Ewing states that individuals participate in a social world of shared understandings, but organize their experience in idiosyncratic ways. Anthropologists have ignored

the idiosyncrasies and emphasized the cultural aspects of the shared understandings. In this study the author employs two methods of highlighting an individual's particular use of cultural symbols. The first is to use knowledge of culture to capture the individual's particular usage; the other is to monitor one's own emotional reactions to the informant as a potential source of information. To illustrate her conceptual goals as well as these methods, the author discusses the case of a young Pakistani woman whose mother burned herself to death when she was eight and whose father died several years later. The author discusses the woman's conception of fire, inside-outside, proper family, and mother, to demonstrate her thesis.