What is Culture?

Updated September 9, 2022 | Kristin Templin

How we live

In today’s society, words like corporate culture, popular culture, and culture shock are tossed around like candy but when you are looking for the definition of culture, you may find yourself bogged down with a myriad of different versions of what this word actually means. We all know that we have cultural differences. Countless cultural studies have been done around the world to prove this. But what exactly is culture?

So...What is culture?

UNESCO has defined culture as a “set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual, and emotional features of society or a social group, and that it encompasses, in addition to art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs."

There are also other ways to define culture. For instance, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary considers culture to be the “characteristic features of everyday existence (such as diversions or a way of life) shared by people in a place or time” and/or “the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization”.

Regardless of the array of definitions, the word's etymology stems from the Latin word colere which means to “till the soil” in connection to nurturing or cultivating something. Nearly every time that the word culture is used in regards to human behavior, it is a way to define the practices that people follow and create a social group out of these.

In the broadest of definitions, culture is simply the way of life for a particular group of people. It is how people live. Aspects of culture language that they communicate with, the value system that they have, and the religion that they follow. In this respect, a culture is really just the sum of all of its parts and almost any social group, no matter how big or small it is, can have its own culture.

How do we study culture?

Culture is made up of an array of both tangible and intangible aspects of our daily lives. From the way we dress to the things we value, culture is a complex entity and for centuries, scholars have tried to make sense of it. Anthropology which means “the study of man” arose as a field of study as a result.

Although modern anthropology is considered by some to simply be an extension of the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century, anthropology as a scientific discipline dates back much further than that. One of the first scholars to create a work that could be considered anthropological research was Herodotus, who chronicled the Greco-Persian Wars in the 5th century BC. Other scholars produced research that could also be considered anthropological in nature including Abu Rayhan al-Biruni during the Islamic Golden Age and Marco Polo in the late 13th century.

Over hundreds of years, one of the most important ways that scholars have developed a wider viewpoint on cultures and how they relate to one another is by categorizing and coding them. This allows them to see similarities and differences amongst cultures and has formed the basis of much research.

Whether or not these categorizations have been successful is often up for debate and throwing blanket terms such as western culture or eastern culture across multiple population groups can sometimes be very problematic and offensive. "American culture" is a really good example of this. The United States is comparable in size to Western Europe and has people living there whose ancestors originally came from across the globe. While the country has done a pretty good job at being a melting pot, is it really possible to say that the culture of New York City is the same as the culture of, let's say, rural Alabama?

Arabic culture is another troublesome example of categorizing human beings into cultures. Although Arab culture spans the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa, is it really possible to classify the highly secular and relatively stable country of Tunisia to the unstbale, deeply religious country of Yemen? Do countries like this have more differences than they do similarities? If so, they are really the same culture?

Many more examples of indisputable differences within cultures can be found across continents, regions, and countries and this makes it important to consider where real anthropological research and categorization ends and where stereotyping begins. Furthermore, while some of the issues related to categorization are "solved" by identifying subcultures, many more are created as a result.

Although categorizing social groups, traditions, material items, etc into cultures can obviously cause a few issues, it still forms an important basis both on how scholars view different societies and how we view each other.

The Blending of Cultures

When people talk about cultures, they often describe them as things that are set in stone and absolute. Or as something that shouldn’t be judged by those outside of the culture itself, an idea commonly referred to as cultural relativism. But, culture change happens all the time due to internal and external pressure.

In some aspects, it is very difficult to change a culture from the outside without using force and in many cases, there is no reason to. Instead, cultures are constantly developing and adapting to the world around them. As the world has become more and more globalized, this has often meant that different cultures are sharing more and more of the same characteristics. It also means that in some areas of the world where social groups were marginalized within a certain culture, the playing field has finally been leveled a bit.

One of the most well-known, and historically-significant cultural blends occurred along the Ancient Silk Road. This trading route blended together western, eastern, and African cultures while products and ideas spread across Eurasia.

In addition to trade, colonialism, slavery, and human migration have also created unique cultural blends. We can still see many examples of cultural amalgamation around the world today whether it be in the Afro-Caribbean music of Cartagena, the Indo-Islamic architecture of Delhi, or the multilingual state of Switzerland.

There are countless examples throughout history and across the globe of instances where cultural change, adaptation, and blending occurred and honestly, we are incredibly lucky that it did. Culture is important both on a micro-level and on a macro-level. This is how societies have come up with some of the most important developments of their time and have shaped the world in inconceivable ways.