Culture & Psychology
18(3) 289–303
! The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/1354067X12446229
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Article
Critical reflections on
some recent definitions
of ‘‘culture’’
Gustav Jahoda
University of Strathclyde, UK
Abstract
At the outset the historical background of attempts to define ‘‘culture’’ is briefly
sketched. Then the definitions found in cross-cultural texts published between 2009
and 2011 are roughly divided into three categories according to where they locate
‘‘culture’’, and whether they present single or multiple definitions. Each definition is
critically examined, as are the relationships between them, and it is shown that several
of the definitions are logically and substantively incompatible. It is concluded (with
Alfred Lang) that there can be no generally agreed definition of culture, and an alternative
proposal is put forward.
Keywords
Cross-cultural psychology, definitions of ‘‘culture’’, history, research styles, textbooks
‘‘When I use a word,’’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, ‘‘it means just
what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’’
Lewis Carroll: Through the looking glass.
Some historical background
The term ‘‘culture’’ has been polysemous for a long time. Originally it stems from
‘‘cultivation’’ as in ‘‘agriculture’’, although Cicero already used cultura mentis ﬁguratively
to refer to philosophy. For centuries it meant producing or developing
Corresponding author:
Gustav Jahoda, Strathclyde University, 40 George Street, Glasgow G1 QE, UK
Email: g.jahoda@strath.ac.uk
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something, such as ‘‘the culture of barley’’ or ‘‘the culture of the arts’’, and is still
employed in this sense as in ‘‘culture of bacteria’’. It was only in 18th-century
France that the single term culture began to be used and to acquire the sense of
training or reﬁnement of the mind or taste. It was rapidly extended to refer to the
qualities of an educated person, and has retained that meaning until today. In
English, in the latter part of the 19th century, the writer Matthew Arnold held a
somewhat similar view, describing culture as ‘‘the acquainting ourselves with the
best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the
human spirit’’ (Arnold 1873). At around the same time, the anthropologist Edward
Tylor famously began his deﬁnition with the words ‘‘Culture, or civilization . . . is
that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, [etc.] and any other capacities
acquired by man as a member of society’’ (Tylor [1871] 1958, p. 1). Let me
just note in passing that the terms ‘‘culture’’ and ‘‘civilization’’ historically had
somewhat diﬀerent meanings in German and French.1
Much of this story is well
told in Kroeber & Kluckhohn’s (1952) classic monograph, which listed some 160
deﬁnitions and added their own. This had a pervasive inﬂuence on cross-cultural
psychology and will therefore be cited in full:
Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and
transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups,
including their embodiments in artefacts; the essential core of culture consists of
traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached
values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of
action, on the other as conditioning elements of further action. (Kroeber &
Kluckhohn, 1952, p. 181)
Kroeber and Kluckhohn also speculated about likely changes: ‘‘The main respects
in which, we suspect, this formula will be modiﬁed and enlarged in the future are
as regards (1) the interrelations of cultural forms: and (2) variability and the individual’’
(1952, p. 181). These forecasts were not really born out. They noted that
we have many concepts but no proper theory of culture; it is questionable
whether there could be any such theory, for reasons that will become apparent.
During the subsequent half-century, a vast literature grew around the topic of
culture, and the label ‘‘culture’’ spread from the social sciences into common
parlance.
In psychology, cross-cultural studies began with the work of Rivers during the
Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits (Rivers, 1901), but that was followed by a
fallow period of almost half a century. It re-started about the time of Kroeber and
Kluckhohn’s (1952) monograph, and its early practitioners were too busy with
their researches to agonize over the meaning of culture. The ﬁrst two decades or
so, cross-cultural psychologists worked as a rule directly with people in other cultures
in face-to-face situations, and their studies were focused on topics like cognition,
perception, and developmental and social issues. When texts of crosscultural
psychology started to appear, their authors felt obliged to explain what
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culture was all about, and a couple of examples will be quoted which illustrate the
divergent characterizations that were oﬀered.
In his widely acclaimed book, Hofstede, ﬁrst cited an earlier deﬁnition by
Kluckhohn (1951) similar to, but not identical with, Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s
(1952) later one. Then he wrote: ‘‘ . . . I treat culture as ‘the collective programming
of the mind which distinguishes the members of one human group from another.’
This is not a complete deﬁnition . . . but it covers what I have been able to measure’’
(1984, p. 21, emphasis added). These words foreshadowed a new approach in crosscultural
psychology, which has become increasingly social, statistical, and indirect,
in the sense that the only contact with participants is through the group administration
of questionnaires and scales.
By the time Brislin (1990) edited a book on ‘‘Applied Cross-cultural
Psychology’’, that process was well under way. However, it had not aﬀected his
deﬁnition of culture, which is an impoverished version of Kroeber and
Kluckhohn’s (1952). His introduction leads the reader very gently, almost as if
she were a school student:
Consider people who have travelled to many parts of the world. They will have
observed (a) recurring patterns of behavior that (b) diﬀer from place to lace but
that (c) within those places are observable generation after generation. Indeed, (d)
adults have the responsibility of ensuring that members of new generations adopt
those recurring patterns of behavior that mark people as well-socialized individuals.
The term that best summarizes the recurring pattern of behaviors is culture. (Brislin,
1990, p. 10)
Later in the same book, this is elaborated in somewhat more sophisticated language,
but the essentials remain the same; for instance, there is no indication that
culture could ever change.
These are of course only examples of several deﬁnitions current at that time,
and since then they have become further diversiﬁed. In order to demonstrate
this variety, and review some remarkably dissimilarities in ways in which culture
has been conceptualised, four recent texts have been scrutinized. They are as
follows:
A. Wyer, Chiu, & Hong (2009) Understanding culture
B. Keith (2011) Cross-cultural psychology
C. Berry, Poortinga, Breugelmans, Chasiotis, & Sam (2011) Cross-cultural
psychology
D. Matsumoto & van de Vijver (2011) Cross-cultural research methods in
psychology
All are books with multiple authors, and with the exception of [C] are edited. In
discussions of particular authors their names will be preceded by a letter denoting
the book to which they contributed.
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The multiplicity of current views
The deﬁnitions will be ordered roughly and rather arbitrarily into three categories,
namely (1) culture as external; (2) as internal, or internal and external; and (3)
groups of several deﬁnitions. The comments provided will generally relate to logical
coherence and considerations of content rather than take the form of judgements of
‘‘right’’ and ‘‘wrong’’. This because there is not, and I think cannot be, an absolute
criterion for evaluation.
Culture as external
Schwartz: Culture matters. National value cultures, sources, and consequences.
[A, pp. 127–162].
I view culture as a latent, hypothetical variable that we can measure only through its
manifestations. The underlying normative value emphases that are central to culture
inﬂuence and give a degree of coherence to these manifestations. In this view, culture
is outside the individual. It is not located in the minds and actions of individual
people. Rather, it refers to the press to which individuals are exposed by virtue of
living in a particular social system. (Schwartz, 2009, p. 128)
The ﬁrst sentence applies to practically all psychological variables and not just
values, seen here as central to culture. The ‘‘normative value emphases’’ underlie
what? It is not really clear what exactly these ‘‘manifestations’’ are. The measurements
consist of questionnaires and scales that are clearly tapping the minds of
individuals. Schwartz’s pronouncements partake of the same mystique as
Durkheim’s ‘‘collective representations’’ that were also seen as independent of
individuals. The question of the relationship between culture and the ‘‘social
system’’ is not addressed, but it seems to be implied that they are two facets of
the same phenomenon.
Cole & Parker: Culture and cognition. [B, pp. 133–159].
This is a more subtle and closely argued conception, originally put forward by
Cole (1996), that has to be shown in greater detail.
[We] think of culture as a dynamically changing environment that is transformed by
the artefacts created by prior generations . . . an artefact is an aspect of the material
world that has been modiﬁed over the history of its incorporation into goal-directed
human thought and action . . . an artefact is simultaneously ideal (conceptual) and
material. It is material in that it is embodied in physical form, whether in the morph-
ology2
of a spoken, written, or signed word, a ritual, or an artistic creation, or as a
solid object like a pencil. It is ideal in that this material form has been shaped by
historical participation in (successful, adaptive) human activities . . . culture can be
seen as the medium of human development which [prepares humans] for interaction
with the world. (Cole & Parker, 2011, p. 135)
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[There are also] secondary artefacts [which] play a central role in preserving and
transmitting the kinds of social inheritance referred to as recipes, beliefs, norms,
conventions, and the like. (Cole & Parker, 2011, p. 135)
The reason for classifying this deﬁnition as ‘‘external’’ is the clear statement that it
describes culture as ‘‘a changing environment’’. It is partly rooted in the Marxist
socio-historical school of which Cole is a prominent expositor. What seems to me
somewhat problematic in this unusual and ingenious approach is the postulated
relationship between primary and secondary artefacts; the latter are said to be
representations of primary ones. Take for instance a ritual: what is to be taken
as its representation? Perhaps the distinction is not as clear-cut as is suggested.
