Definition: Culture

What is culture?

One common use has become something like Arts, Music, Writing, forms of creative expression. Such as the Arts and Culture section of a magazine or website.

In the context of this Healthy Human Culture website I’m using the word to mean something much broader than that, which has meaning at different levels of scale. So any group creates its own culture as does an organisation, a movement, a nation, an international corporation and so on.

For any of these culture includes:

  • formal and informal rules, legal systems, taboos, norms, prohibitions
  • habitual processes, routines, rituals, traditions and customs
  • world view, beliefs and values, spiritual traditions and paradigms of what knowledge and wisdom are
  • structures and forms – systems of governance, decision making processes, roles that hold the forms which different people can inhabit
  • formal and informal relationship structures – parents and children, partners or spouses, employers and employees and more
  • forms of individual and collective expression – media, narrative forms, entertainment, arts, music

Referring to the four quadrant model, these are mainly on the “inner” part of the map. I think it’s impossible to separate out what happens on the outside, even though outer and inner often polarise in modern western / global north worldview. Our systems for growing food, creating shelter, obtaining energy, making stuff, creating what we call an “Economy”, what we mean by work, life choices, dealing with what we call waste, all arise directly from how we understand the world and our place in it. So I’m also including in this world culture things like:

  • organisations, institutions, businesses which provide us with food, healthcare, education, buildings, transport, goods,
  • financial systems and economic structures
  • technologies
  • cities, towns, rural landscapes, how we relate to, manage or seek to control the non-human world
  • our clothes, fashions, lifestyles, what we do in our homes and in public spaces
  • our sicknesses and mental states, and our provision for those needing support or care – including older people, the disabled, sick, mentally ill
  • how we hold the passing and passing on of life – pregnancy, birth, death, marking life stages, and so on.

Here are some quotes using culture in this wider sense of the word.. (my emphases)

“Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

In our fast-forward culture, we have lost the art of eating well. Food is often little more than fuel to pour down the hatch while doing other stuff – surfing the Web, driving, walking along the street. Carl Honore

I plant a lot of trees. I am a great believer in planting things for future generations. I loathe the now culture where you just live for today. Penelope Keith

By creating a feedback culture within your office, you ensure that people continue to learn, grow, and challenge themselves.   Neil Blumenthal