Dear Christa King,

Yes, you have very valid arguments here. Meantime, the modernization and later on globalization has contributed considerably for reshaping the  local culture. See my article on this.

Article Globalisation and Construction of Local Culture in Rural Sri Lanka

I completely agree with you explanation and questions you are posing. I have wondered this about theoretical frameworks that focus on cultural construction (e.g., Vygotsky) - isn't now understood that everything in our "culture" and/or society affect the way we see the world? therefore it would be useful to fully contextualize what the individual cultures we are referring to and specify the ways in which we understand them.

You are right: any term like "culture" is always going to be difficult to define without some uncertainties and qualifications. Surely, though, that uncertainty is not only an inherent part of qualitative judgment, but a necessary part of both preserving its ethical autonomy and our ability to respond to its ever-evolving challenges. Judgments about what separates one culture from another are not totalizing categories, but fluid terms that are open to question and negotiation. It is a fallacy that knowledge has to be certain for it to have validity - in the world of lived experience, which is where culture resides, what matters is a pragmatism that allows us to change and shift in order to accommodate and understand the fluid values that make up any culture.

 If you are looking for an understanding of the generative forces of the social fabric I would imagine that Clifford Geertz 'web of significance (taken from Van Geenep) would be useful or Victor Turners "Forest of Symbols' in that human social interactions are primarily preformative, Indeed the work of Rene Girard is or particular use including his theory of 'mimesis' as described in 'violence and the sacred'. I do not hold the same religious views as Girard but his explanation of social generative forces is most enlightening

Certainly, but it is necessary to say that culture can not only be a list of characteristics because as Geertz pointed out, culture is both a network of meanings in which we are immersed and on which we depend and also something with which we act for generate new symbolic forms. Hence, that in postcolonial cultural spaces what is viable is not so much to make a list of characteristics of each culture interested but to interpret the forms of rewritings that are given.

Yes Mauro good point I would also include the work of Pierre Bourdieu and his concept of over lapping social 'fields' giving rise to 'habitus' which also dovetails nice with the work of R. Girard. This all gets very speculative because of the diminishing returns focusing on a overly general term such as 'culture' however I believe that the work of Bourdieu and Gerard (particularly the concept of 'symbolic violence') holds great promise in conceptualizing a more complete understanding of social generative forces and their attendant symbolic, linguistic and mythical implications.

Hi David and Christa,

Indeed Bourdieu's ideas about influences of external social factors and habitus would be good to look into. Lata

Attempts to define terms like "culture" do not really get us far beyond the basic description by Raymond Williams who, of course, reminds us that the current meanings of the term "culture" only emerged in the 19th century and that before then "culture" meant "agriculture". A more recent caveat was formulated by Graeme Turner (in a public talk) who reminded his audience that the most frequent use of "culture" is in biology (cell cultures). 

So I believe that it would be useful to concentrate our research on how different social groups relate to cultural practices. The underlying question, then, would NOT be "what IS culture?" but INSTEAD "what does culture DO?" What does culture do to the people who identify (in some ways) with it? And what does it mean to identify with any culture? These questions have been asked before, but I believe that new answers can be found in light of recent research, especially in the study of emotions. 

Finally, allow me to say how excited I am to read such a long list of carefully considered and intelligent replies. I was grateful to be reminded of the the work by Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, Bourdieu, Zizek, etc, who each in their way propose a way round the problem of definition. Thank you all for your time. And I hope that you will find the time to reply again. 

The main problem is that the term culture falsely objectivises. Roger Keesing long ago pointed out that one should not speak of culture or cultures but of the cultural. Like Keesing I would also insist that the cultural is inseparable from the social (to speak of society also falsely objectivises).

So a good way of conceiving of things is that the cultural consists of the varieties of knowledge and skills a person requires to be a competent participant in social life.

In addition to Williams' examination of the term rooted in 'cultivation', it's worth noting the role that the Boasian school in the early 20th century US played in helping popularise notions of 'cultures', in order explicitly to cut against the biological determinism of much 19th century anthropology (as George Stocking argued). While this approach is (arguably) limited by its liberalism and tendencies toward relativism, it represented an important anti-racist move at the time.

