People are Culture presents the definition of culture from a cross-section of 16 experts from around the world who have spent their careers working in the realm of culture. The backgrounds of these experts encompass a range of cultural disciplines: anthropology; vis
Since culture is both universal and personal, there is more than one accurate definition of culture. Culture is conceptual; it's a collective set of beliefs, behaviors, ideas, philosophies, and practices shared by groups of people. Different groups of people have different cultures but all social groups have a set of activities and values that they share and that is their culture.
Examples of culture that are shared by all societies include architecture, culinary arts, dance, festivals, folk art, language, and textiles.
Every group defines their culture, whether they do that formally or it's unspoken but understood.
You are an expert on your own culture! We invite you to share a comment with your thoughts on the definition of culture!
The Definition of Culture from 16 of the World's Leading Experts
Each expert gives comprehensive answers to the definition of culture and what is culture:
Rosy Greenlees, World Crafts Council
Rosy Greenlees, OBE, was the Executive Director of the World Crafts Council from 2006 to 2022. The World Crafts Council was established as a non-profit membership organization with the goal of fostering global interest in crafts and fostering international trade among artisans.
There are a number of ways in which one can express a definition of culture. There is culture as an expression of how we are as people and as communities, which is perhaps our traditions, our ways of doing things, how we express ourselves, the clothes that we wear, and so forth. There's the notion of culture which is perhaps slightly more narrowly defined, which is the artifacts that we produce, which represent our values, our ways of thinking about the world which obviously do include things like ceramics and paintings and music and all of those sorts of things. So for me, culture is a way of expressing ourselves as individuals and as communities.
It matters hugely for an obvious reason. It is an expression of being a human being. We are creative beings and we need to express our individuality and our being and our humanity. It is very very core of what we are as human beings. I think it also matters because I think it's a way of understanding other people, bringing people together, and recognizing differences as well as similarities. That is enormously important in the world, especially at the moment.
Amitava Bhattacharya, Banglanatak.org
Amitava Bhattacharya is the founder of Banglanatak.com. Banglanatak.
I'm an engineer by education and I worked in software in Silicon Valley for ten years. I came back to Calcutta and for more than two decades I have been in cultural development. So my answer to the definition of culture will be very practical and work-oriented. As I see it, culture is a skill of communities, which has the potential to develop into enterprises. Those enterprises have the potential to generate resources, which communities can share for their growth.
Culture is extremely important because culture defines a community. Without culture we all are dead. It actually adds life to people, communities, villages, countries, and to the world. So it is extremely important to nurture culture. I think it gives you your identity and it also helps you to interact with the world with your culture, as well as to learn about other cultures.
Mary Hawkes-Greene, Burren College of Art
Mary Hawkes-Greene is the President of the Burren College of Art, Co. Clare, Ireland.
Ideally, the definition of culture is kind of a collective set of beliefs, values, and norms that define how we are and how we live, and what's important to us. I suppose it's the spoken and the unspoken kind of tacit norms that bind us together as a society.
Culture is what gives us our identity; we're bound together by being on the planet but within that, our specific culture relates to the areas and the places and the societies in which we live. That's what differentiates us and makes the world the interesting place it is. Particularly in this age of globalization and homogenization, it really is vital that we're aware of our own culture and the other cultures that enhance the rich tapestry of life.
Anado-Mclauchlin, Assemblage Artist
Anado-Mclauchlin (deceased 2021) was a renowned Assemblage Artist and former owner of the art gallery at the Chapel of Jimmy Ray, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
The definition of culture to me is the byproduct and the essence of sentient beings living amongst one another. It's always a mystery what comes up, there's the culture of yogurt, there's a culture of ants, and there's a culture of humanity. But if you're speaking about human culture, to me it's always defined in different geographical locations and states of mind. So it's the byproduct of people living with one another.
Culture matters because it's the threads that intertwine with one another and create a tapestry of living. It's what this whole existence is about. I believe the human culture is just an amazing event that I’m very proud to be part of.
George Patterson, Tofino Botanical Garden
George Patterson is the Founder of Tofino Botanical Garden, Vancouver Island, B.C.
