What is Culture?

An Introduction to the Subject

At the beginning of each new semester, I ask students to define the word culture. Collectively, they produce a definition that covers the ideas they’ve heard from anthropologists and other intercultural thinkers. Some refer to culture as a system of beliefs, values, and ways of thinking that govern a group of people. Others suggest that culture is the customs, habits, and rituals practiced by varying communities. Still others will comment on the foods, clothing, music, and other products created by ethnic groups. In sum, all these things are captured in the word. Culture is a complex whole that includes and governs all of what students share in that initial discussion. The simplest way to summarize this matrix of objects and symbols is to say that culture is what we make of the earth.1

Culture is what we make of the earth in two respects. First, culture occurs when humans make a concrete change to the earth, producing objects (chairs, omelets, highways, symphonies, etc.) from the raw materials that exists therein. Second, culture is the sense we make of the earth; the system of symbols and meaningful signs that holds together and conveys our beliefs about who we are, where we are, and why we are here.2 In this second respect, culture is the world we make, the world in which we live. We embed in the products we create assumptions about our place, ourselves, and how life should be lived. These assumptions are passed down from generation to generation in the stories that undergird our cultural worlds. Culture, then, is a World Outspoken.

Besides defining culture by those objects, stories, rituals, and rhythms that make up its parts, some attention should be given to the history of the word itself. Culture was originally a “noun of process,” meaning it was a noun synonymous with cultivation.3 Culture referred to the process of working the ground to produce crops. Scientists still use the word this way in scientific labs when they refer to bacteria in a petri dish as a “culture.” Since the 18th century, however, the word is used metaphorically to refer to working, or cultivating, humans. Culture is now understood as the process of civilizing people.4

What does Culture do?

Some of the functions of culture are implicit in what I stated already, but it is helpful to review the details. Culture has four primary functions: Culture communicates, orients, reproduces, and cultivates.5 To demonstrate the functions described in this section, I am going to include two examples. First, I will use the refrigerator as an exemplary object, a single artifact of human culture-making, that does each of the four functions. Second, to help demonstrate the way culture produces objects and systems, I’m going to explore the way education as an institution also does each function of culture. These two examples should provide enough grounding to help make sense of each function.

Culture Communicates

Every product of our culture-making communicates our assumptions regarding the meaning of life. Through these products, human communities make sense of the world and tell the story of a life well lived. However, culture doesn’t communicate explicitly but through subtle moves and suggestive images. Culture communicates metaphorically. According to one study, most people think eidetically, or in vivid pictures,6 and culture communicates directly to our imaginations by providing images that can guide our way of being.

How the Refrigerator Communicates

A refrigerator is “an appliance or compartment which is artificially kept cool and used to store food and drink.”7 It makes it possible for people to purchase and stock foods in bulk. It also preserves food beyond its harvesting season. For instance, strawberries are now accessible year-round rather than from April through June thanks, in part, to refrigeration. The fridge, as it is commonly called, “speaks” through its ability to circumvent the natural process of spoilage. In other words, the refrigerator proclaims that spoilage is no longer an insurmountable issue. People can have the foods they want when they want them. Of course, things still go bad in the fridge, but the subtle message remains: Humanity has the power to overcome natural processes.

All objects communicate, and the refrigerator is no exception.

How Education Communicates

In their seminal book, The Social Construction of Reality, Berger and Luckman argue that people develop their humanity in relationship with their natural and cultural environment.8 We are who we are, in large part, because of where we are from. Educational institutions play a major role in communicating an image of life well lived to children and youth. Through the lives of teachers, extracurricular programming, and even the aesthetic of places of learning, schools promote a view of future success. My Block, My Hood, My City (MBMHMC) serves as an excellent, real-world example of this point.

MBMHMC is a non-profit in Chicago providing youth from under-resourced neighborhoods with “an awareness of the world and opportunities beyond their neighborhood.” Partnering with local schools, MBMHMC takes students on educational explorations (i.e. tours) “focused on STEM, Arts & Culture, Citizenry & Volunteerism, Health, Community Development, Culinary Arts, and Entrepreneurism.”9 Their goal is to “boost educational attainment in spite of the poverty and social isolation” faced by these students.10 The results are remarkable. According to their website, students who take educational trips between the ages of 12-18 are 57% more likely to earn a college degree or do postgraduate work.

In a multitude of ways, education done well communicates that success is part of the future of every young learner.

