By Keith C. Milne
I recently overheard someone say they didn’t understand “culture.” For some reason, this got me thinking about the term, then the concept. I found myself having to pause for an unusual length of time while attempting to formulate my own coherent definition. I found the task to be much harder than I anticipated, and I realized why that stranger had expressed his confusion by saying he didn’t understand it.
One of my first encounters with the word culture occurred when a doctor told me that he needed to take a “culture” of my throat to determine if I had a strep infection. Later, in grade school, my understanding of the meaning of culture broadened to include people belonging to an educated, wealthy, upper-class group who enjoyed eating caviar and listening to classical music.
As I grew older, the tumultuous era of the late 1960’s began to influence and shape my definition of culture in new, more complex ways. In my middle adult years when the term culture came up, or I gave the term anymore of my time and energy, my mind played a short movie, and the movie included all previous definitions rolled into one.
The culture movie included my experience with the doctor, wealthy people enjoying caviar and listening to Mozart, images of people from the counter-culture hippie movement painting each other’s naked bodies in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park while listening to Jimi Hendrix music, all parading through my head. Clearly, I was very confused about the meaning of culture, and my current confusion was just the beginning.
When I finally graduated from high school and entered the work force, I learned first hand about the differences between the blue-collar culture of the trades, and the white-collar culture of the office.
When I enlisted in the Navy, I was indoctrinated into a strict military culture, and the sub-culture of the submarine force.
After my discharge, I settled in Virginia where I learned about southern culture, complete with its own cuisine, speech dialect, and special ways of doing most things, along with a level of racism that I wasn’t prepared for.
Later, in my early 40’s and now an older student in college, I learned about academic culture, cultural anthropology, commercial scale culture, and the need for exposure to cultural diversity.
My ideas about culture eventually became so complex that my mental movie reduced itself to an un-manageable jumble of images being played back at high speed. The list of definitions for this concept seemed endless.
Luckily, sociology helped to deliver me from this nightmare by teaching me about the subjective nature of concepts like culture.
I learned that I had been trying to define the undefinable. I now believe there is no way to singularly define culture. Any meaning ascribed to this concept is completely subjective, depends on the individual experiences that shaped someone’s particular definition, and the context which it is used.
The meaning of culture no longer activates my old mental movie. Instead, it invokes a more refined response thanks to the following quote which really helped nail down a much better, deeper, more complete definition.
For me, the following definition encapsulates most of what my mental movie was trying to tell me or include, albeit in a rather convoluted and strangely homogenized fashion:
The most powerful social influence on human behavior is the culture in which the individual lives, works, procreates, and dies. Culture can be viewed as the aggregate of all beliefs, customs, language, history, and technological achievements of a people. Culture influences not only directly observable behavior but also the values and beliefs that govern that behavior. It provides us with a notion of what is right and wrong and gives meaning to our actions[1].
Gerald J. Hunt
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[1]
Gerald J. Hunt, “Social and cultural aspects of health, illness, and treatment,” in Howard H. Goodman, ed.,
Review of General Psychiatry
(Norwalk, CT: Appleton and Lange, 1992), p. 88.