1.1: Culture, simply defined

Trying to settle on a simple definition of culture is not an easy task. Maybe you will feel the same as you work your way through this chapter. You will see, for example, that the idea of culture has changed many times over the centuries and that in the last 50 years, scholars have made the idea more and more difficult to understand. But in this chapter, I will try to offer the simplest definition that seems reasonably up to date. Scholars might object that this definition is too simple, but I hope it will be useful for the purpose of furthering cross-cultural understanding. In that spirit, we shall regard ‘culture’ simply as a term pointing to:

all the products of human thought and action both material and non-material, particularly those that exist because we live in groups.

Or to repeat the same idea in a slightly different way:

culture consists of all the things we make and nearly everything that we think and do, again, to the extent that what we make, think and do is conditioned by our experience of life in groups.

The first thing to emphasize is that we are not born with culture, like we are born with blue or brown eyes, or black hair. We are born into culture, and we learn it by living in human social groups. The way this idea is often expressed is to say that culture is something that is transmitted from one generation to the next. This is how we become ‘enculturated.’

But we humans are clever animals, so although much of what we make, think, and do is a result of the cultural environment into which we were born, not every material object that a person may make, or every thought, or every action is the result of enculturation. Think about it for a moment. While much of what we call culture is transmitted from generation to generation, new items of culture are invented from time to time. That is to say, sometimes, some of us make things, think things, or do things that are new and different. We are then either honored as innovators or even geniuses, or we are punished as heretics or criminals, or dismissed as eccentric, depending on how open or how closed our societies are to change.

Of course, few things are ever entirely new. For the most part, we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. Still, suppose some clever person creates a completely unique tool to serve some entirely personal purpose of no interest or use to another living person. Then by our definition of culture (above), that tool would seem to have all the marks of culture except one; it would play no role in the life of any group. The same would go for an idea. Any idea not shared by one’s fellow group members would not seem to belong to culture. And similarly, a completely idiosyncratic practice marks a person as merely different, if not strange, not as a person participating in a shared cultural practice.

Having proposed a brief, simple and fairly modern definition of culture that not every scholar of culture would find satisfactory, let us next survey some of the complications one finds in academic studies of culture.