Culture Orients

Culture embodies our hopes and concerns, so it reinforces certain moods and postures toward the world. These moods and postures are only part of the way in which culture shapes individual identities, providing scripts and roles that people live into. It also answers life’s central questions, namely, who are we, where are we, and why are we here. With images and stories communicating directly to our imagination, culture orients our emotional response to the world around us. It profoundly affects our view of beauty, it provides a logic for discerning truth, and teaches certain tastes for what is good. Culture is a teacher. Culture shapes character.

How the Refrigerator Orients

I’ve already mentioned the way in which the refrigerator changes our view of produce and spoilage. It fosters a different orientation to the seasons, making many people completely unaware of the farmers work and harvest schedule. The fridge shapes our perception of food production, increasing the distance between production and consumer. It is also capable of distorting our understanding of sustainable quantities. An empty fridge communicates a compelling message about wealth and security. For this reason, grocers keep their fridges stocked with gallons of milk and eggs. Though not alone in orienting humanities consumption habits, the fridge plays a role in orienting the consumer identity.

How Education Orients

The film adaptation of Wonder depicts the orienting power of education beautifully.11 Wonder is a story about Auggie, a boy born with facial differences, and his family struggling with the transition to a mainstream school. Mr. Brown, Auggie’s teacher, begins his first day of class by teaching the students the meaning of the word precepts. Precepts “guide us when we have to make decisions about really important things,” he tells the class. The monthly precept is meant to help students answer questions like, “Who is it that I aspire to be?” For the remainder of the film, the precepts guide the students as they navigate their identities, bullying, what it means to be a good friend, and what it means to have courage. By the end, the community is changed and Auggie has friends he never dreamed of having. Mr. Brown’s precepts framed the transformation of the students and the characters they became.

Culture Reproduces

In On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry claims that one of the objective qualities of beauty is that it begets more beauty.12 Beautiful objects inspire the production of other beautiful objects. Such is the way of culture. Culture constantly extends from person to person, generation to generation, through contact with “memes.” A meme is “an element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation.”13 Today, most people think a “meme” is strictly a piece of media shared from person to person through digital communications like social media, but a meme can be a piece of clothing, song, book, etc. Any imitation, or replication, of a cultural product is a meme. Like genes (the biological counterpart of a meme), memes are heritable. Culture begets culture.14

How the Fridge Reproduces

The refrigerator’s “accessible food whenever” story now extends to accessible food wherever. Today, people can purchase refrigerators for their vehicles, making it possible to travel with perishable foods. Mini-fridges are common in college dorms and office workspaces. The fridge is now a staple of the Western cultural world, and all these variations of the fridge are memes of early refrigeration machines. These memes extend the story communicated by this object.

How Education Reproduces

A recent article on the Los Angeles Lakers illuminates the benefits of what the organization refers to as “The Los Angeles Lakers’ Genius Series.” Like the educational explorations of MBMHMC, this series consists of in-house presentations and field trips to meet with influential people in other fields of work. The objective of this series is to inspire and challenge the young Lakers team to pursue success in new and creative ways. In other words, the organization hopes players would take an interest in becoming like (i.e. imitating) the speakers they meet. Through these meetings, the Lakers organization is hoping to replicate the likes of The Rock, Elon Musk, and others.

The “Genius Series” supports the argument of Professor Emeritus Frank Heppner of the University of Rhode Island. In a blog expressing his concern with education technology and the shift to online modes of instruction, Professor Heppner asks, “how are we going to INSPIRE students, especially the non-traditional ones?”15 Heppner is of the mind that education is really two simultaneous processes: 1) the process of teaching/learning and 2) the process of inspiring/being inspired. The latter process is the primary avenue for cultural replication. Even Heppner himself confesses, “From [my professor] Stebbins, I learned what it was like to really love the thing you study--and I eventually followed his example.”16

Many people can point to a teacher/professor who profoundly inspired the person they became. People try to replicate the beauty, magic, and wisdom of their instructors, and in this way, people become memes of the educations they received.

Culture Cultivates

The ultimate outcome of culture’s work is the corporate cultivation of the human spirit. In other words, culture is capable of giving form to the spirit of whole communities. For this reason, some scholars have referred to culture as theology incarnate. Through its conversation with the human imagination, through orientation toward the good, true, and beautiful, and through its replication in persons, culture has the potential to shape communities beyond the present. Culture can till the human heart and mind for the good or ill of generations.

