what is culture?

since this is such a complicated question, let's think first about possible definitions of culture, since it is one of the most ambiguously defined words in existence. first, there is the general idea of culture, as in something universally possessed by all human social groups in the world. then, there are particular cultures, which possess things unique to the culture of a certain social group not found in other social groups. so here a major question arises: are the things unique to particular cultures extensions of something universally possessed by all social groups, or are these unique things representative of something possessed exclusively by a particular culture? i tend to believe it's the former, and my definition of culture later on will prove to be compatible with this belief. in any case, i think we need a tangible starting point instead of continuing from a theoretical perspective. let's think about how we would go about studying culture in a basic sense. we could study our own culture, but since this might prove difficult for any number of reasons, i think it would be best to study another culture so we can naturally establish cross-cultural comparisons and thus address both the idea of culture in general and particular cultures. so one would go to a location and see culture represented by language, artifacts, behaviors, etc. one would then find commonalities in these areas, thus categorizing and grouping what his/her investigation uncovers so as to create an organizational system of how each unique/individual cultural "event" (an "event" being something belonging to each area, such as a conversation belonging to language, an object belonging to artifacts, a physical gesture belonging to behaviors, and so on) -- there being millions upon millions for us to investigate in reality and in theory an infinite number of possibilities -- can be classified and its relevance with respect to other classified "events" be determined. so, in short, when studying culture one is looking for similarities and differences in relationships among "events", with the similarities and differences allowing for classifications under "same" and "different". if culture were a completely simple and non-evolving system, then one would look only for "same" and "different" "events". however, since culture is not a simple system, we can't look only at "same" and "different" "events", but we have to view culture as operating by an underlying rule system; this rule system -- at least in theory, as our ability to implement this idea in practice dictates to what extent we can authentically remain true to this principle -- accounts for the internal mechanisms -- e.g., the diversity amongst individuals within that culture that cause culture to be an ongoing, dynamic process rather than a static one -- that are responsible for cultural evolution. so instead of classifying "events" as "same" and "different", in following this rule system, we can study culture over time by predicting "expected" "events", i.e., "events" predicted by the rule system using evidence from the past and present. the only problem with this is that culture is also not a closed system, so "unexpected" events (caused by the environment, e.g., a massive natural disaster previously never experienced) as well as encounters with people from other cultures, resulting in cross-cultural "events", influence a culture externally. internal "events" -- things ultimately caused by people inside a culture (language, artifacts, behaviors, etc.) -- occur, and people within the culture are forced to either accept or reject them. so culture is subject to change and evolution, with the change defining culture as much as its static commonalities. now, to make matters clearer, i would like to establish that "events" like language and artifacts are the result of human behavior even though in-and-of-themselves they are not behaviors. however, from now on, unless noted otherwise, behavior will be used in the broadest sense, encompassing both behaviors and behavioral results. thus, "events" = behaviors. from this, it follows that culture is expressed (not defined by, but expressed) through commonly-accepted behaviors: "same" behaviors, behaviors within the expected set of infinity (thus inherently being accepted due to being expected), and behaviors within the unexpected set of infinity (not accepted simply at face value, and thus requiring consideration before being accepted in either raw or amended form). there are also behaviors in the unexpected set of infinity that are not accepted and thus not a part of that culture, having been rejected from being adopted by or integrated into it. but returning to the idea of the inherent rule system, i began by making the rule system applicable only to things within a certain culture. however, in studying all cultures, or the concept of culture in general, the rule system must be all-encompassing across cultures, characterizing each culture in a way that makes compatible the rules of each culture with each other so that 1) we can have a general concept of culture (not just *a* culture), and 2) cross-cultural "events" can be predicted with the same accuracy as "events" within a culture. with #2, the all-encompassing rule system eliminates the idea of "events" being "unexpected", as all "events" using this system fall within the set of "expected". i should point out a major difference between the two rule systems: the rule system specific to a certain culture is experienced by the people in that culture. for example, consider "behaviors within the unexpected set of infinity". these behaviors, in theory, reveal a different sort of underlying interaction than "behaviors within the expected set of infinity", and accordingly, people in the culture react differently to behaviors in one set as opposed to the other. so, the rule system operates abstractly and differently, but the difference is also experienced in reality by people who operate according to the rule system. as such, people in a culture can know the inherent rule system of their culture to some degree in theory (in practice, this does not occur because people are unable to separate their personal schema from their cultural influences). on the other hand, with the "universal" rule system, it operates abstractly but not differently because every behavior is expected, so when a person in a culture experiences behavior unexpected to him/her, the person does not know why this is so and cannot establish a connection between his/her reaction/experience and the underlying rule system of his/her culture and his/her culture's relationships to other cultures.

