People rarely engage with members of their entire extended family. Instead, they live and interact most closely with other members of their immediate household, and with members of other households to whom they are closely related who live nearby. Thus, it is the people with whom they live in close proximity, in their households and communities, who are usually the most important in terms of daily encounters, that involve activities as basic to survival as the sharing of food, productive labour, and equipment.

The relations of deference and respect, or of patron and client relations that can exist even within a family, are typically underplayed to facilitate necessary mundane cooperation and exchanges. In a small community, people’s daily affairs are usually conducted with all the appearance of an easy familiarity between equals, being typically accompanied by banter, joking and laughter. The appearance of egalitarianism often belies the real situation and serves to check the personal rivalries and family feuds that can and do exist in villages. It should not be allowed to obscure the fact, however, that the relations between villagers are often delicately negotiated, handled with care and, at times, guarded zealously because it is at this level that their simple social and economic well-being or, at times of crisis, survival, most likely depends. The visiting expert’s experience of people’s lives at the local level, if imperfectly derived from logical deduction based on ideal statements about the culture as a whole, is generally partial, inaccurate, or non-existent.