How the Refrigerator Cultivates

It is important to state upfront that not all objects cultivate in equal measure. Cultivation is the process by which whole societies are shaped, and some objects do this to greater degree than others. The car or smartphone, for instance, have immense cultivating power, and they move to the center of cultural worlds that are created around them. We make roads for the car and garages to store them. We have shows to highlight them. Entire cultural systems are created to sustain our use of the automobile. Likewise, we make room in our lives to accommodate the demands of the smartphone.17 While the refrigerator does not have the same potency to cultivate, it still influences society. As part of the cultural world created by the refrigerator, the modern supermarket increasingly includes items from previously inaccessible regions of the earth. This use of the refrigerator cultivates society’s desire for foods beyond their geographical reach. Put differently, because the refrigerator can keep foods as they travel long distances, society cultivates a varied and diversified appetite.

How Education Cultivates

Education, if it continues to be a required part of society, shapes generation after generation with the promotion of its vision of success. Like the refrigerator, however, there are degrees to which education cultivates. MBMHMC seeks to fill a gap in the cultivation of young people in impoverished communities of Chicago. Communities with struggling educational systems simply cannot provide the same expansive vision of the future that stronger systems offer. For this reason, education is typically a hotly debated subject of political interest. It is both an engine that cultivates the future and the picture of disparity between communities.

Conclusion

When my students begin their study of culture, their definition is generally either vague or narrowly focused on ethnic distinctions. My goal is always to ground culture in objects and symbols they can identify and engage. More than that, however, I want them to learn what culture is, so they can be expert culture-makers who bear witness to the Kingdom of God. Indeed, that is the goal of World Outspoken: to teach people to make culture as a way of seeking the city of their hopes. Culture communicates essential messages about place, people, and life. It orients communities toward moods and postures, and it replicates itself from generation to generation, cultivating whole societies. I’ve provided two examples of culture to illustrate these functions: the refrigerator and education as an institution. Through these examples, the Outspoken Community learns to “read” culture. Now, with a bearing on culture, we can make with confidence.

---

Footnotes

1. While Andy Crouch deserves credit for the basic structure of this definition, I’ve replaced the word “world” from his original sentence with the word “earth.” I am using earth to refer to all that naturally exists on our planet without the influence of humanity. World, however, refers to earth and all that humanity creates to promote, sustain, and make sense of their lives together in community. Because of the last clause in this definition, it is worth noting that earth has many worlds an individual can inhabit. Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, Edition Unstated edition (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP Books, 2008).

2. “What Is Culture? | Mars Hill Audio,” May 14, 2018, Link.

3. D. Stephen Long, Theology and Culture: A Guide to the Discussion (Wipf & Stock Pub, 2008).

4. Through history, “civilization” can refer to wicked practices by colonial conquerors. I’m not, here, ignoring this heavy history but rather attempting to use the word for its original meaning. There are many ways in which “civilizing” has been carried out horrifically, and I even explore the subject in greater detail in Seeking Zion. Acknowledging the baggage of the word, I’d ask readers to consider that cultures can civilize (develop people) in very evil and/or good ways (often doing a mixture of both).

5. Each of the following sub-sections is my understanding of Dr. Vanhoozer’s thoughts on the functions of culture. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Charles A. Anderson, and Michael J. Sleasman, eds., Everyday Theology: How to Read Cultural Texts and Interpret Trends, Annotated edition edition (Grand Rapids, Mich: Baker Academic, 2007).

6. Nancy Ammerman et al., eds., Studying Congregations: A New Handbook (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998).

7. “Refrigerator | Definition of Refrigerator in English by Oxford Dictionaries,” Oxford Dictionaries | English, accessed June 27, 2018, Link.

8. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Anchor, 1967).

9. “How MBMHMC Works,” My BLOCK MY HOOD MY CITY, accessed June 28, 2018, https://www.formyblock.org/how-it-works-1/.

10. “MBMHMC For Educators,” My BLOCK MY HOOD MY CITY, accessed June 28, 2018, Link.

11. For those interested in the book, I’ve cited it here: R. J. Palacio, Wonder, 1 edition (New York: Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2012).

12. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, Reprint edition (Princeton, N.J. Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001).

13. Vanhoozer, Anderson, and Sleasman, Everyday Theology.

14. Note: Not every aspect of culture is beautiful, but even distorted (or "ugly") culture reproduces. For this reason, it is important to strive for beautiful rather than distorted culture.

15. “When I Grow Up, I Want to Be Just Like My iPad | Tomorrow’s Professor Postings,” accessed December 13, 2017, Link.

16. “When I Grow Up, I Want to Be Just Like My iPad | Tomorrow’s Professor Postings.”

17. For the curious reader interested in knowing more about the power of the smart phone and other technologies, I’d recommend the following book: Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, Expanded, Revised edition (Basic Books, 2017).