Rosaldo on Culture and Practice

"Culture is, then, always richer than the traits recorded in ethnographers' accounts because its truth resides not in explicit formulations of the rituals of daily life but in the practices of persons who in acting take for granted an account of who they are and how to understand their fellows' moves. Thus, for ethnographers in the field, a set of rules that tells them what the natives do can never show them how and why a people's deeds make psychological sense because the sense of action ultimately depends upon one's embeddedness within a particular sociocultural milieu."

-'Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling', Michelle Rosaldo(1984)