Nature of Culture

Concept and Definitions of Culture

Culture is the most central concept in anthropology. It refers to the learned, shared, and transmitted body of knowledge, beliefs, values, practices, symbols, and material products that characterise a human group and are passed across generations. Culture is what makes human beings distinctively human: every other animal species relies primarily on biological instinct and individual learning; only humans accumulate and transmit learned traditions cumulatively across generations.

The earliest and most influential anthropological definition was offered by Edward B. Tylor in 1871: Culture or civilisation, taken in its widest 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. Three features of Tylor's definition remain foundational: culture is a complex whole (holistic), it is acquired (learned, not innate), and it is acquired as a member of society (shared and social, not individual).

Subsequent definitions emphasised different aspects:

• Ralph Linton defined culture as the social heritage of a group the total social heredity of mankind. He distinguished between covert culture (shared attitudes, values, and ideas that exist only in the minds of individuals) and overt culture (the observable patterns of behaviour and material products).
• Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn surveyed over 160 definitions of culture and synthesised: culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behaviour acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiment in artefacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, and on the other, as conditioning elements of further action.
• Bronislaw Malinowski defined culture functionally as the instrumental apparatus by means of which humans can better cope with the specific problems that face them in their environment in the satisfaction of their needs.
• Ruth Benedict described cultures as personality writ large each culture represents a dominant configuration or pattern that shapes the personality of its members.
• Clifford Geertz defined culture as a web of significance that humans themselves have spun, and argued that cultural analysis is therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.
• Leslie White emphasised the symbolic basis of culture, defining it as the class of phenomena dependent upon symboling: acts, objects, and events characterised by their symbolic meaning.

Characteristics of Culture

Culture is Learned

Culture is not inherited biologically or instinctively; it is acquired through a lifelong process of learning called enculturation. Every child is born with the biological potential for culture but acquires the specific content of his or her culture through exposure to, and participation in, the social group. The fact that a child raised in Japan will speak Japanese, observe Japanese customs, and hold Japanese values regardless of his or her ancestry demonstrates that culture is learned, not inherited in the genes.

Culture is Shared

Culture is not individual; it is the shared property of a social group. Idiosyncratic habits and beliefs specific to an individual are not culture. Cultural traits are distributed across a population and held in common to varying degrees: some traits (such as language) are shared by virtually all members of a society; others are shared only by subgroups (such as occupational specialisations or age-related knowledge). The shared character of culture is what makes communication, coordination, and social life possible.

Culture is Transmitted Across Generations

Human beings alone among animals can transmit complex accumulated knowledge across generations through language and other symbolic systems. This cumulative cultural transmission sometimes called cultural inheritance allows each generation to build on the knowledge and achievements of the past rather than starting from scratch. Writing, art, ritual, and oral tradition are all mechanisms of cultural transmission. Without this capacity, there could be no science, no literature, no religion, and no technology beyond what a single individual could accumulate in one lifetime.

Culture is Symbolic

The foundation of human culture is the capacity for symbolic thought. A symbol is something that stands for something else by virtue of social agreement, not by any natural or necessary connection. Words are the paradigmatic symbols: there is nothing about the sound sequence "tree" that naturally resembles or necessitates its referent; the connection is purely conventional and socially transmitted. All aspects of culture language, religion, art, law, money, etiquette rest on this symbolic capacity. Other animals communicate, but only humans use symbols in this open-ended, generative way.

Culture is Dynamic and Adaptive

Cultures are not static; they change continuously in response to internal innovation, external contact, and environmental change. Cultural change occurs through invention (new ideas arising within a culture), diffusion (borrowing of traits from other cultures through contact), and forced change (such as acculturation through colonialism). Despite constant change, cultures maintain a degree of coherence and continuity: new elements are generally integrated in ways that are consistent with existing values and practices, even if they gradually transform them.

