ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to define a village as a community in which it is possible for every resident to know every other person living there. The village exists as a refuge from the city as well as the city as a refuge from the village. The contemporary anthropologist who goes to study a village has to deal with a double problem—how to understand that culture and how to understand village life without ever having had experience of a village in one’s own society. As anthropologists, we have worked in almost every existing kind of village, and we have worked in villages all around the world. Anthropologists have worked in mining villages without any place for a stranger to stay. Traditional villages in Iran present a different, but no less difficult problem. There houses are built of adobe and additions consist simply of knocking down a piece of wall and adding a bulge to the core of the house.
