Poole explores the connection between cultural schemas and personal experiences of the self among the Bimin-Kuskusmin of Papua New Guinea. He attempts to explain the way in which personal differences—matters of individuality—are given shape by the Bimin-Kuskusmin conceptions of selfhood and identity. This concept of self for adult men involves finiik and khaapkhabuurien, ongoing schemas representing both social and individual aspects of the self. The author uses these to illustrate how local concepts of identity give shape to beliefs learned through socialization and enculturation so that they come to have shared emotive force. He concludes that a strict dichotomy between a Western focus on individuality and a non- Western sociocentricity is misleading.