Culture is Integrated

The elements of a culture are not independent but mutually interconnected in a functioning whole. Change in one domain tends to produce changes in others. The development of agriculture, for example, produced changes not just in subsistence patterns but in settlement, social organisation, property rights, religion, and political structure. This integration is never perfect no culture is completely coherent or free of internal contradictions but it means that cultures must be understood as wholes, not as collections of isolated traits.

Culture is Ideational

Culture exists primarily as a set of shared ideas, beliefs, values, and rules in the minds of people; it is not simply the behaviour that one observes or the artefacts that one finds. The same observable behaviour (for example, bowing) can have different cultural meanings in different contexts; conversely, the same cultural value can produce different behaviours in different situations. This is why culture cannot be reduced to a catalogue of behaviours or objects.

Culture is Universal and Particular

Every human society has culture: this is a human universal. All cultures have language, some form of family and kinship organisation, some form of economic exchange, some form of religion or worldview, some form of political authority, and some system of regulating sexuality and reproduction. These cultural universals reflect the universal challenges of human existence. At the same time, the specific content of these universals varies enormously across societies, which is what makes cross-cultural study so revealing of the range of human possibility.

Culture and Civilisation

In everyday usage, "civilisation" often implies an evolutionary or evaluative hierarchy some societies are considered more "civilised" than others. In anthropology, this usage is rejected. The anthropological concept of culture is non-evaluative and universal: every human society, regardless of its technological complexity, social scale, or historical antiquity, has a fully developed culture. There are no cultures that are "more cultural" than others.

The distinction between culture and civilisation has been understood in several ways:

• In German intellectual tradition (Kultur vs. Zivilisation), Kultur refers to the deeper, spiritual, artistic achievements of a people, while Zivilisation refers to more superficial technical and material accomplishments. Many 19th-century German thinkers regarded French and English societies as more "civilised" in the material sense but valued their own Kultur as deeper.
• In the evolutionary tradition of Tylor and Morgan, "civilisation" was the highest of three stages of cultural evolution (savagery, barbarism, civilisation), with Western industrial societies placed at the top. This framework was influential in the 19th century but is now thoroughly discredited as ethnocentric and empirically unfounded.
• In contemporary anthropology, the distinction between "culture" and "civilisation" is largely abandoned, or "civilisation" is used neutrally to refer to large-scale, literate, urban societies without implying superiority.

Material and Non-Material Culture

Culture is commonly divided into material and non-material dimensions, though in practice the two are inseparable.

Material Culture

Material culture consists of the tangible, physical objects and spaces that people create, use, and assign meaning to: tools, weapons, clothing, housing, pottery, jewellery, vehicles, artwork, and the built environment. Material culture is the domain of archaeology (which reconstructs past societies from their material remains) and of material culture studies within social anthropology. Material objects are never merely physical; they are always embedded in cultural meanings, social relations, and histories.

Technology is a central dimension of material culture: the tools, techniques, and knowledge used to harness and transform the natural environment. Subsistence technology (how food is obtained and processed) has particularly wide-ranging effects on social organisation, settlement patterns, and cultural values.

Non-Material Culture

Non-material culture consists of the intangible aspects of culture: values, beliefs, norms, symbols, language, knowledge, rituals, and social institutions. Non-material culture constitutes the ideational dimension the shared ideas, meanings, and rules that give social life its specific character.

Values are the deeply held beliefs about what is desirable, good, or important. They provide the standards against which people evaluate actions, situations, and other people. Values differ enormously across cultures: individualism versus collectivism, egalitarianism versus hierarchy, materialism versus spirituality, and so on.

Norms are the shared rules that govern specific behaviours in specific situations. Norms may be formal (codified in law or explicit regulation) or informal (conventional expectations enforced through social pressure). Norms vary in their importance: mores are norms whose violation is felt as a serious moral offence (incest, murder, desecration of sacred objects); folkways are norms whose violation causes mild disapproval or embarrassment (table manners, forms of greeting). Norms are learned, but their conventional character is typically invisible to those who hold them they feel like natural facts rather than cultural choices.

