Culture is the system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviours, and artefacts that the members of society use to cope with their world and with one another, and that are transmitted from generation to generation through learning. They use the term culture to refer collectively to a society and its way of life. The modern technical definition of culture, as socially patterned human thought and behaviour, was originally proposed by the nineteenth-century British anthropologist, Edward Tylor. This definition is an open-ended list, which has been extended considerably since Tylor first proposed it.

The first inventory of cultural categories was undertaken in 1872 by a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which was assisted by Tylor. The committee prepared an anthropological field manual that listed 76 culture topics, in no particular order, including such diverse items as cannibalism and language. The most exhaustive such list is the "Outline of Cultural Materials," first published in 1938 and still used as a guide for cataloguing great masses of worldwide cultural data for cross-cultural surveys. Like the table of contents of a giant encyclopaedia, the outline lists 79 major divisions and 637 subdivisions.

TABLE: Diverse Definitions of Culture:

Topical: Culture consists of everything on a list of topics, or categories, such as social organization, religion, or economy

Historical: Culture is social heritage, or tradition, that is passed on to future generations

Behavioural: Culture is shared, learned human behaviour, a way of life

Normative: Culture is ideals, values, or rules for living

Functional: Culture is the way humans solve problems of adapting to the environment or living together

Mental: Culture is a complex of ideas, or learned habits, that inhibit impulses and distinguish people from animals

Structural: Culture consists of patterned and interrelated

ideas, symbols, or behaviours Symbolic: Culture is based on arbitrarily assigned

meanings that are shared by a society

Culture involves at least three components: what people think, what they do, and the material products they produce. Thus, mental processes, beliefs, knowledge, and values are parts of culture. Some anthropologists would define culture entirely as mental rules guiding behaviour, although often wide divergence exists between the acknowledged rules for correct behaviour and what people actually do. Consequently, some researchers pay most attention to human behaviour and its material products. Some researchers believe that culture is merely an abstraction, not a real entity. This is a serious issue because treating culture as an abstraction may lead one to deny the basic human rights of small-scale societies. I treat culture as an objective reality. I depart from the super organic approach in that I insist that culture includes its human carriers. At the same time, people can be deprived of their culture against their will. Many humanistic anthropologists would agree that culture is an observable phenomenon, and a people's unique possession.