so i have outlined how culture is expressed. but we still have left the main question unanswered: what is culture? well, in short, culture is everything in a literal sense, best viewed in my opinion from the perspective of the following categories: mind/brain, body, and environment. mind/brain corresponds to people's thoughts, while body corresponds to people's behaviors. perhaps it is best to first make a distinction between "culture" and "everything". this can be done by showing the relationships among the different categories, but it might be even easier if we start from the very beginning, as in pre-cultural states. at first, everything people do is in an effort to survive. however, in the process, a few things occur. for one, consciousness develops over the course of evolution at some point, and this eventually results in humans developing language. once language is established, people have a method for conceiving and communicating things in the abstract. now, before this point, it is unclear whether humans were capable of establishing correlations in their behavior and noticing which behaviors yielded the best results in situations, or whether humans operated solely from basal instinct. regardless, by the point of language development, people had the tools necessary for establishing relationships among things that were conducive to their survival. in doing so, people were not perfect scientists -- they did not perfectly establish the variables nor a method capable of assessing the importance of those variables at the outset -- and accordingly, they attributed and included many things that were unrelated -- thus, extraneous things -- to the things pertinent for a certain purpose to be fulfilled. for example, suppose a person died when swimming in the ocean during rain. as such, people in the culture thought that there was a connection between the rain and the person's death, so it became a belief in that culture that anyone who swam in the ocean during rain would die -- this demonstrates a cultural belief system, and one can compare it to a belief system based on science and see the difference between the two. so, out of this process of refining their beliefs about how their environment operated, people established culture in creating a set of commonly agreed upon beliefs that resulted in, for the most part, commonly expected behaviors. the unexpected behaviors, which happened only on occasion, were dealt with through whatever system the culture had in place at that time for interpreting behaviors, and through this process the behaviors were determined to either be acceptable or unacceptable. this process is also what constituted "internal" cultural evolution; "external" cultural evolution might be something environmentally introduced to the culture that had never been seen or imagined before, such as a volcano erupting, or an encounter with people from a different culture. remember, we are viewing things in this paragraph from the view of the development of culture in general and, as an example, what happened within a certain culture, so terms like "unexpected", which were eliminated from the perspective of an all-encompassing rule system, are still relevant here because in viewing things from within a culture, we are only operating from the perspective of a rule system within a culture. we'll continue this mindset until further notice.

now, a few additional points i want to make about culture before we reach a crossroads of sorts. for one, in my previous post entitled "what is humanity?", i discussed the role of conceivability and communication primarily, although not purely, as a linguistic function that allowed us to access our pure humanity, analyze conflicts between animal nature and humanity, and express conflicts between animal nature and humanity in domains that were culturally established, e.g. math, psychology, art, religion, etc. so in this sense, the means for our humanity are culturally-specific, although the ends aren't necessarily so. second, i want to point out that culture inherently entails normative and anti-normative behaviors, but that all of these behaviors are still consistent with being a part of that culture. what this means is that while majority behavior constitutes a cultural norm and this can be interpreted as expected behavior by an outside observer, minority behavior is equally as valid, although not as prevalent or powerful within a culture; thus, minority behavior is not unexpected behavior by default. as such, it is correct to actually view the entire range of behavior, both normative and anti-normative, as being expected even though it is not one and the same -- there is an important difference between the two.

