An individual possesses but a single culture. He or she is simply a Somali, a
Mexican, or an American. Culture is thus synonymous with group identity.
The root of this misconception stems from the privileging of what
we can call tribal culture, ethnic culture, or national culture, over cultures
that are connected, as we shall see, to very different sorts of groups, structures,
or institutions. In part this came from the social settings in which
anthropologists first developed the culture idea: small-scale and relatively
socially undifferentiated tribal or ethnic groups. … A person possess and
controls several cultures in the same way, as sociolinguists tell us, that
even a so-called monolingual speaker controls different ‘registers’ of the
same language or dialect.