Edward Burnett Tylor's classic definition of culture, still quoted in anthropology textbooks, describes culture as:
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Anthropology · Foundations
Culture
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In anthropology, culture In anthropology, the learned, shared system of beliefs, practices, and meanings of a group; OpenStax describes it as the whole way of life of a society, combining material objects, technologies, social relationships, everyday practices, deeply held values, and shared ideas. Full entry → is the learned, shared system of beliefs, practices, and meanings that a group lives by — the whole way of life of a society, from its tools to its jokes. Culture is learned, not inherited; shared by groups, not individuals; carried in symbols; made of parts that fit together; and always changing. One warning: culture is the lens you see through, not the picture you see, which is why it is easier to describe other cultures than your own.
Why this matters
Culture answers a strange question: why do people who share the same biology live so differently? Every human group feeds, loves, works, and celebrates — but no two groups do it the same way, and the difference is culture. Academically, culture is anthropology's central idea, the concept that ties the four fields together. Practically, it explains everyday collisions: why a gesture lands well in one place and badly in another, why a joke flops across a table. Honestly, it matters because your own culture shapes what you notice, what you assume, and what you call common sense — and you cannot understand people, including yourself, without accounting for that.
The college version
What culture is: the working definition
Anthropologists study people, and their central idea is culture. The classic definition comes from nineteenth-century British anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, who in Primitive Culture (1871) called culture "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." OpenStax's Introduction to Anthropology updates the picture: culture is the whole way of life of a society, combining material objects, technologies, social relationships, everyday practices, deeply held values, and shared ideas. Honest note: no single definition ever won the argument. In 1952, anthropologists A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn counted 164 published definitions of culture, ranging from "learned behavior" to "ideas in the mind." This lesson uses a working definition most anthropologists would accept: culture is the learned, shared system of beliefs, practices, and meanings of a group — the way of life a group builds and passes on.
Culture is learned, not inherited
People are not born with culture. Babies arrive with reflexes, not recipes; everything cultural is acquired — taught, caught, absorbed, practiced. Anthropologists call this process enculturation The lifelong process by which a person acquires the knowledge, habits, and expectations of the group they grow up in, through teaching and daily exposure rather than biology. Full entry →. OpenStax illustrates the point with two similar behaviors: blinking and winking. Blinking is biological: everyone does it, no one teaches it, and it carries no message. Winking is cultural: it must be learned, and it means something, though exactly what depends on the group. The same test applies to bigger things. A child born to a family of herders but adopted at birth by fishers in a port town grows up tying knots and reading tides, not moving flocks. Her genes did not change; her teachers did. Culture travels between people, never in the blood.
Culture is shared, not individual
One person's habit is not culture. Culture is what a group holds in common: beliefs, meanings, and practices that many people learn and recognize. OpenStax notes that for something to count as cultural, both the action and its meaning must be commonly known among members of a group. In a mountain town, hikers tap the wooden signpost at the trailhead before starting down, and every hiker knows the tap means "safe going." That is culture. One hiker's private habit of kissing her thumb before the tap is hers alone — personal, not cultural, until a group learns it and passes it on.
Culture is symbolic
Much of culture runs on symbols: objects, images, sounds, or gestures that carry a meaning the group assigns. The meaning is not in the thing itself. On a small island, families fly a white flag from the roof the day a child is born. The flag is cloth and string; the message — a new life, congratulations, doors open to visitors — lives in what the community has agreed the flag stands for. Britannica makes the same point about language: the word dog contains no dog-ness; speakers assign the meaning to the sound. Because symbols are agreed rather than fixed, they work only where people share the agreement.
Culture is integrated
The parts of a culture fit together. OpenStax calls culture an integrated combination of materials, technologies, relationships, practices, values, and ideas, and this holism is why a change in one part moves the others. In a river-valley town, the harvest sets the calendar: weddings wait until after the harvest, and the harvest feast opens the festival season. When farmers adopted a fast-ripening rice variety, the harvest came three weeks early — and the festival and the wedding season shifted with it. No one voted to change the calendar; the parts moved because they are connected. Study any one piece of a culture and you find it wired to the rest.