Beliefs are the shared understandings about the nature of the world and how it works about causality, the supernatural, the cosmos, and human nature. Beliefs are not merely cognitive; they are charged with emotion and are closely connected to values and practices.

Cultural Relativism and Ethnocentrism

Ethnocentrism

Ethnocentrism is the tendency to evaluate other cultures according to the standards and values of one's own culture, typically with the conclusion that one's own culture is superior. Ethnocentrism is a universal human tendency: members of every society tend to regard their own ways as the right and natural ones and to look on foreign customs with suspicion, amusement, or moral disapproval. It is deeply embedded in the taken-for-granted character of one's own cultural norms.

Ethnocentrism served certain social functions in small, isolated societies, where strong in-group identity and suspicion of outsiders promoted social cohesion and group survival. But it becomes a serious cognitive and moral problem when it prevents accurate understanding of other cultures or is used to justify exploitation, discrimination, or violence.

The history of colonialism is in large part a history of institutionalised ethnocentrism: European powers defined their own cultures as the standard of civilisation and used this definition to justify the subjugation of peoples whose cultures differed from their own. The evolutionary frameworks of Tylor and Morgan, with their ranking of cultures from "savagery" to "civilisation," provided intellectual legitimation for this project.

Cultural Relativism

Cultural relativism is the principle that any cultural practice, belief, or value must be understood and evaluated in the context of the culture to which it belongs, not by the standards of the observer's own culture. It was championed by Franz Boas and his students (particularly Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Melville Herskovits) as a methodological and ethical corrective to the ethnocentrism of 19th-century evolutionary anthropology.

As a methodological principle, cultural relativism is essential: to understand why people behave as they do, one must understand the cultural framework within which their behaviour makes sense. An anthropologist who evaluates cattle-worship in terms of Western economic rationality will fundamentally misunderstand it; one must ask what cattle mean within the cultural system of which the worship is a part.

As a moral or epistemological principle, cultural relativism is more controversial. In its strong form, it holds that no culture's values can be judged as superior or inferior to those of any other that all values are relative to the culture that holds them and no cross-cultural moral judgements are possible. This strong form creates serious difficulties when confronted with practices such as genocide, torture, or systematic oppression that may be culturally sanctioned. Most contemporary anthropologists maintain methodological relativism (as an approach to understanding) while acknowledging that some form of cross-cultural moral judgement is both possible and necessary.

Herskovits distinguished three levels of cultural relativism: methodological (the principle that cultural traits must be understood in their own context), epistemological (the view that knowledge is always culturally relative), and moral or ethical (the view that moral standards are culturally relative). He advocated all three; most contemporary anthropologists accept the first and are ambivalent about the second and third.

Enculturation and Acculturation

Enculturation

Enculturation (or socialisation) is the lifelong process by which an individual acquires the culture of his or her social group. Through enculturation, individuals internalise their culture's language, values, norms, beliefs, and behavioural expectations. The result of successful enculturation is that cultural standards feel natural, obvious, and correct the taken-for-granted character of culture that makes ethnocentrism so pervasive.

Enculturation begins at birth and continues throughout life, though it is most intensive in childhood. Its primary agents are family (who transmit the most fundamental values and behaviours), peer groups (who transmit age-specific norms and identities), schools (which transmit formal knowledge and civic values), religious institutions (which transmit cosmological beliefs and moral norms), and mass media (which increasingly transmit values and images at a global scale).

Enculturation is never total: individuals internalise culture selectively, reinterpret elements according to their own experience, and sometimes resist or subvert cultural norms. The possibility of cultural change rests on this imperfection of enculturation.

Acculturation

Acculturation refers to the process of cultural change that occurs when two cultures come into sustained, direct contact, with one or both changing as a result. The term was coined by American anthropologists in the 19th century and systematically defined by Redfield, Linton, and Herskovits in 1936 as those phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact with subsequent changes in the original culture patterns of either or both groups.

