Culture: Definitions

1. Culture: Definitions

2. Matthew Arnold:Culture and Anarchy (1869) “But there is of culture another view, in which not solely the scientific passion, the sheer desire to see things as they are, natural and proper in an intelligent being, appears as the ground of it. There is a view in which all the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it, come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and pre-eminent part.

3. Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good.”

4. Raymond Williams:“Culture is Ordinary” (1958) “We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life--the common meanings; to mean the arts and learning--the special processes of discovery and creative effort. Some writers reserve the word for one or other of these senses; I insist on both, and on the significance of their conjunction. The questions I ask about our culture are questions about deep personal meanings. Culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind.”

5. Clifford Geertz:The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) "The concept of culture I espouse. . . is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after.”

6. “Once human behavior is seen as . . . symbolic action--action which, like phonation in speech, pigment in painting, line in writing, or sonance in music, signifies--the question as to whether culture is patterned conduct or a frame of mind, or even the two somehow mixed together, loses sense. The thing to ask [of actions] is what their import is."

7. John Bodley:Cultural Anthropology (1994) • I use the term culture to refer collectively to a society and its way of life or in reference to human culture as a whole. • Topical: Culture consists of everything on a list of topics, or categories, such as social organization, religion, or economy • Historical: Culture is social heritage, or tradition, that is passed on to future generations • Behavioral: Culture is shared, learned human behavior, a way of life

8. Normative: Culture is ideals, values, or rules for living • Functional: Culture is the way humans solve problems of adapting to the environment or living together • Mental: Culture is a complex of ideas, or learned habits, that inhibit impulses and distinguish people from animals • Structural: Culture consists of patterned and interrelated ideas, symbols, or behaviors • Symbolic: Culture is based on arbitrarily assigned meanings that are shared by a society

9. For our class (2004) • A complete set of meanings and values held by all socialized members of a society, influencing their patterns of behavior, with the material artifacts to implement these patterns, devised by people in communication with each other and passed along by them in the process of socialization, to govern their relations with each other and/or with nature.