Edward Burnett Tylor published his seminal definition in 1881: ‘‘Culture, or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.’’ Culture was the central focus of inquiry within the discipline Franz Boas nurtured, though he himself did not formally define culture until his career was nearly over. Tylor considered culture to be a thing and used the term in the singular form - culture in the wholistic sense. Boas highlighted the fact that there were many different cultures, each comprising its own more or less unique, historically contingent set of cultural traits - culture in the partitive sense.
In 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled more than 160 definitions of culture from the literature, and sorted them into seven categories (descriptive, historical, normative, psychological, structural, genetic, incomplete). Kroeber and Kluckhohn defined culture as a ‘‘set of attributes and products of human societies, and therewith of mankind, which are extrasomatic and transmissible by mechanisms other than biological heredity.’’ This definition has analytical utility, because it comprises a theory of culture in the sense that it explains how individuals in a group acquire their behavioral repertory - they learn those behaviors rather than inherit them genetically. What individuals learn concerns not only acceptable behaviors but values, beliefs, attitudes, and otherwise arbitrary meanings of phenomena, such as the fact that holy water is more than merely wet. Leslie White argued throughout his career that man alone had the ability to assign symbolic meaning to otherwise natural phenomena and to anthropogenic phenomena. Conceptions of culture as ideological and transmitted nonbiologically served the historical ethnology or historical particularism school of thought. This school was interested in writing the history of cultural phenomena. Cultural transmission was accomplished by enculturation and socialization between members of a group, and diffusion between groups comprising different cultures.
Culture has also been conceived of as an adaptive system. Perhaps the most famous, or at least well known among archaeologists, definition of culture as an adaptive system was provided by Leslie White in 1959: ‘‘Culture [is] an extrasomatic mechanism employed by [humans] in order to make [their] life secure and continuous.’’ The notion that culture is adaptive was reinforced by Julian Steward’s cultural ecology. In Steward’s view, different technologies mediate the influence of different environments on culture. In White’s view, a culture is a ‘system’. It comprises various elements that are functionally (one might say mechanically) interrelated with other elements, all in a particular organizational configuration. White identified three basic subsystems of a culture: technology, social structure or relations, and ideology. White’s characterization of a culture as a system of elements in a particular structural-functional arrangement paralleled Bronislaw Malinowski’s conception of a culture.
If culture is ideological, it can develop or evolve and accumulate over time; what my grandparents learned is transmitted to my parents, who learn more; all of that accumulated knowledge is transmitted to me, and I can learn more and teach everything to my offspring. Cultural evolution occurs in part as a result of imperfect fidelity of transmission (e. g., learning error), and in part as a result of (necessary) adaptive change. Some argue that the cumulative property of culture allows it to be much more (adaptively) plastic than a biological gene pool, and that it also distinguishes human culture from what otherwise seems to be cultural behavior in nonhuman animals.
‘Culture’ in the wholistic sense can be conceived as accumulated, transmitted, and shared ideas, as an adaptive system, and as only ideological or ideological plus the empirical results of an ideology manifest in behaviors and by-products of behaviors (artifacts). A ‘culture’, in the partitive sense, comprises the particular set of ideas (and behaviors and behavioral byproducts) held more or less in common by a group of individuals that tend to also have a common language, occupy the same general area, and experience some degree of face-to-face contact.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the culture concept was criticized, it was said to be no longer central to anthropology, and it was argued to be an ideological position rather than a scientific concept. This assault continues today, prompting many anthropologists to retool what they take to be the fundamental concept of their discipline. Some still find definitions like Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s useful; others disagree. Nevertheless, the concept is useful when it is defined with an analytical purpose in mind. Part of the present difficulty is that until recently, individual cultures were conceived as units that were more or less bounded and autonomous. But cultures often are not bounded or autonomous. Social groups fission and fuse to varying degrees. The permeability of cultural boundaries, the discreteness of cultures, is historically unique and contingent, and may comprise the research question. The reification of discrete, ethnographically documented cultures influenced archaeology (see Anthropological Archaeology).
World History