Acculturation differs from simple diffusion (borrowing of specific traits) in that it involves sustained contact and pervasive cultural change. It differs from assimilation in that it does not require the disappearing of one culture into another; both cultures may change while maintaining distinct identities.

Acculturation takes several forms: adoption of elements from the other culture while maintaining the original cultural framework; substitution of original elements with equivalent ones from the contact culture; syncretism (creation of new forms by blending elements from both cultures); addition of new elements alongside rather than instead of original ones; and deculturation (loss of original cultural elements without substitution).

The outcomes of acculturation depend greatly on the power relations between the cultures in contact. When contact occurs under conditions of domination (as in colonialism), the dominated culture typically experiences forced acculturation the imposition of the dominant culture's language, religion, economic practices, and values. The cultural survival strategies employed by dominated groups include resistance, compartmentalisation (maintaining separate cultural identities in different contexts), revitalisation movements, and creative syncretism.

Nature vs. Culture: The Debate

One of the most fundamental theoretical questions in anthropology concerns the relationship between biology (nature) and culture (nurture) in shaping human behaviour. The question matters enormously because the answer has implications for our understanding of human nature, social organisation, gender roles, warfare, altruism, and virtually every other dimension of human life.

The Culture School: Boas and the Standard Social Science Model

Boas and the American cultural anthropology tradition emphasised the primacy of culture over biology in explaining human variation. Boas demonstrated through empirical research that physical traits such as head shape changed within one generation in immigrant populations, showing that supposedly fixed racial characteristics were far more plastic than previously assumed. He argued that what appeared to be racial or biological differences between peoples were in fact cultural differences products of different historical experiences and social environments.

Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture (1934) extended this argument, showing that cultures shaped fundamentally different personality configurations and that traits considered natural (such as aggressiveness or passivity) varied enormously across societies. Margaret Mead's Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935) argued that gender roles varied so dramatically across cultures that they could not be rooted in biology.

The Standard Social Science Model (SSSM), as it came to be called, held that the human mind is essentially a blank slate that culture writes upon that there are no significant universal human psychological predispositions, and that human behaviour is almost entirely a product of culture and learning.

Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology

From the 1970s onward, the culture-only view was challenged from within biology and psychology. Sociobiology, developed primarily by E.O. Wilson, argued that many aspects of human social behaviour including altruism, aggression, sexual jealousy, incest avoidance, and gender differences in mate preference could be explained as adaptations produced by natural selection. Evolutionary psychology subsequently developed these arguments further, proposing that the human mind contains specific cognitive mechanisms that evolved to solve recurrent adaptive problems in the ancestral environment: a cheater-detection module, a face-recognition module, specific sexual motivational systems, and so on.

These approaches are highly controversial within anthropology. Critics argue that they are often guilty of adaptationism (inventing evolutionary explanations post hoc without genuine evidence), that they underestimate the plasticity and variability of human behaviour, that they confuse current function with evolutionary origin, and that they have been misused to naturalise and justify existing social inequalities.

The Biocultural Synthesis

Most contemporary anthropologists adopt an interactionist or biocultural position that rejects both extreme poles: neither pure biological determinism nor pure cultural constructionism adequately describes the human condition. Humans are biological beings with specific evolutionary histories, specific cognitive architectures, and specific developmental programmes; and they are also cultural beings whose specific behaviours, values, and identities are shaped by learned traditions. Biology sets constraints and tendencies; culture elaborates, redirects, and often overrides them.

Examples of biocultural interaction: the human capacity for language is biologically based (specific neural structures in the brain; language acquisition device that enables rapid first-language learning in early childhood), but the specific language one speaks is culturally determined. The capacity for colour vision is biological, but the number and categories of colour terms a language employs and the salience of colour in perception vary culturally. The capacity for incest avoidance appears to have a biological basis (the Westermarck effect: individuals raised together in early childhood develop a sexual aversion to each other); but the specific incest taboos of any given society are culturally elaborated far beyond what biology alone requires.

