Department of Anthropology College of Arts and Sciences The University of Alabama

Social Structure
Anthropology 436

Some Definitions of Culture

"CULTURE: (1) the set of capacities which distinguishes Homo sapiens as a species and which is fundamental to its mode of adaptation. (2) The learned, cumulative product of all social life. (3) The distinctive patterns of thought, action, and values that characterize the members of a society or social group (4) A series of mutually incompatible concepts, developing after the Second World War:

 (a) in social anthropology, the arrangements of belief and custom through which social relations  are expressed;

 (b) in materialist studies, the patterned knowledge, techniques, and behavior through which humans adapt to the natural world;

(c) in ethnoscience, a set of standards for behavior considered authoritative within a society;

(d) in symbolic studies, a system of meanings through which social life is interpreted.

Robert Winthrop (1991) Dictionary of Concepts in Cultural Anthropology. NY: Greenwood Press. p. 50

Culture is "an ideal of human perfection...increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy."

Matthew Arnold (1869: 64) Culture and Anarchy

 "Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is  that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."

E.B.Tylor (1871:I:1) Primitive Culture

 "Culture may be defined as the totality of the mental and physical reactions and activities that characterize the behavior of the individuals composing a social group collectively and individually in relation to their natural environment, to other groups, to members of the group itself and of each individual to himself.   It also includes the products of these activities and their role in the life of the groups.  The mere enumeration of these various aspects of life, however, does not constitute culture.  It is more, for its elements are not independent, they have a structure."

Franz Boas (1963--orig. 1938) The Mind of Primitive Man. New York: Macmillan. p. 149.

"Culture is a class of things and events, dependent upon symboling, considered in an extrasomatic context."

Leslie White (1959) "The Concept of Culture" American Anthropologist 61(2)

"Man employs the organs of his body in the process of adjustment to and control over his environment, as do other animals. But in addition to these somatological mechanisms, man, and man alone, possesses an elaborate extrasomatic mechanism which he employs in the process of living. This extrasomatic mechanism, this traditional organization of tools, customs, language, beliefs, etc.., we have called culture.

A culture, or sociocultural system, is a material, and therefore a thermodynamic system. Culture is an organization of things in motion, a process of energy transformations. Whether it be chipping an arrowhead, catching a fish, hoeing a hill of beans, avoiding your mother-in-law, calling your father's sister's son "father," performing a ritual, playing a game, regarding a churinga with awe, or breathing a silent prayer, the event is an expression of energy transformations that is dependent upon symboling."

Leslie White "Energy and Tools"

 "Culture consists of the more or less organized system of learned, prescribed understandings complexly shared by a group of people."

 Marc J. Swartz

 "Culture is all those means whose forms are not under direct genetic control...which serve to adjust individuals and groups within their ecological communities"

Lewis Binford

"The culture concept comes down to behavior patterns associated with particular groups of peoples, that is to "customs" or to a people's way of life."

Marvin Harris

"A society's culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members.  Culture is not a material phenomenon; it does not consist of things, people, behavior, or emotions.  It is rather an organization of these things.  It is the form of things that people have in mind, their models for perceiving, relating , and otherwise interpreting them...

Culture....consists of standards for deciding what is...for deciding what can be, ...for deciding what one feels about it,...for deciding what to do about it, and...for deciding how to go about doing it.  "

 Ward Goodenough

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