What is Culture?

04 January 2009

Culture is the learned behavior of members of a given social group. Many writers and thinkers have offered interesting of this definition. Here are the definitions from four anthropologists:

Culture is the learned, socially acquired traditions and lifestyles of the members of the society, including their patterned, repetitive ways of thinking, feeling and acting. (M. Harris, 1983)

Culture lends significance to human experience by selecting from and organizing it. It refers broadly to the forms to which people make sense of their lives, rather than more narrowly to the opera or art of museums. (R. Rosaldo,1989)

Culture is the medium evolved by humans to survive. Nothing is free from cultural influences. It is the key stone in civilization’s arch as the medium through which all of life’s events must flow. We are culture. (E.T.Hall,1976)

Culture is an historically transmitted patters of meanings embodied in symbolic forms by means of which [people] communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life. (C.Geertz,as cited in Taylor,1991)