A lot of people don't recall that culture actually is an agrarian term, because the Latin root “colere” has to do with cultivation, taking care of the land, and that very early on started to be used as a metaphor for cultivating the soul, and cultivating the mind. But in a broad way, culture is everything we do as people and as social groups. All the words like horticulture and viniculture have to do with caring for things and cultivating.
The definition of culture is everything we are. Without culture, we wouldn't exist. So, it matters very fundamentally that if we're human we're involved in culture, and we have a culture. Without culture, we might exist, but it would be such an impoverished existence compared to the way we live now. So really without culture, we're not human beings.
Debra Kerr, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art
Debra Kerr is the CEO of Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Chicago, U.S.
The definition of culture is the creative output of humans. That can also be divided up into the creative output of specific communities.
Culture has always mattered but I think it might matter today more than ever. I think that people are feeling disconnected from situations, from each other, and from communities, and it's important to be able to tap into either their own cultural background, or the cultural background of their communities, or be able to come up with ways to cope with the challenges of today's society. Experiencing culture, experiencing creativity, is a way for us to relieve stress, to become more empathetic, and to understand each other better in times when often we are speaking at each other and not with each other.
Peter Robinson, Bradshaw Foundation
Peter Robinson is the Editor of the non-profit organization learning source the Bradshaw Foundation, U.K.
I would like to offer a definition of culture from the perspective of rock art. In a new publication entitled “Early Rock Art of the American West” by Ekkehart Malotki and Ellen Dissanayake, the authors addressed this concept: “The metaphor of a surface and a deep structure holds for all known rock art in the world.”
So, superficially rock art may differ drastically in style, execution, and motif, depending on the cultural group that a given marker is born into, just as we speak the language of the group that we are born into.
But underneath, in their deep structure, they're governed by innate underlying principles and capacities that are universal aspects of our nature as human beings. So as cultures have invented their own languages but did not invent the predisposition, or the ability to speak, similar artists and cultures have invented their own arts but did not invent the predisposition to engage in the art itself.
In other words, we are all cultural creatures with shared intense experiences. To focus on the rock art perspective, Jean Clottes, the eminent French rock art specialist, proposes that 'Homo spiritualis artifax' might be a more appropriate appellation than 'Homo sapiens' (wise), because of the close bond between spirituality and art. As humans, we are hardwired to a cultural predisposition. It starts right at the beginning, it's not a new fashion.
I think that personally this can be seen on many levels. Culture generally equates to cooperation and connection, and social values and it also connects to identity. However, if culture is an identity then there's a chance that cultures can clash and we all know about that.
But if we look at human culture in a positive light, it means we have the chance to tackle issues such as inequality, poverty, pollution, and climate change, all the big issues. One of the big issues that are often overlooked is our artistic global heritage i.e., rock art and its recognition and its preservation.
There are never cultural clashes when it comes to rock art. There are no arguments over whose rock art is best or whose says more. Rock art - or 'art', let’s not forget it is basically art - simply reflects what was going on in that particular region at that particular time. It's not a separate or sanitized unit.
If we take for example the painted cave like Chauvet, it can only really be understood in this particular setting or context. So, it's located in a landscape whose characteristics are influenced by the ways of life and the beliefs of the people of paleolithic people. So that is the definition of culture. That is why it's important.
Dr. Ulrike Al-Khamis, Aga Khan Museum
Dr. Ulrike Al-Khamis is the CEO of the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, Canada.
One definition of culture is the fourth essential and existential thing that humans live by. After water and food and shelter, culture is what makes us human, and if we use it well it actually even can make us humane.
Culture is a tool. Of course, it has many many facets. Culture is stratified in many different ways that say everything about us, but also everything about the others around us. Through the medium of culture, we can reach out and start a conversation between us and others. Culture enables us to overcome our differences and discover the commonalities that unite us and that are essential to understand in order to have peace and harmonious communities and societies.
Phoebe Lasoi Salau, Artist
Phoebe Lasoi Salau is a Maasai Bead Artisan from Kenya.
To me, culture is a social behavior or a norm of specific people or certain people from a certain community. My culture definition will be different from any other person’s definition of culture.
You've got things that define our cultures, which are simple or can be basic and very important. For example, if you just meet and ask a Maasai the first thing that comes to someone's mind is cattle. Maasai feel like they're the only ones who've got the right to own cattle in the whole world. And everything we do is around cattle, the feeding.