Culture is dynamic
Cultures change, continuously and sometimes fast. OpenStax describes four mechanisms: diffusion The movement of a cultural element — an object, practice, or idea — from one group to another through trade, travel, migration, or conquest. Full entry →, the movement of an element from one group to another through trade, travel, or migration; innovation The slight alteration of an existing cultural element, such as a new style of dress or a new way of performing an old task. Full entry →, the slight alteration of an existing element; invention, the creation of a new one; and friction, the conflict between elements that reshapes them. In the 1980s, teenagers in a coastal town learned dances from older siblings at village parties. Today they learn steps from videos made on other continents, then add local twists. The dance arrived by diffusion, was reshaped by innovation, and the town's parties changed with it. Change is not the exception; it is how culture keeps working.
The honest framing: culture is the lens, not the picture
Culture is easiest to see from outside. OpenStax opens its chapter on culture with home: the house you grew up in seems simply right, until you visit a house where people sleep in a loft above the stable and the nicest part of the home faces east. Your own culture feels natural because you see through it. That is the reality check: culture is the lens, not the picture. The picture is the world; the lens is what focuses, tints, and crops it. And the lens is not even uniform — culture is shared but contested, and people in different positions within a group hold different versions of it. Studying culture does not remove the lens. It teaches you to notice you are wearing one.
Eli explains
The same idea, in plain words
Explain it like I’m 10
Culture is everything a group of people learns together and passes along: how they greet, what they eat, what they laugh at, what they believe, and what they make. Anthropologists test whether something is cultural by asking two questions. Is it learned, or are people born with it? And is it shared by a group, or is it just one person's habit? If it is learned and shared, it is culture. Culture is also symbolic, because meanings ride on objects and gestures, and integrated, because the parts fit together like gears. And culture never sits still: groups borrow, invent, argue, and adapt, which is why every culture you meet is a work in progress.
Picture it like this
Think of culture as a pair of glasses you have worn since birth. You do not see the glasses; you see through them. They tint the world, focus some things and blur others, and they feel completely natural — until you put on someone else's glasses and everything looks wrong.
Where the picture stops working
The analogy breaks down because you can take glasses off and choose new ones. Culture is stickier: you can learn a second culture, even live inside it for years, but your first one keeps shaping your reflexes and your sense of what is normal. Glasses also belong to one person, while culture belongs to a group and changes only as the group changes — no one can upgrade their culture alone.
Worked example
Every afternoon in the town of Marigat, the same thing happens: around four o'clock, whoever is home puts the kettle on, and neighbors who hear the whistle walk over — no invitation needed. Watch the ritual closely and you see all five marks of culture at once. It is learned: children absorb it by watching, and a newcomer who starts the kettle alone is quickly joined. It is shared: the whole neighborhood keeps the same clock, and no one owns the ritual. The whistle is symbolic: it means "the door is open," a meaning carried in a sound rather than in the water. It is integrated: the ritual depends on the shops closing early so people are home at four, and on the bakery's bread run ending at three-thirty, so there is always something to share. And it is dynamic: when the bakery moved its closing time to five, the whole ritual shifted an hour later within a season — the parts moved together, and the practice changed without anyone voting on it.
Key takeaway
Culture is the learned, shared, symbolic, integrated, and ever-changing system of beliefs, practices, and meanings by which a group lives. It is the lens through which you see the world — and anthropology's job is to help you notice the lens, not just admire the picture.
Quick check
3 questions here, of 5 in this lesson’s practice set. Answers stay hidden until you check.
Two infant girls, biological sisters, are separated at birth. One grows up in a rice-farming village and learns to read the sky for rain and husk rice by hand; the other grows up in a port city and learns to tie mooring knots and haggle at the fish market. Which statement correctly describes their skills?
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In a seaside town, every boat owner paints a blue stripe on the hull when the boat's crew returns safely from a long voyage, and everyone in town knows what the stripe means. Meanwhile, one sailor has a private habit of tapping the mast three times before casting off. Which statement correctly sorts the two?
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Study tools & related lessonsYou’ll learn to · Common mistakes · Easily confused · Key vocabulary · Related
You’ll learn to
- Define culture in anthropological terms, attribute the classic definition to Edward Burnett Tylor, and state the OpenStax working description of culture as a whole way of life.
