Culture

The Social Science Encyclopedia, Second Edition

Culture is one of the basic theoretical terms in the social sciences. In its most general sense within the social sciences, culture refers to the socially inherited body of learning characteristic of human societies. This contrasts with the ordinary meaning of the term, which refers to a special part of the social heritage having to do with manners and the arts. Both the ordinary and the social science uses are derived from the Latin cultura, from the verb colere, ‘to tend or cultivate’. An excellent history of the term culture can be found in Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s (1963) classic work, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions.

In the social sciences the term culture takes much of its meaning from its position within a model of the world which depicts the relations between society, culture and the individual.

Human society is made up of individuals who engage in activities by which they adapt to their environment and exchange resources with each other so that the society is maintained and individual needs are satisfied.

These activities are learned by imitation and tuition from other humans, and hence are part of the social heritage, or culture, of a society. These learned activities persist from generation to generation with only a small degree of change unless external factors interfere with the degree to which these activities succeed in satisfying social and individual needs.

Learned activities are only one part of the society’s culture. Also included in the social heritage are artefacts (tools, shelters, utensils, weapons, etc.), plus an ideational complex of constructs and propositions expressed in systems of symbols, of which natural language is the most important. By means of symbols it is possible to create a rich variety of special entities, called culturally constructed objects, such as money, nationhood, marriage, games, laws, etc., whose existence depends on adherence to the rule system that defines them (D’Andrade 1984). The ideational systems and symbolic systems of the social heritage are necessary because human adaptive activities are so complex and numerous that they could not be learned and performed without a large store of knowledge and a symbolic system to communicate this knowledge and co-ordinate activities.

Much, but not all, of the social heritage or culture has a normative character; that is, the individuals of a community typically feel that their social heritage—their ways of doing things, their understandings of the world, their symbolic expressions—are proper, true and beautiful, and they sanction positively those who conform to the social heritage and punish those who do not.

Individuals perform the activities and hold the beliefs of their social heritage or culture not just because of sanctions from others, and not just because they find these activities and beliefs proper and true, but because they also find at least some cultural activities and beliefs to be motivationally and emotionally satisfying.

In this formulation of the model the terms social heritage and culture have been equated. The model ascribes to culture or social heritage the properties of being socially and individually adaptive, learned, persistent, normative, and motivated. Empirical consideration of the content of the social heritage leads directly to an omnibus definition of culture, like that given by Tylor: ‘Culture…is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society (1958); that is, to an enumeration of the kinds of things that can be observed to make up the social heritage.

However, many social scientists restrict the definition of culture to only certain aspects of the social heritage. Most frequently, culture is restricted to the non-physical, or mental part of the social heritage. The physical activities that people perform and the physical artefacts they use are then treated as consequences of the fact that people learn, as part of their social heritage, how to perform these activities and how to make these artefacts. Treating actions and artefacts as the result of learning the social heritage gives causal efficacy to culture; in such a definition culture not only is a descriptive term for a collection of ideas, actions and objects, but also refers to mental entities which are the necessary cause of certain actions and objects.

The current consensus among social scientists also excludes emotional and motivational learnings from culture, focusing on culture as knowledge, or understandings, or propositions. However, it is recognized that some cultural propositions may arouse strong emotions and motivations; when this happens these propositions are said to be internalized (Spiro 1987).

Some social scientists would further restrict the term culture to just those parts of the social heritage which involve representations of things, excluding norms or procedural knowledge about how things should be done (Schneider 1968). Other social scientists would further restrict the definition of culture to symbolic meanings, that is, to those symbolic representations which are used to communicate interpretations of events. Geertz (1973), for example, uses this further restriction of the social heritage not only to exclude affective, motivational and normative parts of the social heritage, but also to argue against the notion that culture resides in the individual. According to Geertz, culture resides in the intersubjective field of public meaning, perhaps in the same transcendent sense in which one might speak of algebra as something that exists outside of anyone’s understanding of it (Geertz 1973).

