The way we live, the values we place on things, and the structures we build, all give evidence that we are inhabitants of the American culture world. Our culture traits, with their roots mainly in European culture, seem Reasonable and logical to us, but we are mistaken if we think that all the peoples everywhere on earth would find our culture patterns completely acceptable. We live in houses, own land, and recognize certain lines as boundaries between individual properties, states, and countries. Our houses are glass windows, hinged doors, and rooms for such special uses as sleeping, eating, preparation of food, entertaining, and recreation. These habitations are served by definite systems of streets, roads, sidewalks, or other avenues of transportation. Closely spaced groups of houses and other buildings form villages, towns, and cities. At least the more important Of these are served by water supply systems, sewers, and such public utilities as gas and electricity. Communication means are highly developed, as are mass production techniques. These and other culture traits seem fundamental and commonplace to us, but to peoples of some parts of the earth they would be novel, upsetting, amusing, or even unworkable.
We are self-sufficient to only a very limited degree. Most of us would perish promptly if turned loose without clothing or implements of any kind in territory teeming with fish, abounding in game, and richly endowed with vegetable fibers and edible plants. We require the services of many groups of people just to make and sell ordinary garments, and a huge crew is needed to feed an urban dweller. To many of the earth's inhabitants Who are highly self-sufficient the complications appear ridiculous, but we live in an extremely specialized culture world. People in our culture world normally make livings by performing highly specialized tasks. The services of many experts are likely to be available to us every day, in any city, town, or large village we expect to find barbers, doctors, lawyers, clergymen, educators, plumbers, and other specialists we expect to Be able to purchase eat, vegetables, tonsils of all sorts, and all necessities file. We assume the presence of modern conveniences to be perfectly normal. Many people in other culture worlds would reward such culture