now, here is where we arrive at a crossroads of sorts, but first let me touch on a few unrelated points that i feel are still worthy of being mentioned. it starts off with the fact that culture can be viewed as both being and becoming, and can be defined using both: being is the totality of everything constituting that culture up until the present (thus, culture as being is a static summation), and becoming is the inherent rule system within everything that acts as a mechanism for change from the present to a point in the future (thus, culture as becoming is a snapshot in time); thus, the inherent rule system works as an ongoing generative process, and the rule system itself is never static, but instead is always evolving and changing -- the rule system may only appear static at moments to us because that is the way abstraction works in practice, but in theory the abstraction of the rule system reflecting reality is dynamic, or at least has the potential to be at any given moment. also, i should point out that even though culture is expressed through behaviors, the behaviors interact with each other and everything, so everything affects everything and ultimately behaviors in-and-of-themselves are as much constitutions of culture as they are expressions of it -- this sentiment will be touched upon later, although for now let's keep the assumption that behaviors are simply expressions of culture. in order to express something, one must first experience it. so naturally, this leads us to the idea that culture can only be truly experienced by someone within the culture, although one can "experience" it as an outsider. so here is the crossroads: if behaviors express culture and consciousness experiences culture, and people (as gene-environment interactions) and their environment constitute their culture, and descriptions of people and their environment convey culture, what *is* culture? culture is everything. earlier, i asked how one would go about studying culture, but now we have reached a point where it is necessary to ask the question: how can culture be defined? (here i am talking about the concept of culture in general, so the "universal" rule system is now the one being used) i discussed in the opening paragraph that culture is an inherent rule system. now, i will expand upon it by stating that in theory this rule system allows one to predict what a future cultural state will entail from knowing the totality of culture up to the present. from a materialist perspective, culture is everything causing everything to happen, but like in physics, an abstract idea can convey the rule system. thus, an abstract idea extracted from that material of everything is *to know* culture. *to know* culture should be a universal, like thinking about e = mc^2 does not cause the law to be affected, as either thinking or not thinking about it is compatible with what the law predicts. similarly, *to know* means that every form of being both within and outside the culture should be compatible with knowing. however, we soon find that e = mc^2 is not an analogous example because the physical effects of thinking do not cause that law to be affected, whereas the physical effects of thinking do affect one's being, which affects one's behavior and thus affects culture. being is existentialist (not as in the philosophical movement, but as in anti-essentialist), but *to know*, for it to work and be plausible in reality, must be essentialist. thus, *to know* can only work in theory as existentialist, and thus to know and to be are the same. but since no one can ever know everything required to know even in theory (the only way for it to work in theory would there to be an ongoing theory of everything with the universe consisting as a complete ontology), then even in theory we are limited by our being, so people within the culture are on one side of a lens looking out at the rest of the world and have a distorted understanding of their own culture by being in their culture and only a small part of the whole *to know* revealed to them by their limited existence (limited by time and space of their being, which in happening within their culture, is culturally related, but does not make their *to know* any better or worse than the *to know* of people from other cultures -- it just makes their *to know* different). people on the other side of the lens looking at another culture from their own cultural perspective, and have the same limitations as those within the culture except they are "inversed" by being on the other side of the lens. so at first glance, it appears that the only objective view of culture can only be from a god's eye view. but i will now examine this further and conclude that this is not the case.

