Culture is the system of shared beliefs, values, customs,
behaviours, and artefacts that the members of society use to
cope with their world and with one another, and that are
transmitted from generation to generation through learning.
They use the term culture to refer collectively to a society and
its way of life. The modern technical definition of culture, as
socially patterned human thought and behaviour, was originally
proposed by the nineteenth-century British anthropologist,
Edward Tylor. This definition is an open-ended list, which has
been extended considerably since Tylor first proposed it.
The first inventory of cultural categories was undertaken in
1872 by a committee of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science, which was assisted by Tylor. The
committee prepared an anthropological field manual that listed
76 culture topics, in no particular order, including such diverse
items as cannibalism and language. The most exhaustive such list
is the "Outline of Cultural Materials," first published in 1938 and
still used as a guide for cataloguing great masses of worldwide
cultural data for cross-cultural surveys. Like the table of
contents of a giant encyclopaedia, the outline lists 79 major
divisions and 637 subdivisions.
TABLE: Diverse Definitions of Culture:
Topical:
Culture consists of everything on a list of topics, or
categories, such as social organization, religion, or
economy
Historical:
Culture is social heritage, or tradition, that is passed
on to future generations
Behavioural:
Culture is shared, learned human behaviour, a way of
life
Normative:
Culture is ideals, values, or rules for living
Functional:
Culture is the way humans solve problems of
adapting to the environment or living together
Mental:
Culture is a complex of ideas, or learned habits, that
inhibit impulses and distinguish people from animals
Structural:
Culture consists of patterned and interrelated ideas,
symbols, or behaviours
Symbolic:
Culture is based on arbitrarily assigned meanings
that are shared by a society
Culture involves at least three components: what people think,
what they do, and the material products they produce. Thus,
mental processes, beliefs, knowledge, and values are parts of
culture. Some anthropologists would define culture entirely as
mental rules guiding behaviour, although often wide divergence
exists between the acknowledged rules for correct behaviour
and what people actually do. Consequently, some researchers pay
most attention to human behaviour and its material products.
Some researchers believe that culture is merely an abstraction,
not a real entity. This is a serious issue because treating culture
as an abstraction may lead one to deny the basic human rights of
small-scale societies. I treat culture as an objective reality. I
depart from the super organic approach in that I insist that
culture includes its human carriers. At the same time, people can
be deprived of their culture against their will. Many humanistic
anthropologists would agree that culture is an observable
phenomenon, and a people's unique possession.