What is culture?
What is your culture?
What do you like about it, or want to preserve?
What do you dislike about it, or want to change?
“Culture, or civilization . . . 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.”
- Edward Tylor (1871)
“Culture embraces all the manifestations of social behaviour of a community , the reactions of the individual as affected by the habits of the group in which he lives, and the product of human activities as determined by these habits.”
- Franz Boas (1930)
“Culture means the whole complex of traditional behavior which has been developed by the human race and is successively learned by each generation. A culture is less precise. It can mean the forms of traditional behaviour which are characteristic of a given society, or a group of societies, or of a certain race, or of a certain area, or of a certain period of time.”
- Margaret Mead (1937)
“Culture is the integral whole consisting of implements and consumers’ goods, of constitutional charters for the various social groupings, of human ideas and crafts, beliefs and customs. Whether we consider a very simple or primitive culture or an extremely complex and developed one, we are confronted by a vast apparatus, partly material, partly human, and partly spiritual, by which man is able to cope with the concrete, specific problems that face him.”
- Bronislaw Malinowski (1944)
“Culture, then, consists of standards for deciding what is, standards for deciding what can be, standards of deciding how one feels about it, standards for deciding what to do about it, and standards for deciding how to go about doing it.”
- Ward H. Goodenough (1963)
“Culture is an historically transmitted pattern of meanings 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 attitudes toward life.”
- Clifford Geertz (1973)
“Culture is neither natural or artificial. It stems from neither genetics nor rational thought, for it is made up of rules of conduct, which were not invented and whose function is generally not understood by the people who obey them. Some of these rules are residues of traditions acquired in the different types of social structure through which . . . each human group has passed. Other rules have been consciously accepted or modified for the sake of specific goals. Yet there is no doubt that, between the instincts inherited from our genotype and the rules inspired by reason, the mass of unconscious rules remains more important and more effective; because reason itself . . . is a product rather than a cause of cultural evolution.”
- Claude Levi-Strauss (1983)
“Culture lends significance to human experience by selecting from and organizing it. It refers broadly to the forms throughout which people make sense of their lives . . . It does not inhabit a set-aside domain, as does . . . politics or economics. From the pirouettes of classical ballet to the most brute of brute facts, all human conduct is culturally mediated. Culture encompasses the everyday and the esoteric, the mundane and the elevated, the ridiculous and the sublime. Neither high nor low, culture is all-pervasive.”
- Renato Rosaldo (1989)