one criticism i can levy at this is to ask the following question: what if essentialist ideas about culture are functional to an appropriately-deemed extent (thus not being completely comprehensive, but just an attempt at getting most things correct) and that this sort of thinking can be compatible with both people within and outside a culture, e.g. resulting in one of the expected or unexpected but accepted behaviors? for this to work, it has to be culturally acceptable to investigate culture as an inherent rule system that makes essentialist claims. in this sense, culture is simply an unattainable ideal -- wishing that it could either be an essentialist medium that could be studied through an essentialist approach or an existential medium that could be "studied"/experienced through an existential approach -- that we nevertheless work towards by making essentialist claims about an existential medium that we treat as essentialist. thus, one can either be existentialist or essentialist about culture, and if you are essentialist, then you think culture can be studied (although not experienced) objectively, but if you are existentialist, then you don't think culture can be studied at all (i know this will be disputed by contemporary social science, but in claiming to not make essentialist claims and to not use essentialist approaches regarding culture by not using a formal system, they are employing what i would consider to be an informal sort of essentialism, from which essentialist claims can be interpreted and communicated, whereas with pure existentialism, knowledge is specific to the individual at a given place and time and cannot be communicated to others; the successful transmission of information is indicative of some type of essentialism taking place -- while existentialism might be their unrealizable ideal/goal, a realization of this goal would also result in a communication breakdown, so i don't agree that you can "have it both ways", i.e., claiming your work to be one thing based on its failed ideals while having its success rely on the fact that you know its ideals will fail and thus another thing will succeed, yet denying what makes it successful in actuality to be the work's identity. i could elaborate on this further, but i think i should conclude by remarking that if everything is considered to be culturally-mediated, then language, as an aspect subsumed under culture's umbrella that is also culture's best means for communicating what culture is and in being viewed as constant changing fluid interaction (a view espoused by post-structuralists such as derrida, whereas traditional philosophy of language views language as a system constituting some inherent rigidity), then the fluidity of language makes language anti-essentialist, and in reflecting and representing culture, can only do so in an anti-essentialist manner. at least this is the logic that i have observed being used in "postmodernist" anthropological approaches to justify the absence of essentialism; my subscription to analytic philosophy -- although not complete -- is enough for me to believe that language is a rigid system, and therefore using language to describe culture is inherently essentialist, and it is only to a matter of what degree that is open to debate. there is some sticky ground here in that more recent movements in philosophy of language -- ordinary language analysis -- are technically anti-essentialist, but they operate under the assumption that miscommunication using the same language is due to anti-essentialist tendencies, and that once the miscommunication is addressed and clarified, that the language problem is effectively "dissolved". now this does not mean at that point that language has been essentialized per se, only that the level of anti-essentialism has been reduced to a desirable degree. so in ordinary language analysis, a certain amount of anti-essentialism is assumed, but the goal is to reduce it and then circumvent it since it cannot be eliminated. on the other hand, with typical postmodernist anti-essentialist approaches, either anti-essentialism is accepted at whatever level it is assumed to be at, and language and culture operate at that level without changing, or anti-essentialism is accepted as being vague (often inviting views of relativism and subjectivism) and ill-defined, just being defined as the domain of everything that is not essentialist. to make a comparison, the anti-essentialism found in the latter wittgenstein is far different from the anti-essentialism in works by derrida. furthermore, in ordinary language analysis, anti-essentialism is based on assumptions that are extremely complicated and not satisfactorily resolved -- please see "externalism vs internalism" on wikipedia -- and whose justifications, philosophically, are not really any better than the justification for essentialism. the only real reason anti-essentialism, in its ordinary language analysis form, is accepted over logical positivist essentialism is because of "common sense", much like realism is accepted due to "common sense" in spite of the obstacles of skepticism. however, both analytic versions of philosophy of language are compatible with objectivism and universalism, whereas the anti-essentialism espoused by postmodernism is conducive to subjectivism and relativism. so while there may be a philosophical difference, albeit minor, between what i consider to be essentialist approaches and what ordinary language analysis considers to be anti-essentialist, they both result in the same philosophical outcomes about the principles underlying the universe and how they affect our interaction with the universe, whereas the philosophical outcomes of postmodern anti-essentialist approaches are different from the analytic ones. and ultimately, that is the paradigm battleground here when i challenge the typical postmodernist version of anti-essentialism often associated with anthropological definitions of culture, not the rather arbitrary distinction between essentialism and ordinary language analysis's anti-essentialism that at first glance might appear to undermine my position.), only subjectively experienced from within or without. from an essentialist perspective, to know a culture is to predict expected behaviors and treat people in that culture as essentialist (to me, essentialist does not necessarily mean part of an established system, but as part of a functioning schema by the