What is "culture"?

[synthesis]

I really have no idea. I'm inclined to say that it's a meaningless term in and of itself, but I'm open to other ideas.

[Friedrich]

Culture is the practices and beliefs of a set of people.
I think it's a pretty open term, but that is the "correct" definition of it.

[BuddhaInBabylon]

this is a really good question, and one which could take volumes to accurately describe. I think the differentiation between ethnic type culture and individualistic family type culture needs to be made somewhere though....(by the way, those terms, i pulled straight out of my ass) That is to say, i don't think culture is where you are born, or what language you speak, though these things contribute to the overall culture which you manifest....I was born American, but what the fuck is American culture???? This country is no one thing. ALL peoples make up/ made this country...I come from Irish/German immigrants but do not speak german or gaelic, but resemble europeans physically in my appearance...so what is culture indeed....
I embody hip hop culture sometimes and sometimes i am straight up death metal. My roots are backwoods Pennsylvania, but my current mindest reflects the city....which is really who i am? neither? both? i don't know.....:confused:

[¿Que?]

The technical definition is something along the lines of norm, values and beliefs (and I guess certain practices as well). However, culture is not homogeneous and much easier to transcend than social structure.

[Hiero]

Culture is the practices and beliefs of a set of people.
I think it's a pretty open term, but that is the "correct" definition of it.

I was going to say nearly the same thing.

I am doing my honours in cultural anthropology, and the term is a difficult one. I am looking at identity, which I am begining to look as a pragamatic position people take that draws from culture, nation, ethnicity. And culture can mean many things in the eyes of the person who identifies as this or that. It could mean a mirco thing like how one attends the beach or a huge meta narrative like mateship.

One possible way of looking at culture is the same as race. While races do not exist the beliefs in race lead to race categories. The same can be applied to culture and cultures. It would be interesting to look at the universality (if there is any) of the term culture.

[lines]

I would say culture consists of a number of components:
1. The language people speak
2. Their religion or lack of religion
3. Some basic philosophical worldviews such as level of individualism and level of collectivism.
4. Attitudes towards sexual issues.
5. Favorite sports
6. Favorite foods and diet in general
7. Games/hobbies
8. The people considered as heroes by that group of people
9. Their style of sense of humor.
10. The content of their media and entertainment... and their literature

So basically to sum it all up I would say that culture is the beliefs and activities that a group of people hold in common.

[Oswy]

I really have no idea. I'm inclined to say that it's a meaningless term in and of itself, but I'm open to other ideas.

At the most basic level anything that can't be restricted to basic biological activities. To put it bluntly, taking a shit isn't cultural, wiping your arse with toilet paper is :lol:

If you can do something without it being learned or made we might say it is not cultural, if there is learning or manufacture involved, then it is cultural.

[Thirsty Crow]

I really have no idea. I'm inclined to say that it's a meaningless term in and of itself, but I'm open to other ideas.

No, it is not a meaningless term.
It refers to human activity which cannot be placed under the category of economic activity (production and exchange).
There are at least two versions of "culture":

1) the arts - literature, music, painting, etc. These activities do not satisfy immediate human needs so they ought to be distinguished from those that do.

2) the whole way of life - this is a tricky concept, but in my opinion, it may be useful. In this instance, the before mentioned activities and its relations - productive relations - are "wrapped up" by certain modes of behaviour, practices, rituals, all of which are employed in signification or, in other words, producing meaning. Here culture "interferes" in the area of the purely economic. One example would be the practices and forms of heroic masculinity of the assembly workers (automobile industry) which are described in Paul Willis' Shop Floor Culture, Masculinity and the Wage Form (this is a great Marxian account of cultural practices within the confines of capitalist productive relations; unfortunately, I haven't been able to find it online for free, but I recommend it strongly; it was published in Working-Class Culture. Studies in History and Theory).

And Oswy is completely right to counterpose basic biological activities and cultural activities (in this sense, it is almost the same to say "cultural" and "social" activities; both connote coded, "artificial" modes of human behaviour).

[Revolution starts with U]

In anthropological terms culture is broken down to a pretty simple explanation, and these make it almost exclusively a human/hominid phenomenon; behavior that is learned through teaching, rather than observation.
Language, religion, politics, music, art, science, technology, etc... in other words "society."

[synthesis]

It refers to human activity which cannot be placed under the category of economic activity (production and exchange).

So whatever it is people define as "culture" is completely discrete from economic activity? :lol:

[Thirsty Crow]

So whatever it is people define as "culture" is completely discrete from economic activity? :lol:
No, I did not intend to imply that, it's just that such a viewpoint represents a useful methodological "fiction" which can be used to produce specific and mostly valid knowledge about cultural phenomena.
And please not the second "definition" of the term. I think that it is the most useful one. And exactly here economic and cultural activity are explicitly conbnected.

[RevLeftist]

I've seen all your answers and gentlemen, don't define culture as civilization, both are similiar in definition but diferent.

[blake 3:17]

The Left classic on Culture is Raymond William's Culture and Society. He wrote it after going back to university after serving in the Second World War and realized that words like culture and society had very different meanings to people of slightly different ages.

From the Introduction:
The fifth word,culture, similarly changes, in the same critical period. Before this period, it had meant, primatily, the 'tending of natural growth', and then, by analogy, a process of human training. But this latter use, which had usually been a culture of something, was changed, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, to culture as such, a thing in itself. It came to mean, first, 'a general state or habit of the mind', having close relations with the idea of human perfection. Second, it came to mean 'the general state of intellectual development, in a society as a whole'. Third, it came to mean 'the general body of the arts'. Fourth, later in the century, it came to mean 'a whole way of life, material, intellectual, and spiritual'. It came also, as we know, to be a word which often provoked either hostility or embarrassment.

Italics from the original.

Alan O'Connor's second book on Williams is an excellent introduction to Williams' thought. Text: http://books.google.com/books/p/rowman_littlefield?id=b3EoxpJYw0IC&printsec=frontcover&dq=alan+o'connor&ei=HXPMTPyND4LWNfKuuP0O&ie=ISO-8859-1&cd=1#v=onepage&q&f=false

[noble brown]

from what ive learned, culture is the body of knowledge passed down from one generation to another. it may be art, music or tool making. the key here being that it must be passed down, in other words taught. if its not taught then its not cultural.

under this definition (widely used by them smart ppl) its not strictly a human condition. all a species needs to be capable of to have its own culture is live in social grps and the capacity to learn and to teach.

most chimps and bonobos exibit culture. perhaps even some of the smarter birds like the ravens, they seem to have a "tool culture".

now they have done experiments w/ octopi, who are very intelligent, and because they arent social enough to form social grps dont have a culture. they are capable of learning very complex tasks from watching another octopi perform them but there is no 'body of knowledge' cause there is no social grp to pitch in and pass on.\\

i believe most anthropologist these days subscribe to this definition.