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The Concept and Definition of Culture
Human culture has been defined in many different ways. A central criticism of cultural anthropology as a science was that it could achieve no paradigmatic unity because it lacked even a clear definition in either an empirical or theoretical sense of its main object of study, human culture. This kind of criticism is abrogated largely by the clear understanding that whatever it is or seems to be, all people have culture and bear culture throughout their lives, and we know culture well by the dcultural differences we encounter between different peoples in the world. The complexity of culture belies simple formulation or even direct empirical definition. Lack of paradigmatic unity was made apparent by the rise of different paradigms and schools of theory and method depending upon the definition of culture that was held as being central to the understanding of humankind. Needless to say, hundreds of definitions of culture have been proferred as "the Definition" and each aanthropologist seems to have their own mind made up about what culture is or isn't in the world.
We have developed our own definition of culture that has been consonant with our cross-cultural research experience and with our elaboration of human systems theory. Our definition of human culture is:
The total patterning of shared behavior of a group or community of people who share a common language, tradition and worldview. Culture is symbolically organized and functions symbolically in the mediation and adaptation of human behavior to the environment, including social relationships. Cultural patterning interacts with individual psychology at all levels of its expression and articulation, and defines parameters of constraint and sanctions, direct and indirect, within which normal behavior is circumscribed and discrepant behavior marginalized.
This definition is both rationally deducible from human systems theory and empirically productive in that it provides us with a methodological handle by which we can empirically test and investigate culture in terms of shared response patterning to varying natural or controlled forms of stimuli. Sharing of response may be statistically measured and verified in many different ways and upon many different levels of analysis.
The links to the primary portals of this framework are found below:
