What culture is

In everyday speech, 'cultured' often means refined taste in music, art or manners. Sociology uses the word differently. Culture is the whole way of life of a group: the learnt and shared understandings, beliefs, skills, rules and objects that people use to live together. (The word comes from the Latin for tending or cultivating, as in 'agriculture'.)

• Culture is learnt, not inborn; we pick it up through socialisation, and it passes from one generation to the next as a social heritage.
• Culture is like a map: it helps us find our way in society. But it is never finished: people keep adding to it and changing it.
• Humans live in very different natural settings (mountains, plains, forests, deserts, river valleys, islands) and social settings (villages, towns, cities), and they develop different strategies to cope. So ways of life differ.
• Cultures cannot be ranked as 'higher' or 'lower'. The book's case is the 2004 tsunami, in which island tribes with no modern technology, the Onges, Jarawas, Great Andamanese and Shompens, saved themselves while many others were caught unaware.

Definitions from anthropology:

• Edward Tylor (1871): culture is 'that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society'.
• Bronislaw Malinowski of Poland, founder of the 'functional school' of anthropology, added material things: 'Culture comprises inherited artifacts, goods, technical process, ideas, habits and values.'
• Clifford Geertz suggested reading human actions like words in a book, for their meaning: 'Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs.'
• So many definitions existed that Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn published a survey, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (1952).

Example (new): a family that moves from a hill village to a coastal town learns new foods, new ways of building against salt and damp, and new festival customs. Their culture changes because their setting changed, not because one way of life is 'better'.