Many of the disagreements about the definition of culture contain implicit arguments about the causal nature of the social heritage. For example, there is a controversy about whether or not culture is a ‘coherent, integrated whole’, that is, whether or not any particular culture can be treated as ‘one thing’ which has ‘one nature’. If it were found that cultures generally display a high. degree of integration, this would be evidence that some causal force makes different parts of the culture consistent with one another. However, social scientists are now more likely to stress the diversity and contradictions to be found among the parts of a culture. Although almost any element of the culture can be found to have multiplex relations to other cultural elements (as Malinowski (1922), in his great book, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, demonstrated), there is little evidence that these relations ever form a single overall pattern which can be explicitly characterized, Ruth Benedict’s (1934) Patterns of Culture notwithstanding.

Issues involving the integration of culture are related to issues concerning whether or not culture is a bounded entity. If culture is conceived of as a collection of elements which do not form a coherent whole, then the only thing that makes something a part of a particular culture is the fact that it happens to be part of the social heritage of that particular society. But if one believes that cultures are coherent wholes, then the collection of cultural elements which make up a particular culture can be bounded by whatever characterizes the whole.

The boundary issue leads in turn to the problem of sharedness, that is, if culture is not a bounded entity with its own coherence and integration, then some number of individuals in a society must hold a representation or norm in order for it to qualify as a part of the social heritage. However, no principled way has been found to set a numerical cut-off point. In fact, there is some evidence that cultural elements tend to fall into two types: first, a relatively small number of elements that are very highly shared and form a core of high consensus understandings (e.g. red lights mean stop); second, a much larger body of cultural elements which need to be known only by individuals in certain social statuses (e.g. a tort is a civil wrong independent of a contract) (Swartz 1991).

These and other problems have led to disenchantment with the term culture, along with a number of replacement terms such as ‘ideology’ and ‘discourse’. It is not that the importance of the social heritage is being questioned within the social sciences; rather, it is that splitting the social heritage into various ontological categories does not seem to carve nature at the joints. For example, for a culture to work as a heritage—something which can be learned and passed along—it must include all kinds of physical objects and events, such as the physical sounds of words and the physical presence of artefacts—otherwise one could not learn the language or learn how to make and use artefacts. Since the cultural process necessarily involves mental and physical, cognitive and affective, representational and normative phenomena, it can be argued that the definition of culture should not be restricted to just one part of the social heritage.

Behind these definitional skirmishes lie important issues. The different definitions of culture can be understood as attempts to work out the causal priorities among the parts of the social heritage. For example, behind the attempt to restrict the definition of culture to the representational aspects of the social heritage lies the hypothesis that norms, emotional reactions, motivations, etc. are dependent on a prior determination of what’s what. The norm of generalized exchange and feelings of amity between kin, for example, can exist only if there is a category system that distinguishes kin from non-kin. Further, a cultural definition of kin as ‘people of the same flesh and blood’ asserts a shared identity that makes exchange and amity a natural consequence of the nature of things. If it is universally true that cultural representations have causal priority over norms, sentiments, and motives, then defining culture as representation focuses attention on what is most important. However, the gain of sharp focus is offset by the dependence of such a definition on assumptions which are likely to turn out to be overly simple.

Roy D’Andrade

University of California, San Diego

Benedict, R. (1934) Patterns of Culture, Boston, MA.

D’Andrade, R. (1984) ‘Cultural meaning systems’, in R.A. Shweder and R.A.LeVine (eds) Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, Cambridge, UK.

Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures, New York.

Kroeber, A.L. and Kluckhohn, C. (1963) Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, New York.

Malinowski, B. (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific, London.

Schneider, D. (1968) American Kinship: A Cultural Account, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.

Spiro, M.E. (1987) Culture and Human Nature, Chicago.

Swartz, M. (1991) The Way the World is: Cultural Processes and Social Relations among the Mombassa Swahili, Berkeley, CA.

Tylor, E.B. (1958 [1871]) Primitive Culture: Researches in the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Custom. Gloucester, MA.

See also: cultural anthropology; cultural geography; cultural history; cultural studies; language and culture; political culture.

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