Maasai believe that we come from heaven with our cattle. It even happens when a woman is getting married, and that’s why there’s an exchange between cattle and women. When the women get married, you give cattle to the girl’s family, and in exchange, you get a lady. So it’s both spiritual and economic. A Maasai without cattle is a poor Maasai because we invest in cattle.
Cliff Murphy, Smithsonian's Center for Folklife
Cliff Murphy is the Director of the Smithsonian's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Washington, D.C.
I will paraphrase Clifford Geertz, who is an anthropologist. He once gave a definition of culture as being like webs, webs of significance that human beings spin to give meaning to life. That's an image that has a lot of traction in the ethnographic world.
To me, that definition only holds up to a certain degree; if you look at a spider web it's really tidy and there's one spider that's making the web. From my perspective, we have a very broad view of what's happening across the country and see that there are a lot of webs and a lot of spiders.
These are the activities that give our lives collective meaning and they're collectively made. Culture emerges from deliberate action and it emerges from chaos; so I'm more inclined to think of the definition of culture as being like a beaver dam.
Beavers deliberately make the structure, drawing from materials in the area. It's something that they need, and they maintain it for a long time. It dams the river, it creates a big pond and a whole ecosystem around it. Then, at a certain point, they abandon the dam and they build a new one and that causes the dam to break and it causes the pond to go away and there's a whole other ecosystem that needs to adjust and change. So, everybody is making new stuff from old stuff.
I would say culture is what gives us a sense of connection to other people, to our past, to our present, and to our future. It's the things that make us a neighborhood whether that's an actual neighborhood or whether it's a kind of less geographically based one. While culture does provide a sense of connection, paradoxically it also gives us a sense of what makes us distinct in our own right. That's a fascinating tension; everything has its yin and its yang.
Dawit Gabremichael Habte, Author
Dawit Gabremichael Habte is an Eritrean-American IT executive and memoirist and a former refugee.
Even though the definition of culture in general terms is the way of life of a group of people and the way they interact with each other and the way they do things, I think we lose a deeper understanding of culture if we leave it there just as a general term. In a deeper sense, I believe culture is both the tangible and non-tangible arts, knowledge, and secrets that a society uses to transfer and pass from one generation to another and culture is also the mode of communication, the means that is used to communicate those tangible and non-tangible entities.
For example, we define arts, music, cultural institutions, and social institutions, as part of a culture but at the same time those institutions, those artifacts, are also used to communicate or to pass the secrets, the knowledge, the how-to, of a society from one generation to another. In other words, culture is used as a way to communicate, to interact, to connect many many many generations, and those entities, those tangible and non-tangible items are also I believe part and parcel of culture.
In simple terms, culture matters to provide continuity, it matters to share deeply-held knowledge and secrets from generation to generation. Culture matters because it is used as a means of survival, as a means of continuity, and as a means of connection that we cannot otherwise accomplish without using the social construction that we call culture.
Georgia Haddad Nicolau Instituto Procomum
Georgia Haddad Nicolau is the Co-Founder and Director of Instituto Procomum, a non-profit dedicated to social transformation in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
The definition of culture is everything we produce and everything that makes us exist beyond our biological body. That means everything that we believe, all our ideas, spirituality, the things we eat, the way we talk, our language, the way we move, the way we move our hand while we’re talking, and the way countries organize themselves. For me, everything is cultural.
If you enter into the academic concept of it, you’ll see a lot of different approaches in sociology, or anthropology, but I like the really broad definition of culture the things that are not biological, are not natural, but what makes each of us unique, and the experiences unique.
For me, culture is the essence of humanity in the sense this is what makes us humans in the first place, and what gives us names. It’s also a thing that unites us. Not valuing culture is what leads us to some tragic moments, including some of the ones we are living in now.
I’ll give you an example, a real objective one. One of the first symbolic actions of the current Brazilian president was to extinguish the Ministry of Culture of Brazil. I think this is very symbolic in the sense that culture is humanity, it makes us have empathy for each other, makes us view things together, makes us use our creativity, and our ideas to change - be able to change and transform.
