Defining culture

By 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn gathered 164 definitions of culture since the formal inception of the academic discipline of anthropology just 80 years earlier. They were in search of the primary focus of their field of study. Kroeber (right) fits the very image of what you'd expect in a cultural anthropologist. He just looks like he's looking for something, not to mention the giddy-up-and-go of Kluckhohn (below). It was apparently not a discipline to be practiced in the confines of a dusty library or sterlized laboratory.

Clyde Kluckhorn, Source: Long Riders Guild

Alfred Kroeber, Source: University of California Berkley

Their consolidated definition was a little wordy: “Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiment in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other as conditioning elements of further action." 

As far as anthropological writing goes, that kind of verbiosity is common. Clifford Geertz whittled it down a bit further by 1966 in his work The Interpretation of Cultures: "a 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 . . . " Almost there.

My favorite definition is from Christian anthropologist Paul Hiebert (1985): "Culture is the more or less integrated systems of ideas, feelings, and values and their associated patterns of behavior and products shared by a group of people who organize and regulate what they think, feel, and do."  It was a definition introduced to me by Bill Selvidge at Nazarene Theological Seminary in 2002 along with this image to the right.

More recently Brian Howell and Jenel WIlliams Paris have also made an attempt to define culture, this one found in their book Introducing Cultural Anthropology (2010) -- by the way, it's my textbook of choice since beginning to teach this course in the same year. In it, they define culture as "a total way of life of a group of people that is learned, adaptive, shared, and integrated."

Not to be outdone, each semester I give to my students a page of these definitions and a few more for good measure. They are then challenged to arrive at a definition of their own. Feeling guilty after doing this learning activity the first time, I realized I needed to come up with a definition of my own. Since then, I have arrived at what I'll call a working definition. It's still in process, and knowing me, not all the way thought through. I have used it at the annual Cross Cultural Orientation (CCO) for World Mission, a training session for outward bound missionary candidates for the Church of the Nazarene. There I defined culture as "a shared way of life for a particular group passed on from generation to generation through a highly adaptive array of symbols, practices, behaviors, and values that enable them to create and enjoy a world in which they live from the raw materials God has provided."Basically, it's what humans think about and do wherever they find themselves. Whatever we think about a culture different than ours, it is certainly the case that we've only begun to scratch the surface.

How would you define "culture"? 

EDIT: As I said, this is a working definition of culture. So, I've already needed to add a bit. Here is my new definition: Culture is "a shared way of life for a particular group passed on from generation to generation through a highly adaptive array of symbols, practices, behaviors, and values that enable them to create and enjoy a world in which they live from the raw materials God has provided."