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HE community-study method has been fairly widely used in studies of T American culture (Arensberg 1954; Hollingshead 1948). In that method it has become traditional to use local communities as local samples or microcosms of culture. A good deal of theoretical statement of the justification of the tradition is now accumulating (Steward 1950). Nevertheless, no independent treatment of specifically American communities looking toward classifying them in correspondences with a typology of American cultures or subcultures has yet been attempted. It is useful, then, if communities do reflect their cultures, to ask what sorts of communities are distinguishable in the United States and how these sorts reflect one by one American culture or cultures. CULTURES AND COMMUNITIESIn undertaking to answer such questions, some preliminary decisions must be made. We must take it for granted that communities properly sampled do reflect their cultures. The full proof is not cogent here; I have taken pains to spell out elsewhere how they do so (Arensberg 1954). Communities seem to be basic units of organization and transmission within a culture. They provide for human beings and their cultural adaptation to nature the basic minimum personnel and the basic minimum of social relations through which survival is assured and the content of culture can be passed on to the next generation. Already pan-animal as ecological units, communities are panhuman as transmission units for human culture, It is their function in keeping alive the basic inventory of traits and institutions of the minimal personnel of each kind for which culture provides a role and upon which high-culture specialization and acceptance can be built that makes human communities into cell-like repeated units of organization within human societies and cultures.We can rely, then, on this hypothesis for ordering the experience of American communities we will cite. Without defending it further, we must notice a t once that it implies that each culture has its characteristic community which serves as such unit and that each isolable type of community, as such a unit of cultural organization and transmission, stands for an isolable culture. We can hypothesize a one-to-one correspondence of some kind between culture and community.Naturally the correspondence will hold for the two only as we take them as cultural data. We must treat them with the same operations of observation and generalization, working on both of them within cultural or social anthropology rather than a t random. Cultural data are patterns and wholes and processes among patterns, not matters of size,

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