Making Mutual Sense: My Daughters and I in a Village in Iran

(By Special Editor Renate Fernandez) Erika Friedl, in keeping with her preferred low‐profile stance, tells of raising two daughters in an Iranian mud village from infancy through early adulthood, their time in the field distributed over a total of more than six field years. Rarely personally frustrated by having to adapt her Austrian/U.S. academic middle‐class ways to a strongly marked patriarchy in a physically and socially uncomfortable situation, Friedl is perplexed at her own most "unanthropological" refusal to accept village ways for her daughters. She comes to terms with her reaction by distinguishing her own relatively uncostly adjustment, being an adult, from the heavy price in human development that she feels would have been paid by her daughters had she not insistently prepared them for a full cultural engagement with life in the Western world.