The first time I saw coconut-skating I was so sure it was a joke that I laughed out loud.

The
scowl that came back was enough to tell me that I had completely misunderstood the
situation. In the Philippines a maid tends to be all business, especially when working for
Americans.

But there she was, barefooted as usual, with half of a coconut shell under each broad foot,
systematically skating around the room. So help me, skating.

If this pehypothesis was that a certain local person was at least a part-time lunatic.

I backed out and strolled down the hall, trying to look cool and calm.

from the desk where she was typing.

why is she skating –

Mary, who had done part of her prefield orientation training in one of my workshops,

de

Her typewriter clicked on, scarcely missing a beat, until I exclaimed from the living room

hall

individuals themselves or passed osuch a conception of culture differs from ones that have
dominated thinking in much of the social sciences, especially in international relations and
conflict resolution. For one thing, in this concept, culture is seen as something much less
stable or homogenous than in the concepts proposed by others. Our idea of culture focuses
less on patterning and more on social and cognitive processing than older ideas of culture
do. For another, by linking culture to individuals and emphasizing the number and diversity
of social and experiential settings that individuals encounter, we expand the scope of
reference of culture to encompass not just quasi- or pseudo-kinship groups (tribe, ethnic
group, and nation are the usual ones) but also groupings that derive from profession,
occupation, class, religion, or region. This reorientation supports the idea that individuals
reflect or embody multiple cultures and that tributed in a group. Compared with the older
approach, which connected a singular, coherent, and integrated culture to
unproblematically defined social groups, this approach makes the idea of culture more
complicated. Such complication is necessary, because the world of social action, including
conflict and its resolution, is a complex one, and we need a different concept to capture it.