Some Definitions of Culture

The biological/medical meanings and agricultural meanings of the word "culture" will not concern us here. The word once had connotations of intellectual excellence or highly developed ability to recognize and appreciate aesthetic excellence. I would suggest that this understanding of culture, (eg. "Tom is a cultured young man") is very much outdated. These days, the common understanding is that we all have (and participate in) culture. For the purposes of this website, I am assuming a sociological/anthropological definition of culture.

In my main article, I have used the Websters New English Dictionary definition that culture is "the totality of socially transmitted behaviour patterns characteristic of a people." That might not be the best definition, but it's serviceable enough and touches on all the important ideas implied in the modern usage of the word.

Living Webster: "the total of human behaviour patterns and technology communicated from generation to generation."

Classic definition from Sir Edward Tylor (1871): "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."

Stephen A Grunlan & Marvin K Mayers (1979) in the glossary of "Cultural Anthropology" define culture as "the learned and shared attitudes, values, and ways of behaving of a people; also the artifacts of the people."

The ArtLex Lexicon of Visual Art Terminology gives a very full definition, of which we quote only a part. "The entirety of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, and all other products of human work and thought: decorative artifacts, environmental pollutants, high art, political ideologies, ritual beliefs, social customs, and so on. In anthropology, culture refers to the way of life of a human society, transmitted from one generation to the next by learning and by experience. Cultural universals include social organization, religion, structure, economic organization, and material culture."

Words of Art (an Online Dictionary) sees culture as a "way of life which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning, but also in institutions and ordinary behavior"

The Sociology Dictionary (another Online Dictionary) quotes from Alfred L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn: "culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values." Of course, symbolic interactionists would add that the essence of culture is language (i.e., symbols), as the essence of reality is language or symbols. For this school, culture is most generally identified as "systems of human meaning." It should be pointed out that some sociologists exclude artifacts or material objects from their definitions of culture; they include in culture technical knowledge about the artifacts but do not include the artifacts themselves. Other sociologists and cultural anthropologists have suggested combining the concepts culture and society contending that all human phenomena are sociocultural in nature... Culture is a general term which refers to the beliefs, traditions, attitudes, and way of life shared by a people."

Concise Oxford Dictionary - "the customs, civilization, and achievements of a particular time or people (studied Chinese culture)."

Robert Crotty, in Multiculturalism and religious pluralism: Interaction and Overlap (1992) sees culture as "the total shared way of life af any given human group." He quotes Clifford Geertz defining culture as: "An historically transmitted pattern of meaning embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and their attitudes toward life." He also quotes Emile Durkheim: [Culture is] a collaborative consciousness… a psychic being that has it's own particular way of thought, feeling and action different from that peculiar to the individuals who compose it."

David Burnett (1990) says that "cultures are not merely random sets of strange customs and activities. Within each and every culture there is a system of order shared by all the members of that society. In this way, culture may be likened to a game of chess. To a person who has no knowledge of the game the players seem at first to be moving the strangely shaped pieces at random. With time the observer begins to see that there is an overall strategy employed by the players. Culture may be likened to the game itself, whilst the worldview is the unseen set of rules which determines how the game can be played."

Bob Fergie, Cultural Anthropology lecturer at Bible College of Victoria, (and guest lecturer at Tabor where I heard him) says that there are three levels of culture. They are 1) the inner worldview,
2) habitual customs and ritual, and 3) surface behaviour. At the heart of culture is worldview. From this core, the various subsystems of culture can be pictured like bicycle spokes, radiating outwards. The subsystems of culture include religion, economics, government, language and social behaviour.