Definitions of Culture

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 embodiment in artifacts; the essen­tial core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; cultural systems may on the one hand be considered as products of action, on the other, as condi­tional elements of further action.

(Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952: 181; cited by Berry 2004: 168)

Culture consists of the derivatives of experience, more or less organised, learned or created by the individuals of a population, including those images or encodements and their interpretations (meanings) transmitted from past generations, from contemporaries, or formed by individuals themselves.

(T. Schwartz 1992; cited by Avruch 1998: 17)

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law, but an interpretive one in search of meaning.

(Geertz 1973: 5)

[...] the set of attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors shared by a group of people, but different for each individual, communicated from one gener­ation to the next.

(Matsumoto 1996: 16)

Culture is to society what memory is to the person. It specifies designs for living that have proven effective in the past, ways of dealing with social situ­ations, and ways to think about the self and social behavior that have been reinforced in the past. It includes systems of symbols that facilitate inter­action (Geertz 1973), rules of the game of life that have been shown to 'work' in the past. When a person is socialized in a given culture, the person can use custom as a substitute for thought, and save time.

(Triandis 1989: 511-12)

Culture is a fuzzy set of basic assumptions and values, orientations to life, beliefs, policies, procedures and behavioural conventions that are shared by a group of people, and that influence (but do not determine) each member's behaviour and his/her interpretations of the 'meaning' of other people's behaviour.

(Spencer-Oatey 2008b: 3)

Culture is a universal orientation system very typical of a society, organiza­tion or group. [...] It influences the perceiving, thinking, evaluating and act­ing of all its members and thus defines their affiliation to the culture. Culture as an orientation system structures a specific field of action for those who feel affiliated to this culture and thus creates the prerequisites for developing its own ways of coping with its environment.

(Thomas 1996a: 112; translated by Franklin)

To study culture is to study ideas, experiences, feelings, as well as the exter­nal forms that such internalities take as they are made public, available to the senses and thus truly social. For culture, in the anthropological view, is the meanings which people create, and which create people, as members of soci­eties. [...] On the one hand, culture resides in a set of public meaningful forms [...]. On the other hand, these overt forms are only rendered meaning­ful because human minds contain the instruments for their interpretation. The cultural flow thus consists of the externalizations of meaning which individuals produce through arrangements of overt forms, and the interpretations which individuals make of such displays - those of others as well as their own.

(Hannerz 1992: 3-4)

These definitions draw attention to a number of import­ant characteristics of culture:

Culture is manifested through different types of regularities, some of which are more explicit than others.

Culture is associated with social groups, but no two individuals within a group share exactly the same cultural characteristics.

Culture affects people's behaviour and interpretations of behaviour.

Culture is acquired and constructed through interaction with others.

Culture is those deep, common, unstated experiences which members of a given culture share, which they communicate without knowing, and which form the backdrop against which all other events are judged.

Edward T Hall (1966)

To sum it up, it should be clear to this point that culture is ubiqui­tous, multidimensional, complex, and all-pervasive. Because culture is so broad, there is no single defini­tion or central theory of what it is. Definitions range from the all-encompassing ("it is everything") to the narrow ("it is opera, art, and ballet"). For our pur­poses we shall define culture as the deposit of knowl­edge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, social hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relationships, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through indi­vidual and group striving.

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