researcher using language, which inherently categorizes and thus essentializes things, ultimately allowing the research to be interpreted by other researchers despite the absence of a formally agreed upon system between the researcher behind the research and his/her peers; the fluidity of language will cause many to claim that the research is inherently subjective in gathering, interpreting, and disseminating the information, and thus they are not employing essentialism, but i'll continue to maintain that unless a complete communication breakdown occurs, some sort of essentialism on some level is occurring -- we can leave the rest of the whole existentialist/essentialist, objective/subjective, etc. debates to philosophy of language at a later time), which is an attempt at an objective approach (whether or not it succeeds at this in practice is a different debate altogether -- i'll address this in a moment). now, one can argue that culture affects our ability to objectively undertake an essentialist approach. however, if people both within and outside a culture agree on a common method and arrive at similar conclusions, then the ability for our essentialist approach to transcend our existential being has been achieved and something approaching objectivity has been reached. to argue that any culture prevents us from objectively studying culture is pointless because as long as one is aware of inherent cultural bias and adjusts accordingly, the variations within a culture are greater than variations among different cultures, so to attack a person's ability to do objective work studying culture is simply an ad hominem. but going back to the original point that to know a culture is to predict expected behaviors (and now we return to the rule system as being specific to a certain culture), one also has to realize that to accept unexpected behaviors is to be in a culture since you have the power of choosing to accept or not to accept the unexpected behavior. but even in that culture, each person can only know whether to accept or not accept unexpected behavior from their own perspective, not for the whole culture (hence why i said earlier that in practice people cannot access their own culture's inherent rule system). as such, someone in a culture can *know* something that someone outside a culture cannot, but that person's *know* is existential, subjective, and extremely limited as far as exerting power in their culture as they are one of many who will ultimately decide the fate of an unexpected behavior. furthermore, form the perspective of the "universal" rule system, this person's *know*, even in theory, does not possess any greater understanding of his/her culture's rule system than any other person either within or outside the culture.

now, a few more points before concluding this piece. first, the inherent rule system (both kinds) being determinist or indeterminist depends on one's view of the universe, including taking consciousness into account; if the universe is determinist, then the rule system in theory, with a perfect ontology, could predict every future behavior, but if it is indeterminist, then it could not. second, for those who argue that one cannot study culture because of cultural bias, i would like to point out that the limits of knowledge based on evidence (not on our epistemology/ability to process) are just as, if not more obstructing, as our epistemology. so, let's assume that truly "knowing" culture is 100%. if culture, through evidence, only reveals, say, 10%, and our bias causes us to misinterpret cultural evidence by 20%, then ultimately we can only "know" 8% of a culture. but as one can tell from looking at the numbers, 90% of the problem with studying culture is due to the evidence, and 2% is due to bias (this is assuming bias more than negligibly exists, which is something i am opposed to and am merely allowing here for the sake of devil's advocate). thus, i would tell a person worried about cultural bias that the bias isn't the main reason you can't know the culture; the real reason is that there isn't enough evidence to study. perhaps quantifying it isn't the proper thing to do, but i don't know how else i could go about demonstrating the argument. third, i would like to mention that if one doesn't feel that descriptions of culture do much justice towards accurately conveying them, it might be more effective to measure cultural change and rate of change cross-culturally, and then arrive at conclusions regarding the cultures using these results, since they reveal aspects of the inherent rule systems within each culture. in this sense, i believe this is the only way we can truly define what culture is without resorting to having to reduce culture to everything: examine the difference in culture through the change from one state to another, and we will have a better understanding of what culture, and in a broader sense, everything, is by establishing a clearer idea of the nature of the inherent rule system in culture, and in a deeper sense, the universe. this leads me to my final point, the million dollar question: can culture be studied scientifically? certainly, certain aspects of it can be studied scientifically, such as psychology, but they are very compartmentalized and specialized and do not give a more comprehensive picture of culture, only some scattered facts here and there without any real insight into the inner workings of culture -- they show the effects of the system, but don't examine the system itself. certainly a qualitative approach can be somewhat useful, but it too has inherent limitations including objectivity in gathering and assessing evidence and the degree to which causality or correlation can be established. i think my last point about studying cultural change and rate of change cross-culturally is the most scientific and most useful in determining the inherent rule systems of each culture, for it is through the understanding of those that the study of culture can most closely resemble a science. in this sense, i would say that we can't study culture scientifically the way we can physics or chemistry, but certainly can at certain levels via psychology (and eventually neuroscience) and one day, on a comprehensive level, i think we might be able to in a way that somewhat resembles what non-lab natural science does, although this view is probably a little too optimistic, although bits and pieces might someday be realized.

