What Sociologists Mean by Culture

In everyday English, culture refers to a rather narrow slice of human activity: museums, classical music, literary fiction, the theater, fine cuisine. A 'cultured' person, in this usage, is someone who has cultivated taste in these refined domains. This usage is recent in historical terms, largely a nineteenth-century inheritance from writers like Matthew Arnold, who defined culture as 'the best which has been thought and said' (Arnold 1869). It remains the default sense in popular speech, where the opposite of 'cultural' is often 'commercial' or 'popular.'

Sociology uses the word differently, and the difference is not a matter of semantic preference. It is constitutive of what the discipline studies. In sociological usage, culture is the shared system of symbols, meanings, practices, and values through which members of a group interpret experience, coordinate action, and constitute a social world. Culture in this sense includes high art, but it also includes the language people speak, the gestures they use to greet one another, the stories they tell about why their group exists, the distinctions they draw between the clean and the dirty, the moral categories through which they evaluate strangers, and the taken-for-granted assumptions about time, causality, and personhood that structure everyday life.

The foundational nineteenth-century anthropological definition remains a useful starting point. E. B. Tylor, writing in 1871, defined culture as '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' (Tylor 1871, p. 1). Note what this definition does. It refuses to restrict culture to elite or refined domains. It treats culture as co-extensive with learned social life. And it locates culture in the group — 'as a member of society' — rather than in the individual mind.

A century later, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz sharpened the concept. Culture, he wrote, is 'a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life' (Geertz 1973, p. 89). His more famous formulation, borrowed from Max Weber, is that 'man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun' and that culture is those webs (Geertz 1973, p. 5). This metaphor carries two useful implications: culture is produced by people (they spin the webs), and it subsequently shapes the action of those who inhabit it (they are suspended in them). Culture is neither a purely external force nor a purely individual possession; it is a medium, collectively produced and collectively inhabited.

In 1986 the American sociologist Ann Swidler proposed a further refinement, one that shifted cultural sociology away from the assumption that culture operates as a unified value system. In her toolkit model, culture is better understood as a repertoire of 'symbols, stories, rituals, and world-views, which people may use in varying configurations to solve different kinds of problems' (Swidler 1986, p. 273). People do not simply internalize a culture and then act it out; they draw selectively on available cultural materials to construct 'strategies of action' appropriate to their situations. The Swidlerian revision was consequential because it explained why people in the same culture act so differently, and why people can articulate values they do not act on: culture supplies resources, not scripts.

Why does the definition matter? Because what counts as culture shapes what sociology studies. If culture is narrowly understood as elite taste, sociology of culture becomes a sub-specialty about museums and orchestras. If culture is understood broadly as the medium through which social life is organized, then the sociology of culture becomes entangled with virtually every other area of the discipline: stratification, politics, race, gender, organizations, economic life. The broader definition, as we will see, is the one that now dominates the field, and it brings with it a specific research agenda: to study how meanings are produced, how they circulate, how they get taken up or resisted, and how they make a difference to what happens in the world.