sible to grasp all the aspects of anotherÆs culture.
The key step, if we are to study culture from the point of view of only some key traits, is to select those traits carefully. While it would tell us some important things about American culture to look at, for example, the kinds of items that are sold at gas station convenience stores (where diapers, cat food and office supplies are mingled with high-fat foods and low-cost beer), such as arena is less likely than are others to get us to a truly deep understanding of American cultural values. However, if we were to look at either secular or religious rituals, or both, than we might have some higher degree of confidence that what we are studying, the particular cultural complex that we have focused on (to use a term that is now somewhat out of date but that still retains a good degree of usefulness) is one that can indeed tell us something meaningful about the enduring aspects of the culture as a whole.
This, of course, sounds simpler than it actually is, for what constitutes a ritual is not to easy a matter to decide as one might suppose it to be. What, for example, are the defining rituals of American society? The Superbowl? A presidential inauguration? A mass in the National Cathedral? All of these, most likely, but which others? And should any of these be given primacy? Perhaps we should instead examine the myths of Americans to determine the ways in which it is best to understand Americans. Perhaps we should examine such mythic beliefs as Manifest Destiny, or Yankee ingenuity.
Of course, we are not walking down this road for the first time. The great anthropologists before us, including Claude Levi-Strauss and Bronislaw Malinowski have provided us with guideposts, with ways to examine a culture that preserves the integrity of that culture without allowing us to become lost within a forest of what seem to be unconnected details as we wander among words and customs and obje...