Culture is core to a sustainable society, but what is meant by “culture” and how do we define the word?
On culture, Francis Fukuyama wrote: “A thriving civil society depends on a people’s habits, customs, and ethics – attributes that can be shaped only indirectly through conscious political action and must otherwise be nourished through an increased awareness and respect for culture.” Max Weber, similarly, wrote, “The significance of the nation is usually anchored in the superiority, or at least the irreplaceability, of the culture values that are to be preserved and developed only through the cultivation of the peculiarity of the group.” To paraphrase Fukuyama and Weber on culture: The significance of a nation is anchored in the thriving civil society, which depends on the people’s awareness of, and respect for, the irreplaceability of their culture.
In defining “culture” we come to some difficulty: there are as many definitions of “culture” as there are authors on the subject. Let’s aggregate several of these in order to attempt a universal definition. Culture is:
- “… an intergenerational transfer of past experience.” – Elinor Ostrom
- “… a learned meaning system that consists of patterns of traditions, beliefs, values, norms, meanings and symbols that are passed on from one generation to the next and are shared to varying degrees by interacting members of a community.” – Ting-Toomey & Chung
- “… a deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, actions, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and artifacts acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.” – Samovar & Porter
- “… a learned set of shared perceptions about beliefs, values, norms which affect the behaviors of a relatively large group of people.” Lustig & Koester
- “… what gives people a sense of who they are, of belonging, of how they should behave, and of what they should be doing.” – Moran & Harris
Dynamic, ethnocentric, and integrated, “culture” encompasses a range of phenomena transmitted through social learning in human societies. A group’s culture, influenced by internal developments and external interactions, and transmitted through enculturation, acculturation, and assimilation, changes over time, in a process of continuous evolution, from either discovery and innovation, borrowing and diffusion, or acculturation and long-term contact with another culture; as such, it seems obvious and important to note that a culture must adapt with a people in order to survive.
Taking from the above, we can define “culture” thusly:
“Culture” is a dynamic, ethnocentric, integrated, learned, and shared social system of knowledge, traditions, beliefs, ideas, values, roles, norms, meanings, and symbols that defines a group of people and their way of life, represents an intergenerational transfer of past experience, is influenced by internal developments and external interactions, changes over time in a process of continuous evolution, is acquired through individual and group striving, and provides for psychological needs such as belonging and prestige.
Thanks for reading!