But debates about the limitations of the notion of 'culture' have been playing out for a long time in anthropology, building on Keesing's arguments, including among many anthropologists influenced by post-colonial theory. Lila Abu-Lughod in her 1991 piece "Writing Against Culture" also put forward one of the most salient critiques: that the term 'culture' is reifying (implying sharply bounded separate entities), totalising (that 'cultures' are somehow singular wholes), and lends itself too easily to static functionalist interpretations, in which process, transformation, history, etc are missing. Along similar lines, Talal Asad took issue with Clifford Geertz's interpretation of cultural institutions as meaning-making processes, which Asad suggested tends to efface issues of power, ideology and practice.

The other problem with 'culture' in this relativist sense (as well as in its sense as 'cultured' or 'cultivated'), is that it carries connotations as encompassing those aspects of (human) life that are not 'natural', indeed that humans create or produce out of the 'natural'. Thus the term is rooted in oppositions of biology-vs-social-life, nature-vs-culture that are arguably culturally and historically contingent to particular dominant strands of contemporary Western philosophy.

The term 'cultural' thought of as processual and contingent seems to have remained for many scholars a useful kind of vague heuristic device. But this doesn't solve the definitional problem of what makes something 'cultural'. Even the notion of 'globalisation' impacting local 'cultures' has been critiqued by post-colonial scholars, since too often globalisation is conflated with westernisation. In this, the Santa Cruz 'Worlding' project offers an intriguing avenue for understanding and foregrounding how ('cultural') formations, practices, ideas and processes are perpetually being connected, transformed, reconfigured and disarticulated, etc, on a world scale, without recourse to the reifying or static notions of 'culture'.

I will write about only from my experience with this matter. In trying to define what is culture we are faced at the danger to distort the defintion because we can have unconscious image according to which we define culture e.g. we can define culture in terms of our understanding of the world. What I have found in my research of Bulgarians (I`m Bulgarian) and Bulgarian Turks (the live in the same country) that different culture has different emotional responses on important questions like what is love, what is feminnity or musculinity, how man or women must behave to each other or to their children etc. In my dissertation I study the social character (Erich Fromm's concept) of these two etnicities and I have found different views about the world and of course different way of living. One of the important finding were that they have much in common because they live in the same country and are influenced by the same institutions and economic system. But what is prove that people act according their character sometimes independently from what is their best interest (doesn`t matter if we have in mind economic, health or some other interest). I don`t think that we must start from any definition in order to study different culture because this means that we have already a prerequisite about what is culture and what is not. But we must know the the peculiarities of a given culture - social, economic and so on.

Is this question not a reflection on how and why we begin to relate to ourselves and the world in habitual ways, of unknowing? 

 It is clear to anybody who has some cross-cultural experience that cultural differences and similarities exist. This is because typical value patterns are different from culture to culture and people position themselves in relation to a specific value pattern (without necessarily themselves sharing all those values). In order to talk about those differences, we need some sort of vocabulary. I think the cultural dimensions concepts as developed originally by Hofstede and later by Minkov and many others is useful for this - even though we should be conscious that anything that helps us focus on some aspects of culture may at the same time obscure attention to other aspects.

Thanks, Christa, and the various (thoughtful) respondents. Sorry it has taken me some time to reply.

You are certainly right, Christa, that “culture” is used in a range of ways and that most uses are simplifications. I take culture to be something along the lines of a set of patterns that recur across individual practical identities (i.e., individual skills, activities, interests, etc.) within a society. In other words, a culture comprises practical identities in the way that a language comprises individual competencies or idiolects. (The competence is a function of successful personal interaction, not of conformity to a putatively pre-existing, Platonic language.) The main simplification in treating culture is assuming uniformity, which in fact there is only partial overlap across practical identities. The diversity of practical identities is something we all recognize for in-groups (the home culture), but something we often fail to recognize in out-groups (foreign cultures)—hence the well-known tendency to find out-groups more uniform than in-groups.

This assumption of out-group uniformity is particularly pronounced in claims of cultural difference, which often reduce cultures to a single practice in any given area (e.g., attitudes toward women or marriage). Claims of literary universality do not, generally, assume cultural uniformity. This is in part due to the fact that they do not claim that all works are of a given sort. Assertions of literary universality are more typically claims that a certain pattern is one of the options available across unrelated traditions of literature and orature. For example, I have argued that romantic plots turn up in a wide range of cultures. In such stories, two people fall in love and are prevented from uniting due to some social problem, often parental interference—whether they are Romeo and Juliet, Layla and Majnun, Dusyanta and Sakuntala, or Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai. That doesn’t mean that all stories are romantic, that non-arranged marriages are common (or even possible) in a given society, or that there is any other sort of uniformity within cultures—or, for that matter, across cultures.

In sum, yes, people do tend to simplify the idea of culture. However, that simplification is typically more a problem with assertions of cultural difference than with claims that a particular literary feature or option is a universal, at least when claims of the latter sort are adequately specified.

"However, that simplification is typically more a problem with assertions of cultural difference than with claims that a particular literary feature or option is a universal"

Allow me to respectfully disagree - you're allowing yourself to get out of the problem too easily here. In literary analysis, one needs to be equally conscious as in other domains of one's own particular way of looking at the world. The idea that stories of 'romantic love' are universal, for example, may be a case in point.

My work in Sri Lanka attempted to analyse the contribution of recent global influences on the construction of local culture. See following articles

Article Globalisation and Construction of Local Culture in Rural Sri Lanka

Article EFFECT OF TRANSNATIONAL INTERVENTIONS OF ALIENATION AND BURE...

Well it also appears that most here are discussing ethnic r national cultures. However, culture can refer to other groups or communities. I don't mean the common everyday use as, business culture or academic culture  or company culture etc.  But there is useful content is for e.g. youth culture, and more recently hip-hop as culture.

Remember Boy George and The Culture Club ? One could contemplate their demeanor, song lyrics, sexual preference and general behavior and easily compose a list of characteristics to define a culture. I assume that is why they adopted the word "culture" into the name of their band. Or did they mean culture as in well-behaved, well-spoken, well-dressed (in their minds)? As Ms King pointed out, the term culture can be very ambivalent to describe the lifestyle of any group of individuals, past or present.

I do however agree with meneer Van Pinxteren that a vocabulary is essential to any deliberations on what makes people appear different from one another. In that respect, I would synthesize the meaning of "culture" is simply whatever makes us the opposite of homogenized creatures. How boring would it be if we were all exactly alike physically, mentally and behavior-wise. I think the force that created us enjoys variety as the spice of life.

All in all, I think defining people into cultures is the same as classifying chairs as furniture. Its just a communication tool albeit sometimes a dangerous one when utilized for making comparisons. No one ever compares a chair to a table and judges one as superior to the other.

Well maybe, but culture is much more than lifestyle, which is why there are the two words that mean 2 different things, lifestyle is lifestyle and culture is culture- different!

Thank you, Patrick, for guiding the conversation back to the role of universals in the discursive constructions of culture. 

My daily experience (teaching English literature in the Middle East) makes me intensely aware that cultural crossing is one of the most important human skills. It seems to me that the ability to cross boundaries is a deeply human survival skill. But how do we do it? Especially when we consider that we may not even be aware of the kinds of boundaries which we are crossing. 

I think that my particular situation highlights something that happens tacitly in less obvious fashion everywhere all the time. In any event, my current circumstances make me think about cultural boundaries in a different way. It goes without saying that there are different types of (cultural) boundary: but my personal experience has taught me that some boundaries are very easy to cross and some are as solid as brick walls. I have also noticed that there are days when cultural crossing is like a pleasant adventure, and there are days when (what I perceive to be) the same boundaries appear to be insurmountable. 

I raised this question on a forum devoted to literary universals because I believe that it is the possibility to appeal to universals that enables us to cross boundaries. Furthermore, I think that is by reading literature that we are familiarised with the idea that there are universally valid ways of responding to people and cultural practices.

A paradoxical, even key aspect of culture, is an ability to change. So how do we better appreciate contingency? One way would be to come to such an understanding through negative argument, about what approaches seem overly deterministic, and find a way to avoid them. More specifically, any approach that reduces culture to one aspect, one cognitive interest, or one level of society of another, becomes deterministic. To take a Kantian division of the disciplines, the arts, the technological sciences and politics, all have there owns arguments about how they are the key discipline. We cannot do anything unless we are well motivated, so the arts foreground expressive capacities. Politics emphasize that we can't do anything unless we have an organizational modus operandi (or we descend into civil war). The technological sciences emphasize that unless we get the science right, everything will collapse around our ears in a physical sense. So who is right? The answer could be that they are all right. Instead of seeking a determinate basis in any discipline, therefore, we need to understand how they form into  'assemblages' (see Deleuze and De Landa). Policy proposals (or similar) can thus be better appreciated as assemblages of the expressive, the political and the technical that have, therefore, a deeper reasoning than any one discipline alone can have. Social change therefore arises as a successful (or the most favored) assemblage comes to the fore. Cultural change could thus be re-appreciated as the disciplines form into co-construction and co-functioning assemblages that co-evolving new expressive, political and techno-scientific outcomes conjointly. Competition and cooperation still exist, but between assemblages rather then disciplines. Ultimately, beyond the agency/structure dichotomy, everything becomes a matter of design or re-design. Or, decentering design such that it becomes to be regarded as a capacity shared by all institutional, technological and artistic producers and consumers, becomes a key way to understand culture.

When human begins live together, as a society, in a particular area, they form several key habits and norms by which they live their life. Culture is the knowledge, language, values, customs, belief, food, attitudes, religion, morals that are passed from person to person and one generation to the next. Dominant culture consists of several sub cultures. Each sub culture provides its members with a different set of values and expectations. They share these norms with one another and collectively, this is called a culture. Culture is a collective phenomenon. Culture is a way of acting, a way of behaving; It is continually changing and dynamic. Culture is not inherited, it is learned

This is important because culture is dynamic, progressive and adaptable.

Dickson Adom

Hello:

In my experience as an ethnographic researcher I think that  It is important to conceptualize the understanding of cultures from the otherness, that is to see the "others" from the "us" because we are all part of humanity. Respect for others from the US is important to preserve the different worldviews around the world.

As a young immigrant to the US, I am bilingual as well as bicultural.  Thus I am, and have always been acutely aware of what is exactly "culture."  Thus, I don't understand what is to be changed or reconceptualized and certainly not "imagined.".

Consensus is an important part of a description of cultural identity (or culture). We are all members of several cultural communities. But some of these communities allow us to contribute to shaping its goals, while in other communities we have no power at all (regardless of whether this is the result of being a member of a very large community or for any  other reasons). In some communities, we may be tolerated, but not very easily. It is important to get away from thinking in binary terms: membership in a cultural community is no simple yes/no question. It is also not particularly useful to think about cultural boundaries as a line that divides "us" and "them".  

Well, a linguistic approach leads us pretty quickly into semantics. I guess a good starting point is Anna Wierzbicka's comparative studies on differences between semantic fields in which meanings are conjured in minds of individuals brought up in different cultures. Take her "Imprisoned in English" for an easy intro.

Culture is an umbrella term for the accepted ways of life within a group of people who have various cultural precepts such as moral values, norms, beliefs and actions that somehow distinct them from other societies while greatly shapes their way of life, thinking and choices. Though the entire way of life was handed down to the people by their great forebears which they learned in the society, culture is conservatory but open to slight transformations as time passes by in generations.

Who is that thnks of culture as diving "us and them"? As far as "binary," where I come from, people can use what ever tem they want to describe oneself, even in the national census of the goevernment. Anyone here knows exactely what is meant by biligual and bicultural, such as I am and there are millons like me, since we are a nation of immigrants. This is key to understanding that we are talking about nationality and country of orign and we are aware of various other cultures of mebership.

At a very abstract level, your questions leads to another one: how could "we" reconceptualize or reimagine 'culture' (or any other notion)?

The most simplistic way to do that, would be to create a new defintion and voilà. Reconceptualized!

Obviously, when people don't start using the word 'culture' with the new definition, but stick to their outdated use, there will be a slight problem.

This leads to the conclusion that a word does not mean what is refered to by its defintion. The meaning of a word follows from what people use it for.

The next hypothesis is that people use 'culture' when experiencing differences between them and others, which they do not relate to that other's individual characteristics but group under a more abstract term. As long as people have that experience, for which they need a word, reconceptualizing 'culture' will not lead to anything. It is not the use of the word 'culture' that creates the experience of perceived differences; the word is merely used to label/rationalize/explain the experience.

Apart from the impossibility to execute such a linguistic intervention across all cultures, it is the experience of felt differences that will require linguistic labels for its social expression.