Culture (Anthropology)

Reference entry · last updated September 5, 2026

Culture, in anthropology, is the body of knowledge, belief, custom and habit that people acquire as members of a society, as distinct from what they inherit biologically. Edward Burnett Tylor gave the founding definition in 1871: “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.”[1] Later definitions keep the same three properties. Culture is learned, it is shared by a group, and it passes between people rather than through genes.[3]

Etymology

The modern term descends from Latin cultura, cultivation. Cicero used it figuratively in the Tusculanae Disputationes, where he wrote of a cultivation of the soul, cultura animi.[4] The agricultural sense and the sense of personal refinement both survive in English. The anthropological sense, a whole society's learned way of life, dates from the nineteenth century.

Definitions

Tylor's definition opens Primitive Culture (1871). Its scope is deliberately wide: knowledge, belief, art, morals, law and custom together, with a catch-all for any other acquired capability or habit.[1] The definition places culture on the side of acquisition. Whatever a person learns as a member of society counts.

By the middle of the twentieth century the term had multiplied. Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn surveyed the accumulated definitions in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (1952).[11]

Clifford Geertz, in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), shifted the emphasis from inventory to meaning. “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun,” he wrote. “I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning.” The method he proposed for reading those webs is thick description.[5]

An institutional definition appears in the preamble of the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, adopted 2 November 2001: culture “should be regarded as the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group, and that it encompasses, in addition to art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs.”[2]

Cultural evolution researchers use a narrower working definition: culture is socially learned information stored in individuals' brains that is capable of affecting behavior. Social learning here means copying behaviour observed in others or acquiring it by being taught.[3] Humans acquire culture through enculturation and socialization.[4]

Transmission and cultural evolution

Dual inheritance theory, also called gene-culture coevolution, developed from the 1960s through the early 1980s to explain human behaviour as the product of two interacting evolutionary processes, genetic evolution and cultural evolution. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman published foundational dynamic models in 1976. Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson's Culture and the Evolutionary Process (1985) became the field's standard reference.[3]

On this account a cultural trait behaves like an inherited trait with a different channel. It varies between individuals, it is transmitted by social learning, and some variants spread while others die out. The same three processes, variation, transmission and selection, are the ones a later literature uses to ask what happens when machines join the population of learners and teachers (see Machine culture).

Subculture and counterculture

A subculture is a group of people within a cultural society that differentiates itself from the values of the mainstream or dominant culture. Dick Hebdige, in Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), argued that members signal membership through a distinctive style: fashions, mannerisms and argot.[6]

A counterculture is a culture whose values and norms of behaviour are opposed to those of the current mainstream society, and sometimes diametrically opposed to mainstream cultural mores. John Milton Yinger proposed the term contraculture in a 1960 American Sociological Review article. Theodore Roszak's The Making of a Counter Culture (1969) carried the word into general use.[7] Subcultures differ from countercultures: a subculture can coexist with the mainstream it marks itself off from, while a counterculture defines itself against it.[6]

Organizational culture

The term transfers to firms and other organizations. Organizational culture is the set of shared norms, values and behaviours in an organization. Edgar Schein, in Organizational Culture and Leadership (1992), defined it as a shared pattern of basic assumptions that group members acquire over time as they learn to cope with internal and external problems.[8] The anthropological properties carry over unchanged: the assumptions are learned on the job, shared across the group, and passed to newcomers.

Culture as an explanation

Culture is often invoked to explain why a country, firm or team underperforms. Benjamin R. Punongbayan, writing in BusinessWorld in September 2024 on the claim that Filipino culture is “damaged” and inhibits economic growth, argued that the claim cannot be assessed until the term is fixed. Combining two dictionary senses, he adopted a working definition of Filipino culture as “shared beliefs, attitudes, values, behavior, practices, and goals of the Filipino nation,” with “shared” meaning held by most rather than all, and only then asked which traits could plausibly affect growth.[9]

The methodological point generalizes. A culture-based explanation is testable only once it names which shared beliefs or practices do the causal work and what evidence would separate them from institutional or historical causes of the same outcome.

Machine culture

Brinkmann and fourteen co-authors introduced the term machine culture in a 2023 Nature Human Behaviour perspective for culture mediated or generated by machines. They argue that intelligent machines simultaneously transform the cultural evolutionary processes of variation, transmission and selection: recommender algorithms alter social learning dynamics, chatbots form a new mode of cultural transmission by serving as cultural models, and machines contribute cultural traits directly, from game strategies and visual art to scientific results.[10] The framework treats machines as participants in the same three processes that dual inheritance theory uses for humans, rather than as a separate phenomenon.

References

↑ Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom, vol. 1, London: John Murray, 1871. Full view of the 1920 Murray printing: https://archive.org/details/primitiveculture01tylouoft. Definition as quoted in Wikipedia, “Culture.”
↑ UNESCO, Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, adopted 2 November 2001, preamble. https://www.unesco.org/en/legal-affairs/unesco-universal-declaration-cultural-diversity
↑ Wikipedia, “Dual inheritance theory.” Definition of the theory, Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1976), Boyd and Richerson (1985), and the working definition of culture as socially learned information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_inheritance_theory
↑ Wikipedia, “Culture.” Etymology from Cicero's cultura animi; enculturation and socialization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture
↑ Wikipedia, “Clifford Geertz,” quoting The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Geertz
↑ Wikipedia, “Subculture.” Definition; Hebdige (1979). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subculture
↑ Wikipedia, “Counterculture.” Definition; Yinger (1960), Roszak (1969). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterculture
↑ Wikipedia, “Organizational culture.” Definition; Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership: A Dynamic View (1992). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational_culture
↑ Benjamin R. Punongbayan, “Does Filipino culture hinder economic development?”, BusinessWorld, MAP Insights, 3 September 2024. https://www.bworldonline.com/opinion/2024/09/03/617541/does-filipino-culture-hinder-economic-development/
↑ Levin Brinkmann, Fabian Baumann, Jean-François Bonnefon et al., “Machine culture,” Nature Human Behaviour, 2023, doi:10.1038/s41562-023-01742-2. Free full text (preprint): https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.11388
↑ Alfred L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, vol. 47, no. 1, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum, 1952.