for this exceedingly complex reality may be love."(p.241)

I learned a lot from the book, even such details as why my husband occasionally calls me 'appa'! Tamils have told me the same thing - that it is surprising how many insights an outsider can have on one's own culture. "Discovering the meaning of love to this family was rendered difficult by the fact that for them, love was by nature and by right hidden... A mother's love for her child - tay pacam - the strongest of all loves and the most highly valued, had to be kept contained and hidden. Anni said that a mother should never gaze lovingly into her child's face, especially while the child was sleeping, because the loving gaze itself could cause harm to the child. (She told me this when she caught me gazing into my own sleeping child's face in just this dangerous way. When I told her it was our custom to let people lead their own lives, she said simply, "Tappu [That is a mistake]." After some time I learned that if you cared about people, you would interfere."(p.93).

I wholeheartedly embrace Trawick's way of viewing and trying to understand how other people's minds work, particularly her willingness to recognize the free agency of individuals to work with, not just within, their own culture. I am delighted at her reference to culture as a form of esthetics because so much of culture is not purely functional.

"Let us try another metaphor [as when we think of the conscious/unconscious dichotomy]. Let us not think of the person, the native, as a sphere, with a surface to be stripped off or gotten through to the real stuff, the contents. Let us think of consciousness, or better yet, culture (how do we distinguish between these two ethereal constructions of consciousness or culture?) as an activity-culture/consciousness as an activity not done by one person, but done among people, leaving its traces in memory (which we shall admit is a mystery), which will be part of the matrix for the next cultural act, the next interaction. Let us say that culture is the interaction. After all, what else would it be?

Then when we view things this way, we find that there is no surface or depth. Instead there is only the turbulence of confrontation, with ourselves as part of it, and this turbulence is the most interesting, because the most active, thing. Now let us consider the turbulence in which we together with others are swept up.

In all this churning, surface and depth are commingled. Now our aim is not to get to the bottom of things, but to stay afloat. Now what is most important is not what we or others are, but what happens between us-what others present to us, and how we receive it, and what we present, and how it is received by them, and what comes out of it all, continuously, what is being formed, the eddies, the patterns of waves." (p.89)

What a contrast from a stiff set of rules about how a particular society works! I could fruitfully read this book a second time.