Incidentally, a majority of current deﬁnitions of culture put the stress on what are
here called ‘‘secondary artefacts’’.
Bond & van de Vijver: Making scientiﬁc sense of cultural diﬀerences in psychological
outcomes: Unpackaging the Magnum Mysterium [D, pp. 75–100].
This does not really contain a deﬁnition of culture, but is a kind of reductio ad
absurdum of culture to a variable that can be made to vanish. The argument is quite
elaborate and turns on the development of models that will allow prediction.
If we have completely unpackaged the cultural diﬀerence by using a construct to
predict the outcome, then we have eﬀectively ‘‘made culture disappear’’. In this
vein, Lam et al. (2005) made cultural diﬀerences in aﬀective forecasting disappear
by unpackaging them with a culturally equivalent measure of focal thinking
As the authors concluded from their analysis, ‘‘defocused Euro-Canadians and East
Asians made equally moderate aﬀective forecasts’’. (Bond & van de Vijver, 2011,
pp. 85–86)
This result is rather less impressive than might appear at ﬁrst sight, as a
hypothetical example will show. Suppose we have two cultures, X and Y.
People in X are on average short and fat, and Y are tall and thin. Studies have
established a cultural diﬀerence: Ys are better runners than Xs. We can eliminate
culture by comparing people of equal bodily features in the two
cultures—wonderful!
But that is not the whole story:
Even if we completely unpackage the cultural diﬀerence, there is no end to model
elaboration, because there is always more outcome variance to predict – gender,
education level, and other categorical factors may also relate to the outcome.
(Bond & van de Vijver, 2011, p. 86)
This candid admission reveals that model-building is an activity capable of
almost endless expansion, a veritable labour of Sisyphus! Anyway, this kind of
view of culture as a variable is typical of the statistical approach, now in
ascendance.
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Culture as internal or internal and external
Hong: A dynamic constructivist approach to culture: Moving from describing culture
to explaining culture [A, pp. 3–23].
The ambitious objective here is to pin down the causal mechanism through which
culture exerts its inﬂuence. Hong deﬁnes
. . . culture as networks of knowledge consisting of learned routines of thinking, feeling,
and interacting with other people, as well as a corpus of substantive assertions and
ideas about aspects of the world . . . it is . . . shared . . . , among a collection of interconnected
individuals who are often demarcated by race, ethnicity, or nationality; (b)
externalised by rich symbols, artefacts, social constructions, and social institutions
(e.g. cultural icons, advertisements and news media); (c) used to form the common
ground for communication among members; (d) transmitted from one generation to
the next . . . ; (e) undergoing continuous modiﬁcations . . . (2009, p. 4)
A few comments on some of these items are in order: (a) they need not be interconnected
in any direct sense; and the signiﬁcance of ‘‘race, ethnicity, and nationality’’
needs further elaboration in this context, especially as it is also stated that
these types of groups, while ‘‘carriers and agents’’ of culture, are not responsible for
the causal potential of culture; (b) the concrete examples oﬀered are rather odd; (c)
is unusual, but no doubt correct in an important sense; (d) and (e) are frequently
listed.
Moving from deﬁnition to supposed explanation, Hong writes that . . . ‘‘The
causal potential of culture resides in the activation and of the shared cultural
knowledge, which brings about aﬀective, cognitive, and behavioural consequences’’
(p. 4). Subsequently (pp. 7–9), this key concept of ‘‘activation’’ is more fully discussed,
and turns out to be rather trivial. It seems to boil down to the fact that
when people encounter particular situations, they will bring to bear their cultural
knowledge (in so far as it is relevant) for arriving at their response.
This notion of ‘‘causal potential’’ requires more detailed scrutiny. It assumes
that culture as such can be treated as a cause, which is questionable since there is so
little agreement as to the precise nature of it. But supposing that culture can be a
cause, then it must function as such nearly all the time. Given Hong’s exhaustive
deﬁnition of culture as ‘‘networks of knowledge’’ together with associated aﬀects, it
seems to follow that most ordinary routines as well as exceptional situations are
governed by culture. In sum, this approach fails to keep is promise of providing an
explanation of culture.
