Tensions in a definition of "culture"

Rosaldo's "views" "'culture' as the intelligible form of peoples' lives" (1980: xi-xii). these "patterns that lend an intelligible form to quickly changing social practice" (1980: xi), Rosaldo herself is aware of the problem and all her general statements are surrounded by caveats one uses to defend against the ultimate critique of pragmatist descriptions of cultural patterns: that they overgeneralize what individual persons carry within themselves. She writes "in summary":

I believe that folk notions of "person" and "society," "individual action" and "social form" will always be related, each illumining the other in a way that guarantees "strategic" import to investigations of cultural constructs concerning "personhood," "human motivations," or "the self." To say this is not in any sense to claim that all individuals within a culture are the same, all "socialized" to be the ideal "persons" of their society. It is rather to insist that the reproduction of a given form within a culture demands such continuities in discourse as would permit a shared and sensible frame for the interpretation of daily practice, so that the ways that individuals construe their actions show some relation to the orders that they recognize in the world. (my emphasis. 1980: 223)