WHAT IS CULTURE?
“Culture” is a word with many meanings. The doctors speak of making a “culture” of a certain kind of bacteria, and ants are said to have a “culture.” Then there is the Emily Post kind of “culture”—you say a person is “cultured,” or that he isn’t, depending on such things as whether or not he eats peas with his knife.
The anthropologists use the word too, and argue heatedly over its finer meanings; but they all agree that every human being is part of or has some kind of culture. Each particular human group has a particular culture; that is one of the ways in which we can tell one group of men from another. In this sense, a CULTURE means the way the members of a group of people think and believe and live, the tools they make, and the way they do things. Professor Robert Redfield says a culture is an organized or formalized body of conventional understandings. “Conventional understandings” means the whole set of rules, beliefs, and standards which a group of people lives by. These understandings show themselves in art, and in the other things a people may make and do. The understandings continue to last, through tradition, from one generation to another. They are what really characterize different human groups.