- Explain why culture is learned rather than inherited, distinguishing acquired cultural behavior from innate biological behavior with an original example.
- Explain why culture is shared at the group level, distinguishing a cultural practice from an individual habit with an original example.
- Analyze how culture is symbolic, integrated, and dynamic, tracing how a change in one part of a culture ripples through the others using an original example.
- Apply the five characteristics of culture — learned, shared, symbolic, integrated, dynamic — to a single everyday practice.
Common mistakes
"Culture is in your genes — children inherit it from their parents."
Culture is learned, not inherited. Parents pass culture on by raising children inside it, but the transmission runs through teaching, example, and daily life, not DNA. A child adopted at birth into a different family learns that family's culture completely.
"Anything I do is part of my culture."
Culture is shared by a group. A private habit — your lucky pen, your way of folding laundry — is personal, not cultural, until a group learns it and passes it along.
"Traditional means unchanging; a real culture stays the same."
Every culture changes. Elements diffuse in from other groups, new inventions catch on, old practices get reworked or dropped. Continuity and change happen at the same time, which is why anthropologists call change a paradox, not a failure.
"Anyone from a culture can explain all of it."
Culture is shared but also contested and uneven: people in different positions within a group hold different versions of their shared culture. One person's account is a view from inside, not the whole picture.
Easily confused
A blink vs. A wink
A blink is innate, automatic, and meaningless; a wink is learned, deliberate, and means something. The first is biology, the second is culture — which is why anthropologists use the pair to show that culture is acquired, not inherited.
A cultural practice vs. An individual habit
A cultural practice is a routine a group learns and shares — the town's four o'clock tea ritual. An individual habit is a personal routine — one person's lucky pen. Culture lives at the group level: shared meaning is what makes something cultural.
Continuity in culture vs. Change in culture
Culture is passed from older to younger members, giving it continuity, yet it is altered by diffusion, innovation, invention, and friction at the same time. The two are not opposites at war; they are the same process viewed from two angles.
Key vocabulary
- culture
- In anthropology, the learned, shared system of beliefs, practices, and meanings of a group; OpenStax describes it as the whole way of life of a society, combining material objects, technologies, social relationships, everyday practices, deeply held values, and shared ideas.
- enculturation
- The lifelong process by which a person acquires the knowledge, habits, and expectations of the group they grow up in, through teaching and daily exposure rather than biology.
- symbol
- An object, image, sound, or gesture that a group has agreed carries a particular meaning, so that the meaning lives in what people attach to the thing rather than in the thing itself.
- material culture
- The physical objects a group makes and uses, from tools and buildings to clothing and art, as opposed to the ideas and practices behind them.
- cultural practice
- A routine or habitual form of behavior that members of a group learn and repeat, such as how people greet, eat, or mark an occasion.
- cultural frame
- A patterned, shared way of interpreting a situation that tells people where they are, what role they play, and what behavior fits.
- norm
- A group's shared expectation of how someone in a particular role or situation should behave, which is often idealized rather than a description of what everyone actually does.
- value
- A group's shared notion of what is good, true, correct, appropriate, or beautiful, which explains why people follow the norms they follow.
- diffusion
- The movement of a cultural element — an object, practice, or idea — from one group to another through trade, travel, migration, or conquest.
- innovation
- The slight alteration of an existing cultural element, such as a new style of dress or a new way of performing an old task.
Sources & references
- 3.1 The Homeyness of Culture — Introduction to Anthropology (OpenStax) — OpenStax, Rice University
- 3.2 The Winkiness of Culture — Introduction to Anthropology (OpenStax) — OpenStax, Rice University
- 3.3 The Elements of Culture — Introduction to Anthropology (OpenStax) — OpenStax, Rice University
- 3.6 The Paradoxes of Culture — Introduction to Anthropology (OpenStax) — OpenStax, Rice University
- Ch. 3 Key Terms — Introduction to Anthropology (OpenStax) — OpenStax, Rice University
- Culture | Definition, Characteristics, Examples, Types, Tradition, & Facts — Encyclopaedia Britannica
EliExplains lessons are original prose written from the open, credible references above. See Copyright & Licensing.
Researched 2026-08-22
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