Definition of Culture
A simple definition of culture: Learned and shared patterns of
thought and behavior characteristic of a given population, plus the
material objects produced and used by that population.
Every word in this short definition is important. For example, culture
is learned. Culture is learned not in a classroom or by reading a book
(usually!) but by experience, imitation, and informal instruction from
parents and peers. All three begin at the moment of birth. When we
say that culture is learned we are emphasizing that it is not
genetically determined, not biologically inherited.
While it is possible to define culture simply, studying the more
elaborate definitions in the following list should help you understand
this basic anthropological concept more fully. Be sure to continue on
to the sections containing Clifford Geertz's and Raymond Williams'
discussion of culture.
CLASSIC DEFINITIONS OF CULTURE
Culture is a term used in confusing and contradictory ways. From an
anthropological perspective, there can be no youth culture or media
culture. Here are some definitions of the term which reflect how it is
used in this course.
"Culture taken, in its wide ethnographic sense is that complex whole
which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any
other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of
society. The conditions of culture among the various societies of
mankind in so far as it is capable of being investigated on general
principles, is a subject apt for the study of laws of human thought
and action" (Edward Burnett Tylor).
Culture is "an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied
in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic
form by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop
their knowledge about and attitudes towards life" (Clifford Geertz).
Culture consists of "learned systems of meaning, communicated by
means of natural language and other symbol systems, having
representational, directive, and affective functions, and capable of
creating cultural entities and particular senses of reality" (Roy
D'Andrade).
Culture is "an extrasomatic (nongenetic, nonbodily), temporal
continuum of things and events dependent upon symboling. Culture
consists of tools, implements, utensils, clothing, ornaments, customs,
institutions, beliefs, rituals, games, works of art, language, etc.
(Leslie White).
"Culture consists in the shared patterns of behavior and associated
meanings that people learn and participate in within the groups to
which they belong" (Whitten and Hunter).
A Definition of Culture from Clifford Geertz in Emphasizing
Interpretation (The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973)
Clifford Geertz (1926-present) is best known for his ethnographic
studies of Javanese and Balinese cultures in Indonesia and for his
writings about the interpretation of culture. The most influential
aspect of Geertz's work has been his emphasis on the importance of
the symbolic -- of systems of meaning -- as it relates to culture,
cultural change, and the study of culture; notice this emphasis as you
read the summaries and excerpts below.
In attempting to lay out the various meanings attached to the word
"culture," Clifford Geertz refers to the important anthropological
work, Clyde Kluckhohn's Mirror for Man, in which the following
meanings are suggested:
1. "the total way of life of a people"
2. "the social legacy the individual acquires from his group"
3. "a way of thinking, feeling, and believing"
"A society's culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or
believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members"
(Ward Goodenough).
4. "an abstraction from behavior"
5. " a theory on the part of the anthropologist about the way in which
a group of people in fact behave""
6. a "storehouse of pooled learning"
7. "a set of standardized orientations to recurrent problems"
imaginative universe within which their acts are signs" (Geertz pp.
12-13).
Culture is Ordinary
Raymond Williams, Moving from High Culture to Ordinary Culture
Originally published in N. McKenzie (ed.), Convictions, 1958
8. "learned behavior"
9. a mechanism for the normative regulation of behavior
10. "a set of techniques for adjusting both to the external
environment and to other men"
11. "a precipitate of history"
12. a behavioral map, sieve, or matrix
"The concept of culture I espouse. . . is essentially a semiotic one.
Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in
webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those
webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental
science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of
meaning. It is explication I am after. . . . (Geertz pp. 4-5)"
Geertz compares the methods of an anthropologist analyzing culture
to those of a literary critic analyzing a text: "sorting out the structures
of signification. . . and determining their social ground and import. . .
. Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of 'construct a
reading of') a manuscript. . . ."
Once human behavior is seen as . . . symbolic action--action which,
like phonation in speech, pigment in painting, line in writing, or
sonance in music, signifies--the question as to whether culture is
patterned conduct or a frame of mind, or even the two somehow
mixed together, loses sense. The thing to ask [of actions] is what
their import is" (Geertz pp. 9-10).
Geertz argues that culture is "public because meaning is"--systems of
meaning are necessarily the collective property of a group. When we
say we do not understand the actions of people from a culture other
than our own, we are acknowledging our "lack of familiarity with the
"Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its
own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human
society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. The
making of a society is the finding of common meanings and
directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under
the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing
themselves into the land. The growing society is there, yet it is also
made and remade in every individual mind. The making of a mind is,
first, the slow learning of shapes, purposes, and meanings, so that
work, observation and communication are possible. Then, second,
but equal in importance, is the testing of these in experience, the
making of new observations, comparisons, and meanings. A culture
has two aspects: the known meanings and directions, which its
members are trained to; the new observations and meanings, which
are offered and tested. These are the ordinary processes of human
societies and human minds, and we see through them the nature of a
culture: that it is always both traditional and creative; that it is both
the most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual
meanings. We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a
whole way of life--the common meanings; to mean the arts and
learning--the special processes of discovery and creative effort.
Some writers reserve the word for one or other of these senses; I
insist on both, and on the significance of their conjunction. The
questions I ask about our culture are questions about deep personal
meanings. Culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind.