ABSTRACT
For many of us our fi rst encounter with the strangeness of culture is with the different practices that can be found in different cultural environments. Cultural practices can be defi ned as ways of doing something which relate to particular cultural environments and may therefore be unfamiliar to newcomers. They concern everyday activities where there are choices about eating, washing, clothing, communicating, timing, surroundings, being together and so on. A cultural environment can be defi ned as a geographical or psychological entity from which an individual derives a sense of cultural identity at a particular point in time. This could be anything from a community, friendship group or occupation, to a notion of nation or civilisation.
