Culture

In popular uses of ‘culture’, the term often refers to sets of artistic accomplishments or pleasant manners. In anthropology, however, ‘culture’ means something much broader and its use includes all the socially shared components of human thought, feeling, and behaviour. This comprehensive notion of culture has been with the discipline right from its start, and for many practitioners, it has defined its subject matter. Since the 1990s, however, culture's continued usefulness has been questioned: critics fear that studying culture encourages overly rigid and exaggerated understandings of human difference. This entry reviews the history of and controversy about culture in anthropology and then turns to what we know about the social sharing of thought and behaviour. It starts by showing that some animals have culture too, although human reliance on culture is far more extensive, includes cumulative achievements, and also affects human genes. The entry then discusses whether the scope of culture is shrinking in global modernity, illustrates that culture is not exclusively ideational, and makes the case for seeing culture less as a straightjacket and more as a toolbox, one that can be studied systematically. Popular usage of ‘culture’ as a term or concept often comes with misconceptions, such as the idea that cultures are clearly bounded and static entities. While this troublingly lends itself to ethnic and nationalist discrimination, other public uses such as in the rise of cultural heritage have a benign side too. Confusion between the everyday and the elitist notions of culture continues to be widespread in public discourse. In anthropology, no broadly supported alternative to the concept has emerged yet, and as an empirical phenomenon, culture (however labelled) continues to be central to the discipline.