If we don’t take this into account, then it’s barbarianism; it’s the portents of death. The definition of culture is life itself. For me it’s essential. How can someone not see why culture matters? Even the ones that say that culture doesn’t matter, know it matters. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be so scared of it.
Michael Mason, President Lincoln's Cottage
Michael Atwood Mason is the CEO of President Lincoln's Cottage, Washington, D.C. U.S.
I find this question of "What is culture" intimidating because culture is such an expansive concept that it’s fairly difficult to define. Most simply, it’s the way we see and do things. And I honestly think about it in an everyday way as the interrelated web of meanings and activities that we all engage in as we live together. It’s both how we act in the world but also how we make sense of the world. It also functions as a filter for how we understand what we’re seeing and it helps us formulate how we’re going to respond.
To my mind, what makes it so fascinating is that it bridges everything from the most personal to the most collective aspects of our lives. I often ask people to tell me the story of where they got their name. Almost everybody has a story about how their parents picked their name. That is unbelievably personal. And it’s a constant; it literally follows you around for most of your life, at least for most of us. And sometimes that is very, very personal. My mother’s name is very unusual and she was named after a very close friend of her mother’s, just to use an example in my family.
In other cases, it goes out to a very broad collective set of references. My son’s name is Nicholas, named after St. Nicholas. So, there’s this huge range of meanings even in that very local, very private space.
At the other extreme, we have things like the Fourth of July or the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which are national celebrations that bring together thousands and thousands, sometimes even millions of people to participate in something that’s very collective, reminding us who we are and our relationship to this larger imagined community.
I think culture matters because it connects the most personal parts of our lives and the most collective parts of our lives. It has to do with how we see the world and how we choose to act upon the world.
Much of my own career has been focused on that question. How are people using culture to change their lives, usually for the better? People make very clear decisions about taking on certain kinds of cultural responsibilities and they step into cultural roles. And by stepping into those roles they have to engage consistently in certain kinds of cultural activities, behaviors, performances, and kinds of productivity. Business culture is all about productivity.
To my mind, culture matters because everything that we do is within a cultural context and is meant to have some kind of effect within that cultural context. Culture allows us to see things in a particular way and it allows us to make choices about how we’re going to act in our world.
Stuart Ashman, International Folk Art Market
Stuart Ashman is the former CEO of International Folk Art Market and the Owner of Arts de Cuba, Santa Fe, N.M., U.S.
From my perspective, the definition of culture is the customs, traditions, the arts, the social institutions, the attitudes, the achievements, the failures of a group of people, a nation, a tribe, etc. It’s a conglomerate of things. We often talk about corporate culture as how a group of people behaves, but in our case, it’s how they act coming from their traditional lives.
We learn from each other as a people, and so, it’s fascinating to learn about other cultures. I mean everybody agrees that’s what travel is all about, to meet other people and see their customs, traditions, arts, etc. Culture really is important as a way of understanding the rest of humanity.
When we gather all 150 artists from 50 countries on the Santa Fe Plaza in their native costumes and they are standing there with 1,500 people from the public, we say this is what world peace looks like. Understanding each other is part of what culture offers.
Wana Udobang, Journalist
Wana Udobang is a Nigerian Writer, Poet, Journalist and Filmmaker.
For me, the definition of culture is about history. It’s about rituals; it’s about memory, as well. And it’s about how people share those things, and how people interact with those things, and how people evolve with those things in some way, shape, or form.
Why does culture matter? I think because it is history, memory, it is literally part and parcel of our lives, how we do things, the kind of food we eat, how we connect, the stories we share, the stories we leave behind, and literature. I think it just encompasses every dimension of our lives, and I think as long as we’re human, and we matter, then our cultures matter, essentially.
Meg Pier, People Are Culture
Meg Pier is the Founder and Editor of People Are Culture, Boston, MA U.S.
People are culture. Culture explains what it means to be human. Culture is all the myriad ways we create, communicate, identify, individuate, and connect.
Culture provides ways to both express our individuality and to see ourselves in others.
Culture is the transmission line that makes possible cooperation, peace, and prosperity.
Culture matters because without the capacity for connection we have misunderstandings, fear, intolerance, prejudice, chaos, anarchy, and annihilation.
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