A Summary of the Article What is Culture?

In the article What is Culture?- a collection of quotations, compiler Helen Spencer-Oatey set out
to explain the term culture, which she described as a difficult word to define. Essentially, this
difficulty arises from the many applications of the word in different situations. Spencer-Oatey
developed that various anthropologists have presented numerous definitions to distinguish the
term culture. Firstly, Spencer-Oatey provides a brief extract from Avruch to provide her readers
with a contextual background to some of the different researchers' perspectives when interpreting
culture. The compiler reports that according to Avruch, culture could refer to three things;

i. The unique intellectual or artistic activities or outcomes of a social group.

ii. Culture could also refer to a quality possessed by people in social groups, or

iii. The distinctiveness of different peoples or societies' many and varied cultures.

Another important idea that the compiler discusses is the characteristics of a culture. Spencer-
Oatey analyses that culture is manifested at various layers of depth, including three basic levels
of apparent artifacts, values, and basic underlying assumptions. Noticeable artifacts include
physical aspects of a group like how they dress, how they address each other, and their
environment's general layout. The author documents that values are the unconscious responses
guiding a person's behaviors. Another characteristic of culture discussed is that it influences
behavior and interpretations of behavior. Additionally, culture is characterized by its potential
differentiation from universal human nature and unique individual personality.

Spencer-Oatey further expanded the following characteristics that typify culture.

i. Culture shapes biological processes because most human conscious behavior is acquired by
interacting with individuals within their culture.

ii. Culture is connected to social groups, as the author explains that at least one or more people
share the latter. Culture can be shared by people from a particular country, ethnic or religious
group, organization, role, or occupation.

iii. Culture is both an individual construct and a social construct.

iv. Culture is consistently both socially and psychologically dispersed in a group.

v. Culture has universal (etic) and distinctive (emic) elements.

vi. Culture is acquired.

vii. Culture is subject to gradual change as people are introduced to innovations and new
information.

viii. The various aspects of a culture are often interrelated.

ix. Culture is a descriptive, not an evaluative concept.

Another critical observation compiled by Spencer-Oatey is that culture also has insufficient
stereotypes like culture is homogenous, culture is a thing, it is consistently spread among
members of a group, people only have a single culture, culture is a custom, and finally that
culture is timeless. The author advised that some of the errors we must avoid when studying
culture include using a small sample to draw conclusions about a large group and avoiding
confusing the levels of culture during analyses. The author concluded the article by presenting
the following words citing that they are closely related to culture. The terms are culture and
nation, culture and race, culture and ethnicity, culture, subculture, and coculture, and lastly,
culture and identity.