The Meaning of Culture

Culture is a term which is brandished with little regard to its actual meaning, likely due to the fact that there are hundreds of definitions trying to capture the essence of culture. One such definition, provided in a social psychology textbook, states that culture is ‘the enduring behaviours, ideas, attitudes, and traditions shared by a large group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next’ (Myers & Spencer, 12). While this is a workable explanation of culture, in that it captures the fact that culture is enduring (rather than transitory), shared by a large group and passed down through enculturation, all it states regarding the makeup of culture is that it consists of behaviours, idea, attitudes and traditions. This may seem like an all-encompassing collection of traits, but some (such as technology) are markedly absent, while others (like language and arts) are poorly encompassed by those listed. There is also some controversy regarding whether culture exists solely in humans; a less exclusive definition would include what cultural anthropologists insist on calling “behavioural variation” in primates (Stanford, 111), but this may just be a semantic