Subculture, Counterculture, and Cultural Pluralism

A subculture is a group within a larger culture that shares some elements of the dominant culture but also maintains its own distinctive values, norms, and practices. Subcultures are defined by occupation (the subculture of medical professionals), ethnicity (the subculture of Italian-Americans), religion (the subculture of Hasidic Jews in New York), age (youth subcultures), sexuality (LGBTQ+ subcultures), or class (working-class or elite subcultures). Members of subcultures are typically bicultural, moving between the norms of the subculture and those of the dominant society.

A counterculture is a subculture that actively rejects and opposes core values and practices of the dominant culture. The hippie movement of the 1960s, for example, explicitly rejected mainstream American values of materialism, conformity, and institutional authority and proposed alternative values of communalism, personal liberation, and anti-militarism.

Cultural pluralism refers to the coexistence of multiple distinct cultures within a single society, with each maintaining its distinctiveness rather than being assimilated into a homogeneous dominant culture. It is the alternative to assimilationist or melting-pot models of cultural interaction.

Culture and Social Structure

Culture and social structure are analytically distinct but empirically intertwined. Social structure refers to the patterned, organised relationships among individuals and groups in a society the positions, roles, institutions, and arrangements that persist through time independently of particular individuals. Culture refers to the shared meanings, values, and norms that animate those structures and give them their specific character.

The relationship between culture and social structure has been theorised in several ways. In structural-functional anthropology (Radcliffe-Brown, Durkheim), social structure is primary and culture serves to maintain it. In cultural anthropology (Boas, Geertz), culture is primary and social structures are expressions of underlying cultural patterns. In practice-oriented approaches (Bourdieu, Giddens), the distinction collapses: culture and social structure are co-constituted through ongoing human practice the habits, dispositions, and strategies of embodied social actors who both reproduce and transform the social and cultural world in which they live.

High Culture, Low Culture, and Popular Culture

Within stratified societies, distinctions are commonly drawn between high culture (the artistic and intellectual productions associated with educated elites: classical music, fine art, literature, philosophy) and low or popular culture (the cultural productions of the masses: folk art, popular music, genre fiction, television). These distinctions are social and historical, not inherent in the works themselves; what counts as "high" culture in one era may have been popular entertainment in an earlier one (Shakespeare, for example, was popular theatre).

Anthropology, in principle, treats all cultural productions as equally worthy of study, refusing to privilege elite or literate culture over popular or oral culture. Cultural studies (a field that emerged from Gramsci's analysis of hegemony and the Frankfurt School's critical theory) has developed sophisticated analyses of popular culture as a site of both ideological reproduction and creative resistance.

Universalism, Particularism, and Cultural Evolution

A central tension in the anthropological study of culture has been between universalist and particularist approaches. Universalism seeks cross-cultural generalisations and laws patterns and regularities that hold across all or most human cultures (cultural universals, evolutionary stages, functional requirements). Particularism (associated especially with Boas and historical anthropology) emphasises the uniqueness of each culture and the importance of understanding it on its own terms, in its specific historical context, without forcing it into universal categories or stages.

The evolutionary tradition (Tylor, Morgan, Spencer) proposed a unilinear sequence through which all cultures must pass: savagery, barbarism, civilisation. This framework was demolished by Boas, who showed that cultural diffusion, historical contingency, and the lack of empirical support made such universal sequences untenable. Neo-evolutionism (White, Steward, Sahlins, Service) later revived evolutionary thinking in more sophisticated forms, distinguishing specific evolution (the particular historical trajectory of a specific culture) from general evolution (the overall tendency of cultures to increase in complexity and energy harnessing).

Today, most anthropologists accept that cultures do change in patterned ways but reject the idea that all cultures must pass through identical stages or that change is always progressive. Cultural change is better understood as adaptive and historical shaped by specific environmental conditions, historical encounters, and internal dynamics than as driven by a single universal law of progress.