Taken from: http://www.wsu.edu:8001/vcwsu/commons/topics/culture/culture-definition.html
A Baseline Definition of Culture
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People learn culture. That, we suggest, is culture's essential feature. Many qualities of human life are
transmitted genetically -- an infant's desire for food, for example, is triggered by physiological
characteristics determined within the human genetic code. An adult's specific desire for milk and cereal
in the morning, on the other hand, cannot be explained genetically; rather, it is a learned (cultural)
response to morning hunger. Culture, as a body of learned behaviors common to a given human society,
acts rather like a template (i.e. it has predictable form and content), shaping behavior and consciousness
within a human society from generation to generation. So culture resides in all learned behavior and in
some shaping template or consciousness prior to behavior as well (that is, a "cultural template" can be
in place prior to the birth of an individual person).
This primary concept of a shaping template and body of learned behaviors might be further broken
down into the following categories, each of which is an important element of cultural systems:
• systems of meaning, of which language is primary
• ways of organizing society, from kinship groups to states and multi-national corporations
• the distinctive techniques of a group and their characteristic products
Several important principles follow from this definition of culture:
• If the process of learning is an essential characteristic of culture, then teaching also is a crucial
characteristic. The way culture is taught and reproduced (see reproduction in the glossary) is itself an
important component of culture.
• Because the relationship between what is taught and what is learned is not absolute (some of what is
taught is lost, while new discoveries are constantly being made), culture exists in a constant state of
change.
• Meaning systems consist of negotiated agreements -- members of a human society must agree to
relationships between a word, behavior, or other symbol and its corresponding significance or meaning.
To the extent that culture consists of systems of meaning, it also consists of negotiated agreements and
processes of negotiation.
• Because meaning systems involve relationships which are not essential and universal (the word "door"
has no essential connection to the physical object -- we simply agree that it shall have that meaning
when we speak or write in English), different human societies will inevitably agree upon different
relationships and meanings; this a relativistic way of describing culture.
A recent etymology of the word "culture":
Look in an old dictionary -- say, a pre-1960 Webster's -- and you'll likely find a definition of culture that
looks something like this: "1. The cultivation of soil. 2. The raising, improvement, or development of
some plant, animal or product" (Friend and Guralnik 1958). This use of the word has its roots in the
ancient Latin word cultura, "cultivation" or "tending," and its entrance into the English language had
begun by the year 1430 (Oxford English Dictionary). By the time the Webster's definition above was
written, another definition had begun to take precedence over the old Latin denotation; culture was
coming to mean "the training, development, and refinement of mind, tastes, and manners" (Oxford
English Dictionary). The OED traces this definition, which today we associate with the phrase " high
culture," back as far as 1805; by the middle of the 20th century, it was fast becoming the word's primary
definition.
However, if you try a more modern source, like the American Heritage English Dictionary, you'll find a
primary definition of culture which is substantially different than either of the two given above: "The
totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of
human work and thought." Why such a difference, and in such a (relatively) short period of time? Well,
in the past 40 years, the use of the word "culture" has been heavily influenced by the academic fields of
sociology and cultural anthropology. These fields have gradually brought what was once a minor
definition of culture (the last of eight definitions given in the old 1958 Webster's quoted above) into the
mainstream.
It is easy to imagine how the U.S. society which was so focused on "socially transmitted behavior
patterns" in the sixties would come to need a word to describe the object of its interest. The civil rights
movement during this era brought everyone's attention to bear on cultural differences within U.S.
society, while the Vietnam War served to emphasize the position of the U.S. culture in relation to other
world cultures.
Over time, these new uses for the word culture have eclipsed its older meanings, those associated with
cultivation of the land and the production of crops. You might say that an aspect of U.S. culture over the
past 40 years is its fascination with the issue of culture itself -- a fascination which has brought about
many changes in the way we speak and the meanings of words which we commonly use.
Famous Quotes about Culture
Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, I, 1869 [source: Esar]
Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, -- the passion for
sweetness and light.
Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, pref., 1873 [source: Esar]
Culture is to "know the best that has been said and thought in the world."
Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, pref., 1873 [source: Esar]
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That is true culture which helps us to work for the social betterment of all.
Henry Ward Beecher [source: Correct Quotes]
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A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture.
Samuel Butler [source: Esar]
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Culture is everything. Culture is the way we dress, the way we carry our heads, the way we walk, the
way we tie our ties -- it is not only the fact of writing books or building houses.
Aime Cesair, Martiniquen writer, speaking to the World Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris
[source: Petras and Petras]
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Culture, with us, ends in headache.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Experience, 1841 [source: Esar]
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No culture can live, if it attempts to be exclusive.
Mahatma Gandhi [source: Correct Quotes]
Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart.
Mahatma Gandhi [source: Correct Quotes]
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Men are so inclined to content themselves with what is commonest; the spirit and the senses so easily
grow dead to the impressions of the beautiful and perfect, that every one should study, by all methods,
to nourish in his mind the faculty of feeling these things. ...For this reason, one ought every day at least,
to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few
reasonable words.
Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. Bk. v, ch. 1 (Carlyle, tr.) [source: Stevenson]
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Rather than by your culture spoiled,
Desist, and give us nature wild.
Matthew Green, The Spleen, l. 248 [source: Stevenson]
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Culture is like the sum of special knowledge that accumulates in any large united family and is the
common property of all its members. When we of the great Culture Family meet, we exchange
reminiscences about Grandfather Homer, and that awful old Dr. Johnson, and Aunt Sappho, and poor
Johnny Keats.
Aldous Huxley [source: Flesch]
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Culture is but the fine flowering of real education, and it is the training of the feeling the tastes and the
manners that makes it so.
Minnie Kellogg, Iroquois leader [source: Petras and Petras]
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The poor have no business with culture and should beware of it. They cannot eat it; they cannot sell it;
they can only pass it on to others and that is why the world is full of hungry people ready to teach us
anything under the sun.
Aubrey Menen [source: Flesch]
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A cultivated mind is one to which the fountains of knowledge have been opened, and which has been
taught, in any tolerable degree, to exercise its faculties.
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, II, 1863. [source: Esar]
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Culture is what your butcher would have if he were a surgeon.
Mary Pettibone Poole, A Glass Eye at a Keyhole (1938). [source: Maggio]
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The primary indication, to my thinking, of a well-ordered mind is a man's ability to remain in one place
and linger in his own company.
Seneca, Epistulae ad Lucilium. Epis. ii, sec. 1. [source: Stevenson]
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Culture is the habit of being pleased with the best and knowing why.
Henry van Dyke [source: Stevenson]
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Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors, who when their turn comes
will manufacture professors.
Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (1949) [source: Maggio]
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Are not the processes of culture rapidly creating a class of supercilious infidels, who believe in nothing?
Shall a man lose himself in countless masses of adjustments, and be so shaped with reference to this,
that, and the other, that the simply good and healthy and brave parts of him are reduced and clipp'd
away, like the bordering of a box in a garden?
Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 1870 [source: Esar]