What is Culture?

Here is a question that's incredibly important to the study of anthropology, especially the field of cultural anthropology (Hmm...whoever would have thought that culture would be important to cultural anthropology?). So in the pursuit of anthropology, we must arrive at a definition of what culture is which quite thankfully for us has already been done in anthropology, most significantly by anthropologist Edward B. Tylor whom stated :

"Culture, or civilization, taken in its broad, ethnographic sense, 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."

Now what we have to do now, as trying to understand what Tylor essentially says is that culture is the full range of learned human behavior patterns. Where in any given, specific culture, these patterns would be styled differently and be in fact different from other cultures. This is a very handy definition, very simple and concrete which will allow us to perceive what exactly culture is.

However there are a few other terms used when talking about culture in general, there are theories of multiple levels of culture. That in complex multi-ethinc societies there is the primary culture of the entire society, that there are levels of sub-culture within any given society. For example, using the United States as a sample, African Americans, Japanese Americans and Mexican Americans would all be examples of sub-cultures within the greater American culture. Then even below the level of sub-cultures are the principles of cultural universals as proposed by George Murdock, Claude Levi-Strauss, Donald Brown and a few other anthropologists as well.

So there we have three essential tiers of Culture, the concept of the culture of societies as a whole, of sub cultures within a greater society and then below all cultures and sub cultures the underlying themes of cultural universals. To clarify what exactly these cultural universals are they have been defined as an element, pattern, trait or institution that is common to all human cultures worldwide.

This is the point, especially considering that I just mentioned societies that I need to mention that there is a distinct and very important difference between Cultures and Societies. The difference being that while cultures are complex constructions of learned behaviors and perceptions all a society is a group of interacting organisms. This is important because though cultures and societies are not the same thing they are absolutely and undeniably chained together, culture being created and constantly changed by societies. Because of this cultures are continuously changing, growing and evolving products of people's cooperation, conflict and interaction.