Oyserman & Sorensen: Understanding cultural syndrome eﬀects on what and how
we think [A, pp. 25–52].
Oyserman & Sorensen begin by saying that the usual way of viewing culture is to
regard it as a single uniﬁed whole ‘‘isomorphic [sic] with one’s country of origin’’
(2009, p. 25). As against that they put forward the notion of culture as multidimensional
and
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. . . propose that societies socialize for and individuals have access to a diverse set of
overlapping and contradictory processes and procedures for making sense of the
world and that the processes and procedures that are cued in the moment inﬂuence
the values, relationality, self-concept, well-being, and cognition that are salient in the
moment. (2009, p. 25)
This suggests that people have access to a range of ‘‘cultural syndromes’’, a concept
put forward by Triandis (about whom more below). The individual can pick out
from this array ‘‘what is relevant at the moment’’.
A critical issue is what Oyserman and Sorensen understand by a ‘‘cultural syndrome’’,
and this is what they say:
. . . we operationalize cultural syndromes as patterned beliefs, attitudes, and mindsets
that go together in a loosely deﬁned network: when one aspect of a syndrome is
primed, other aspects of the syndrome are also likely to be active and available in
working memory. (2009, p. 27)
Although the authors explicitly repudiate Hong’s (2009) approach, it seems to me
that there is a certain similarity between this and Hong’s concept of ‘‘activation’’.
The idea that culture is not monolithic and can contain incompatible elements,
and that diﬀerent cultures will have things in common, makes good sense.
However, expressing this in terms of syndromes as formulated by Triandis is
more questionable. In one important publication he deﬁned a cultural syndrome as:
. . . a pattern of shared attitudes, beliefs, categorizations, self-deﬁnitions, norms, role
deﬁnitions, and values that is organized around a theme that can be identiﬁed among
those who speak a particular language, during a speciﬁc historical period, and in a
deﬁnable geographic region. (Triandis, 1996, p. 408)
Examples of such themes are ‘‘tightness’’ (many rigid norms strictly enforced versus
fewer norms that are more ﬂexible and loosely enforced); or ‘‘Complexity’’
(number of cultural elements such as job types: fewer in traditional rural versus
modern urban settings); another, most famous and pervasive in recent cross-cultural
psychology, is individualism/collectivism. These themes are attributes of
societies, and in order to relate them to individuals in a culture some linking is
required. This can be done, Oyserman and Sorensen suggest, through ‘‘priming’’
designed to activate pre-existing tendencies of a cultural syndrome continuum. In
one of their studies the task was to circle in a story either self-related terms such as
I, me, myself, which are expected to trigger individualism, or plural pronouns like
we, us, ourselves, that would enhance collectivist tendencies. Such methods were
apparently quite successful.
Generally, it is diﬃcult to reconcile the syndromes, which, according to Triandis,
are features of cultures and/or social systems, with those of Oyserman and
Sorensen said to pertain to individuals.
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Wan and Chiu: An intersubjective consensus approach to culture. The
role of intersubjective norms versus cultural self in cultural processes [A, pp.
79–91].
According to this view ‘‘culture consists of symbolic elements that members of a
culture generally believe to be important to or characteristic of the culture’’ (Wan &
Chiu, 2009, p. 80). Such beliefs may or may not be well grounded, but what matters
is the consensus. In order to ﬁnd out what these beliefs are, one simply asks members
of a given culture what they think are salient personality features, important
beliefs, practices, etc. in that culture. In so far as the respondents are in agreement
on particular aspects, these can be accepted as central to the culture as seen by its
members. Unlike the preceding formulation this one is seemingly straightforward,
and the authors at one point issue a disclaimer, stating that inter-subjective consensus
is not the only deﬁning aspect of culture. They contrast it with what they call
the statistical approach to culture, which deﬁnes it as the average or modal values,
beliefs, personal attributes, and practices that are endorsed or displayed by an
average member of the culture.3
Subsequently the picture becomes more complex when the notion of a ‘‘cultural
self’’ is introduced, which is constituted by that part of culture, which is internalised.
This is distinguished from people’s consensual beliefs about their culture,
which will overlap to varying extents with their cultural self. Furthermore,
. . . the statistical norms based on the statistical aggregates of cultural members’ selfreported
values and beliefs often diverge from the inter-subjective assumptions cultural
members hold about their in-group members’ values and beliefs . . . . Similarly,
people’s perceptions of the personality traits prevalent in their culture have been
found to be quite diﬀerent from the actual self-rated personality traits that they themselves
possess. (Wan & Chiu, 2009, p. 87)
So things now seem to become rather confused, with several competing
aspects. There is the statistically determined aspect, the ‘‘cultural self’’, and the
consensually typical features of the culture. If one asks what most clearly characterises
a culture, the answer is probably to be found in the following statement;
‘‘When people in a culture agree on what symbolic elements are important to
the culture, these elements become the core elements of the culture’’ (Wan & Chiu,
2009, p. 80).
In thus giving priority, when deﬁning culture, to people’s consensual
perceptions of what is important in their culture, these authors are distinctly
unusual.
Overviews of selected definitions
In two of the texts, the authors surveyed a range of deﬁnitions, without speciﬁcally
favouring any particular one.
Keith: Introduction to cross-cultural psychology [B, pp. 3–19].
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Keith (2011) provides a concise outline of various deﬁnitions of culture, starting
with Heine’s (2008, p. 3) snappy 2-part deﬁnition:
a. information (e.g. beliefs, habits, ideas) learned from others, that is capable of
inﬂuencing behavior; and
b. a group of people who share context and experience.
The only merit of this formula is brevity. As regards (a), most information is
gleaned from other people and much of it is capable of aﬀecting behaviour; so it
fails to discriminate between information that is or is not cultural-speciﬁc;
(b) similarly, this deﬁnition ﬁts practically all groups that have some permanence,
e.g. the family.
Next, the fuller deﬁnition by Matsumoto (2009) is cited:
A unique meaning and information system, shared by a group and transmitted
across generations, that allows the group to meet basic needs of survival, by
coordinating social behavior to achieve a viable existence, to transmit successful
social behaviors, to pursue happiness and well-being, and to derive meaning from
life. (p. 3)
Keith points out that this is similar to other deﬁnitions and that the common
element is the notion of ‘‘a group with shared behaviors, values, and beliefs that
are passed from generations to generations’’ (2011, p. 3). What he fails to mention
is that this goes back to Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952), also incorporating recent
evolutionary ideas about adaptations. Matsumoto further added some politically
correct elements like ‘‘the pursuit of happiness’’. While that phrase was contained
in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, it is not likely that it ﬁgures in evolutionary
processes!
Another deﬁnition cited by Keith is that of Triandis, Kurowski, Tecktiel, &
Chan (1993) who see culture
. . . in terms of objective and subjective characteristics that increase the odds of survival,
provide satisfaction for people sharing an environmental context, and are
shared via language. Objective elements of culture . . . are the tangible objects of culture
(architecture, food, manufactured products), whereas subjective culture comprises
such human elements as social, economic, political, and religious practices. It
is of course the subjective human elements that are of most interest to psychologists.
(cited in Keith, 2011, pp. 3–4)
First it must be said that this is Keith’s version of Triandis et al., and the reference
is to an article in which the deﬁnition of culture was only peripheral. Yet it is true
that the simple objective/subjective dichotomy has been quite widely adopted, but
the distinction is less clear-cut than is often assumed; e.g. why are ‘‘practices’’ here
described as subjective?
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Finally, Keith mentions Berry, Poortinga, Segall, and Dasen (2002) who, he
says, call culture just ‘‘the shared way of life of a group of people.’’ But as the
next section will show, that was followed later by a quite lengthy discussion of the
issue.4
Berry, Poortinga, Breugelmans, Chasiotis, & Sam [C, pp. 224–229].
In this edition, the brief deﬁnition mentioned above is on page 4, presumably to
avoid confusing people at the outset. The section on ‘‘Conceptions of culture’’
begins with an historical overview, headed by Tylor (1871). Then the deﬁnitions
by Linton (1936) and Herskovits (1948) are listed which are, respectively, ‘‘the total
social heredity of mankind’’ and ‘‘the man-made part of the human environment’’;
it is stated that these are now widely used, but that is questionable.5
The categories of deﬁnitions put forward by Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) in
their famous monograph are listed, the headings being as follows: 1. Descriptive, 2.
Historical, 3. Normative, 4. Psychological, 5. Structural, and 6. Genetic.
The ecocultural framework used in this text incorporates many features of these definitions.
However, it is most closely related to the genetic deﬁnition. It adopts the view
that culture is adaptive to both the natural habitat and to socio-political contexts (the
ﬁrst two origins) and that the third origin (creative processes) are represented as
feedback from human accomplishments to other features of the framework. This
dynamic view of how populations relate to their ecosystem treats culture not as a
stable end-product, but as part of a constantly changing system, both adapting to, and
impacting on, its habitat. (p. 225)
It seems rather odd that this key statement is relegated to a footnote! At any rate,
the classic deﬁnition by Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952), already cited above, is
then oﬀered.
Berry et al. (2011) comment that culture is both external and internal, positions
they label C1 and C2 respectively. They note that C2, or ‘‘culture in the mind’’
gained ground during the 1970s, was adopted by Cole (1996) and Shweder (1990)
who identify it with ‘‘cultural psychology’’. They are wrong as regards Cole, as will
be evident from the discussion of Cole and Parker (2011) above. They also quote
the following from Geertz (1973) on page 226: ‘‘culture [is] in the mind of the
people’’. Yet on page 27 they say: ‘‘ . . . it is important to note that Geertz (1973)
warned against the ‘cognitive fallacy’ that ‘culture consists of mental phenomena’’’
(Berry et al., 2011). There is no comment on this seemingly blatant contradiction;
but it is based on a misunderstanding of what Geertz was writing about. The
quotation on page 227 of Berry et al. (2011) is incomplete, and its meaning has
been misread. Here is the relevant part:
The cognitivist fallacy – that culture consists . . . of ‘‘mental phenomena which
can . . . be analysed by formal methods similar to those of mathematics and logic’’ –
is as destructive of an eﬀective use of the concept [of culture] as are the
behaviorist . . . fallacies . . . (Geertz, 1973, p. 12)
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The term ‘‘cognitivist’’ here applies to an anthropological theory that applies formalist
methods, and is quite diﬀerent from cognitivism in psychology. Geertz
(1973) is not denying that culture consists of mental phenomena, as he stated on
p. 89 when he described it as ‘‘patters of meaning’’. Geertz was therefore not
contradicting himself.
Next, more recent deﬁnitions (including some here discussed in A above) are
brieﬂy mentioned, including two by prominent psychological anthropologists who
concur that both C1 and C2 together constitute culture. The rise of post-modern
anthropology, which wants to dispense altogether with the concept of culture, is
noted, and critics of that persuasion are cited. As might have been expected, Berry
et al. say that ‘‘In this text we adopt the view that ‘‘culture’’ is still a useful notion,
and accept that both views of culture (C1 and C2) are valid.’’ (2011, p. 228)
Finally, there is Kroeber’s (1917) notion of the superorganic, which holds that
culture is a collective phenomenon over and above individuals. This position, generally
long abandoned, is surprisingly resurrected by Berry at al. (2011) as
. . . an important one for cross-cultural psychology since it permits us to employ the
group-individual distinction in attempting to link the two, and possibly to trace the
inﬂuence of cultural factors on individual psychological development and behavioural
expression. (p. 229)
This is an odd confusion, since Kroeber understood the ‘‘superorganic’’ in the sense
of Durkheim’s ‘‘collective representations’’, which is quite diﬀerent from what
cross-cultural psychologists usually regard as the ‘‘group level’’; the latter is derived
from individual-level data.
Altogether, readers of the lists of deﬁnitions oﬀered in this section are apparently
expected to make up their own minds as to what they prefer.
Discussion
More than half a century after Kroeber and Kluckhohn, and a literature that could
easily ﬁll a sizeable library, the most striking feature of these deﬁnitions is their
diversity. While some are based on classic formulations, others are newly invented.
Moreover, many of them are logically incompatible with each other. Here are a
couple of examples: 1. the supposed location of culture is variously said to be (a)
only in the mind or (b) both in the mind and in the material world created by
humans; (c) external only (without specifying where). 2. (a) culture is treated as a
‘‘variable’’ by tough-minded advocates of measurement, while (b) others maintain
that such a position entails a misconception of what constitutes culture. Some writers
explicitly state that their own deﬁnition is the correct one and others are wrong.6
It is also interesting that several authors present empirical studies (their own
and/or researches by others) in order to demonstrate that their particular deﬁnition
of culture is the right one. The fact that they succeed in doing so (at least in their
own estimation) shows the extraordinary malleability of the construct ‘‘culture’’.
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It must be stressed that ‘‘culture’’ is not a thing, but a social construct vaguely
referring to a vastly complex set of phenomena. From these one is able to select
when building one’s own deﬁnition—though of course there are constraints.7
Stated in this way it seems quite obvious, but several of the contributors to these
texts write as though there were objective criteria whereby the correctness of a
deﬁnition could be judged; and that is also implicit in the eﬀorts to support
one’s deﬁnition by empirical evidence.
One imagines that readers of these texts are liable to become rather confused,
especially since ‘‘culture’’, like some Freudian terms, has now become part of our
everyday vocabulary. As Kuper (1999, p. 2) put it in his excellent study: ‘‘Everyone
is into culture now’’. In its popular sense ‘‘culture’’ is usually coupled with a range
of adjectives to indicate some undeﬁned properties of a category, such as ‘‘adolescent
culture’’, ‘‘consumer culture’’, ‘‘literary culture’’, ‘‘tabloid culture’’, ‘‘visual
culture’’, and so on. Such ordinary usage is unproblematic, it being understood
that ‘‘culture’’ in this sense usually points vaguely to some characteristic ways of
behaviour of a category of people. By contrast, social scientists have agonized over
this for almost a century, without coming much nearer to an agreed solution.
What is one to conclude? Simply abandoning the term ‘‘culture’’ is not an
option. This is because over the centuries, writers have struggled to convey something
akin to our ‘‘culture’’ by using other expressions. In the 16th century,
Montaigne, in his famous essay ‘‘on cannibals’’, referred to the ‘‘opinions and
customs’’ of a nation; in the 18th Hume wrote about the ‘‘moral causes’’ of the
diﬀerences between peoples; Montesquieu mentioned the ‘‘spirit of a nation’’; and
Millar compared the ‘‘character and political institutions’’ of nations (for details,
cf. Jahoda, 1993).
In sum, the concept of ‘‘culture’’ is probably indispensable, yet there is no way
of escaping Alfred Lang’s (1997, p. 389) conclusion ‘‘that attempts at deﬁning
culture in a deﬁnite way are futile’’. So what, if anything, can be done? My
answer would be that much of the time it is quite practicable and defensible
simply to use the term without seeking to deﬁne it. However, if either for a theoretical
or empirical reason clariﬁcation is essential, then the author should explain
the speciﬁc manner in which she employs the term ‘‘culture’’ in that particular
context. Similarly, students should not be presented with a rigid formula or a
smorgasbord of deﬁnitions, but given some insight into the ways the concept is
useful in spite of the impossibility of pinning it down.
Funding
This research received no speciﬁc grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial,
or not-for-proﬁt sectors.
Notes
1. The terms ‘‘culture’’, ‘‘civilisation’’, and ‘‘Kultur’’ in English, French, and German
respectively, have had, and continue to have, different connotations. In a brilliant
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study, Elias (1977, p. 6) wrote that these concepts ‘‘grow and change with the group
whose expressions they are. The situation and history of the group is mirrored in them.’’
Cf. also Krewer & Jahoda (1993) and Jahoda (1993).
2. It is not very clear what ‘‘morphology’’ means in this context.
3. It looks as though they were thinking of Kardiner’s (1939) ‘‘basic personality’’ or
DuBois’s (1961) ‘‘modal personality’’. However, these are not the kinds of concepts
employed in current statistical approaches to cross-cultural psychology.
4. Keith refers to the second edition (2002) of this text, while I have used the most recent
(2011) edition.
5. These and other early definitions of culture were influenced by Clark Wissler, especially
his book Man and culture (1923).
6. For instance, Oyserman and Sorensen (2009, pp. 25–26) state that Hong (2009) is wrong
to assume that each society has only one culture.
7. For instance no one would define culture in terms of nationality. Paradoxically, however,
in practice nations are often treated as cultures.
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Author Biography
Gustav Jahoda is Emeritus professor of psychology at the University of
Strathclyde, Glasgow. He was one of the earliest pioneers of cross-cultural psychology,
carrying out research on comparative perception, cognition and sociocognitive
development in West Africa, India and Hong Kong. After retirement
he turned to theoretical and historical issues in psychology and anthropology.
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