What is Culture?

Zach Furlow

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History 323

            What is culture?  How would you define it?  These are interesting questions.  Culture is a term that is thrown about very frequently without much thought to its meaning.  It is a little difficult to give a concrete answer, since to do so requires one to remove themselves from the fabric of the culture everyone lives in every day to observe it and define it.  In my opinion, culture is the meat on the bones of civilization.

            If one assumes that civilization is the framework for human society by which we come together and live as members of a larger, then culture is the way in which we do so.  I said at first that the answer is difficult to define because we live with it every day and therefore become inured to the fact that we participate in carrying out the forms of culture in all we do.  Culture is the set of beliefs, technologies, ideas, etc… that are held in common (on a wide range of scale) by people as they go about their lives.

            Obviously this is a very inclusive definition and somewhat vague.  I believe that it necessarily has to be since one can make very minute distinctions between different cultures (e.g. one can define French culture, but French can also be defined as West-European, European, and/or Western culture).  Culture is simply the way humans interact with each other and the world around them.