The culture concept — which overtime has been contrasted, combined, and entangled with the related concepts of society, personality, identity, symbolism and practice — weaves together the history and core philosophical and methodological debates of anthropology as a discipline. Yet, today the concept that lies at the center of what anthropology is and does is fragmented and contested, as anthropologists have taken on the challenges put forth by postmodernity to cope with contradiction, borderlessness, constant flux, and the impacts of anthropological and historical biases, such as sexism, orientalism, and othering. This has left some anthropologists reaching back to science to find stability and others plunging into a realm of interpretation and description, while a new generation of anthropologists formed within this milieu must find space to make a discipline, whose central subject is disputed, both relevant and professional.

The 12th century Anglo-Norman word culture was derived from the Latin word cultura, meaning the cultivation of land (Beldo 2010:144, OED Online n.d.). As colleges and universities spread through Europe in the 16th century, culture came to mean the cultivation of people through education (OED Online n.d.). The culture concept came to mean a quality of the upper class that indicated refinement in taste, judgement and intellect through the 18th century leading up to the Industrial Revolution (Beldo 2010:145). European contact with other peoples through the rise of imperialism produced the need to discuss a collective customs of a people (OED Online n.d.). In the 19th century, French philosophers used the term civilisation to encompass the religion, economy, politics, morals and technology that distinguished the West from contemporary “primitive” cultures (Kuper 1999:30). After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the German word kultur was positioned in opposition to the French concept of civilisation (31).  While civilisation was conceptualized as transnational, German kultur was expressed as the nationalistic and individual achievement through the cultivation of intellectual, religious and artistic pursuits (31). In 1871, Edward Burnett Tylor used elements of both civilisation and kultur, to create the first formal anthropological definition of culture: “Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (1). Tylor’s definition — one of the most widely cited definitions of culture in anthropology — became the seed for anthropological deliberation for the next century. (more…)