Culture

Historical Perspective

Kroeber and Kluckhohn's definition represents a summary of what American anthropologists and social scientists would call culture in the 1940s and 1950s. In contrast with this definition, in the 1920s and 1930s, culture was simply defined as “the learned behavior.” However, Kroeber and Kluckhohn argued that although the concept of culture is based on the study of behavior and behavioral products, culture cannot be conceptualized as only the behavior or the investigation of behavior. Instead, part of culture consists of norms for or standards of behavior, and another part consists of ideologies justifying or rationalizing certain ways of behavior. Finally, every culture includes broad general principles of selectivity and ordering (“highest common factors”) about behavior.

Definitions of Culture

The word culture originates in Middle English (“a cultivated piece of land”) from the French word culture and from the Latin verb culturare (“to cultivate”). All versions of the word ultimately come from the early Latin colere (“to till or cultivate the ground”). A review of overarching themes and patterns in definitions of culture in various disciplines might be beneficial to our understanding of culture. Each theme has its own [Page 1098]strengths and weaknesses, and there are inevitable overlapping and interpenetrating relationships between and among themes.

Seven types or themes of definitions of culture can be listed:

• Structure/pattern: Definitions that look at culture in terms of a system or framework of elements (e.g., ideas, behavior, symbols, or any combination of these or other elements)
• Function: Definitions that see culture as a tool for achieving some end
• Process: Definitions that focus on the ongoing social construction of culture
• Product: Definitions of culture in terms of artifacts (with or without deliberate symbolic intent)
• Refinement: Definitions that frame culture as a sense of individual or group cultivation to higher intellect or morality
• Power or ideology: Definitions that focus on group-based power (including postmodern and postcolonial definitions)
• Group membership: Definitions that speak of culture in terms of a place or group of people, or that focus on belonging to such a place or group

Culture and Psychological Processes

Theories explaining culture from a perspective of psychological processes contribute to the understanding of the processes through which specific individuals' actions and behaviors influence the actions and behaviors of others and become norms, customs, and rituals. They help to explain how the specific clusters of thoughts and action can become commonly shared among some populations but not others. Biological foundations, motivational systems, affective/emotional systems, cognitive/communication systems, and linguistic perspective will be presented as five of the examples of psychological theories.

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