[A. G. Maisey]

Please accept my apologies for causing you any confusion David. I guess it is probably inevitable that some confusion must be generated when we are limited in discussion by what we can put on paper, but even so, I perhaps should have been more explicit with some of what I have written, although in all honesty, it did not occur to me that questions such as the ones you have framed might even arise. I sometimes take too much for granted. Call it a character fault.

You've raised a number of questions, so probably the easiest way for me to respond is to interpolate my responses:-

Do you believe that all Javanese share the same world view?

No, and I'll go further, I do not believe that even the same Javanese person holds a consistent world view.
The way most people see the world can vary according to situation, and that idea of "situation" automatically embraces the concept of time. This applies no less to a Javanese person than it does to anybody else.
For instance, the modern Javanese engineer who has come from a village background could well espouse one world view when in the work place, or outside his village environment, but when he is back in the village, he becomes a member of the village hierarchy and will adopt the hierarchical position and world view that is expected of him.

What about Westerners, or even to be more specific, how about Americans?

I'll assume that "Westerners" is near enough the same as "people from a Western European cultural base", thus, everybody in the Old World, plus those of us whose ancestors came from that Old World.

No, of course not, there is observable wide variation in the way different people from this base see and react to the world around them.
I'll assume that the generality already stated applies as much to all non-indigenous people from all the Americas as much as it does to people anywhere else with the group delineated by paragraph 1 of this response.

Of course, if we include indigenous people within the group, then again, we can expect situational variation in probably most cases, however, in the case of indigenous people who are still living as their ancestors lived, then it might be necessary to carry out very specific investigation of each individual group before any opinion could be formed.

Do you believe that my own personal world view is more likely to be closer to your own or what you might perceive as a Javanese world view?

No idea at all David. I'm sorry.

Or perhaps that my own world view is closer to whatever you believe to be the generic American world view?

Again, I am completely unable to answer this question.

If you could answer these questions what evidence would you base these assumption on?

What I've written above are not assumptions, they are opinions.
In one case above I have given a very brief outline of an informed opinion, in another case I have given an opinion that could probably be described as the opinion of an educated layman, in a couple of cases I have not given an opinion at all, simply because I have insufficient information to form an opinion.
One of the beauties of opinions is that anybody can have an opinion, and that opinion does not require any evidence at all to support it --- unless the person stating the opinion wishes others to adopt it, in which case he might well wheel out a whole barrow load of evidence.

My position in this thread is that any opinion that I state is up there for others to accept or reject as they see fit. I'm not pushing any barrow here. I don't care if anybody accepts my opinion, and I care even less if they reject it. In fact, I am more than happy to hear any argument against any of my opinions, and I won't argue back.

This thread was started to extract opinions. Arguing against the opinions of others is not really such a great way to encourage people to state their opinions.

David, in respect of the quote that preceded your questions:-

Quite simply it is not possible to understand one world view when working from the base of an entirely different world view.

As already stated, this is my opinion. It is an opinion that I have formed after a very long time spent reading anthropological text books, and reinforced by very close personal contact with two cultures that are not my own --- well, in one case very close and very lengthy contact, in the other case lengthy contact but lacking the same degree of personal contact. This opinion seems to me to reflect a widely held opinion within the community formed of professional anthropologists. These people could well be wrong. My own opinion, although an informed opinion, could well be wrong.

I have many character faults, and one of these is that when somebody can demonstrate that something I believe to be true, is in fact untrue, I am not offended in any way, rather I welcome the revelation of a new truth.

So it is, that if you can demonstrate that the opinion of mine that you have quoted is in fact inaccurate and insupportable, then I will welcome that revelation.