regardless of the feasibility of studying culture as a science or not, the idea of studying culture from a "god's eye view" is more along the lines of how natural science approaches science rather than how social science does. while a god's eye view is a helpful epistemological guideline, it should be noted that taken in its most literal sense, from a god's eye view the abstraction can be reduced infinitesimally small so that the abstraction mirrors reality on a continuous level rather than a discrete one, and thus the abstraction cannot be accessed by anyone but from a god's eye view. (this is the "universal" abstract rule system mentioned at the end of the first paragraph -- ultimately, while the perspective of the cultural-specific rule system can be helpful in explaining how a cultural rule system can account for an infinite number of possibilities, i view the "universal" rule system as being the more correct, complete way to view how culture operates) as such, human approximations of abstraction (and thus of culture) which naturally are discrete will fall short of reaching the desired ideal goal. on a similar note, remember how earlier i discussed how culture is quite literally everything? well, this leaves us with a problem of how to define everything. while the inherent rule system provides a process for defining change of the everything, it does not provide a categorical definition for how to define culture. as such, culture is a theoretical construct that exists only because it is a useful way to view things, not because it exists in-and-of-itself. now, two things to that point. first, i would say that culture is best defined through a geographical lens because it best takes into account the people and their environment when assessing cultural factors; while culture later became defined as a behavioral pattern involving symbols (this definition has since been overtaken by newer, non-essentialist definitions of culture), i would argue that the origins of the definition of culture and the spirit of the term basically viewed culture, as it pertained to certain cultures, as the essence unique to people of a certain environment, and as culture pertained to all humans, the essence unique to all people in the world, i.e., a universal psyche. the second implication of culture not existing in-and-of-itself is that culture's temporal definition is arbitrary -- when did pre-cultural states stop and cultural states begin? was there a transition period between the two? if language is one of the fundamental aspects of culture, and language is dependent on consciousness arises as a result of human evolution, then does the emergence of consciousness constitute the beginning of culture? since ontologically i have defined culture as being intertwined with everything, there are two paths to choose from regarding how we approach this situation: 1) if culture indeed is dependent on consciousness, then before consciousness existed, culture did not exist, or 2) if there is no set definition for when culture began, then everything from the beginning of time can be viewed as related to culture, as the inner workings of the universe defined through the inherent rule system are applicable to the evolution of matter, which eventually evolved into humans and their environment. rather than being forced to choose one over the other, i think it is a matter of context for choosing which one is appropriate. for the purposes of social science, #1 is a more practical perspective, whereas #2 works for a more austere, philosophical/theoretical viewpoint that i believe is closer to "the truth" about culture, but is less useful more defining "the truth" about culture as it relates to us as humans in the world at present. finally, i would like to address the contemporary notion that there is no need for a system of culture. while i agree that a system per se is not needed, that culture as a metaphysical idea and ideal is something that researchers should be working towards, in reality it might be impossible to ever reach a consensus on the definition of culture, so researchers should still view their work as contributing to a knowledge base that, in theory, would one day allow us to make the definitive definition of culture. without this ideal, the idea of culture is fractured with no endpoint. as such, since culture is only defined in the eye of the beholder instead of viewed as something actually existing "out there" in reality or theoretically as something (such as my proposed rule system), culture is simply an epistemological indicator for each researcher depending on how they define it, and is meaningless as a metaphysical idea that can be universally agreed upon. by denying the potential for universal agreement on culture's definition, social scientists have effectively denied culture as something we can study and have replaced it with the idea that it is simply a reflection of ourselves. the latter might make one inclined to believe that the idea of culture is more important now than ever before, that since everything we do is cultural, that culture is the currency by which we conduct our lives. however, i happen to believe the exact opposite; by abandoning culture as an object of study, we have either implicitly given up on studying culture or we believe that the idea of culture -- at least embodied by the spirit of the term as it was conceived in its origins -- is dead. i also believe that it gives us a false sense of knowledge in attempting to define everything, including things that are unknown, as simply being cultural constructs and that it opens the door for relativism, which i think is a philosophically poor way of viewing the universe.