Culture (social)

Culture encompasses the processes, values and manifestations of historic civil society. In its modern connotation culture is widely understood to pertain to heterogenous, hybridised human customs, protocols and activities in the terrain of culture, media, sport, arts, heritage and tourism.

UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (2002) defined culture as "... the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of a society or a social group..." that "encompasses, in addition to art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs".

"Cultural Capital: Realising the potential of a world class city" (London, City Hall/Mayor of London 2004) states: "'Defining culture' - culture, media and sport.. the arts, tourism and sport; ancient monuments and sites; buildings and other structures which are of historical or architectural interest or which otherwise form part of the heritage..; museums and galleries; library services; archives; treasure, and antiquities of a movable nature; broadcasting, film production and other media of communication. as well as the broader creative industries, parks and open spaces".

Defining Culture

In 1973, Clifford Geertz's called culture the concept "around which the whole discipline of anthropology arose, and whose definition that discipline has been increasingly concerned to limit, specify, focus, and contain." Not all anthropologists would agree; Radcliffe-Brown, for example, preferred to define anthropology as the study of society, because he believed that culture "denotes, not any concrete reality, but an abstraction, and as it is commonly used a vague abstraction." On the work of defining culture, Radcliffe-Brown and most other anthropologists would agree with Geertz that one quickly finds oneself in a "conceptual morass." Edward Sapir suggested that there are three different uses for the term "culture" that get confused: he says the first definition of "culture is technically used by the ethnologist and culture-historian to embody any socially inherited element in the life of man, material and spiritual", the second definition "refers to a rather conventional ideal of individual refinement, built up on a certain modicum of assimilated knowledge and experience but made up chiefly of a set of typical reactions that have the sanction of a class and of a tradition of longstanding" and the third definition "aims to embrace in a single term those general attitudes, views of life, and specific manifestations of civilization that give a particular people its distinctive place in the world." To make matters more complicated, Geertz points out that even the way anthropologists use the term "culture" can be confusing; by way of demonstration, he points out:

In some twenty-seven pages of his chapter in the concept, Kluckhohn managed to define culture in turn as: (1) "the total way of life of a people"; (2) "the social legacy the individual acquires from his group"; (3) "a way of thinking, feeling, and believing"; (4) "an abstraction from behavior"; (5) a theory on the part of the anthropologist about the way in which a group of people in fact behave; (6) a "storehouse of pooled learning"; (7) "a set of standardized orientations to recurrent problems"; (8) "learned behavior"; (9) a mechanism for the normative regulation of behavior; (10) "a set of techniques for adjusting both to the external environment and to other men"; (11) "a precipitate of history"; and turning, perhaps in desperation, to similes, as a map, as a sieve, and as a matrix.