Culturepdf

Introduction

In social/cultural anthropology, ‘culture’ is usually taken to mean the socially shared components of human thought, feeling, and behaviour. It is used both comprehensively for human culture and for the subsets specific to certain groups of people, such as the cultures of bakers, cyclists, or the Japanese. This has given a new meaning to a word initially used for the products of cultivation, such as crops or bacteria—suggested by the Latin root colere (cultivate, tend) —and later extended to the fruits of human self-cultivation, such as artworks, good manners, and other refined achievements. (The toiletry bag, for example, is still a Kulturbeutel in German.)

In 1672, German philosopher Samuel von Pufendorf first used ‘culture’ for the customs and habits of entire societies (Hahn 2002, 149), and through thinkers such as Johann Gottfried Herder, this usage proceeded to the works of social anthropology’s nineteenth century founders. In his classic Primitive culture, Edward B. Tylor famously pronounced that ‘[c]ulture, or civilisation, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, arts, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man [sic] as a member of society’ (1871, 1). More so than ‘civilisation’, ‘culture’ stayed as the umbrella term for all the specifics of human groups that are socially produced. It denotes what for a long time many social anthropologists saw as the core subject matter of the discipline, to such a degree that its North American strand became known as ‘cultural anthropology’.

American anthropologists such as Franz Boas and his famous students Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict were also key in disseminating the broad anthropological understanding of culture as well as a better sense of its weight. They convinced the reading public that it is indeed social processes that make human groups differ, down to the shapes of their craniums (Boas 1912), and that the culture of people’s upbringing lastingly affects their personalities (Benedict 1934, 1946; Mead 1928). At a time when scientific racism was still not fully debunked, this was a major achievement for a rather small discipline. And when people today no longer (only) think of Homer, Puccini, or bow ties when they hear the term ‘culture’, but rather have a broader understanding in mind, anthropology deserves some credit, although cultural sociology and the interdisciplinary field of ‘cultural studies’ that formed from the 1960s onwards (Hall 1980, Williams 1981) have been influential as well.

Culture contested

Precisely the spread of a notion of culture that felt familiar, however, made many of the discipline’s practitioners wary. The 1990s and 2000s saw a growing critique of the term, in part owed to the general Foucauldian and postmodern wave of conceptual scepticism and discursive critique, but also from the side of staunch realists and empiricists (such as Barth 1994, Goody 1994, Keesing 1994). To these scholars, speaking of culture(s) invariably suggested clearly bounded and seamlessly integrated units—the ‘wholes’ of Tylor’s definition. However, few of these could actually be found in a world in which globalisation, migration, class, and gender intersect with local, ethnic, or national specifics in complex ways. Worse still, speaking of culture was seen as morally pernicious, as it facilitated ‘othering’, or the deepening of the chasm between anthropological observer and the observed and buttressing the former’s material and symbolic dominance over the latter (Borofsky 1994a, 1994b; Borofsky et al. 2001; for overviews of the critique, see Brightman 1995; Brumann 1999, S1–S3; Fox and King 2002). As called for in the most succinct statement of this position, the consequence could only be ‘writing against culture’ (Abu-Lughod 1991); that is, dropping the term and the facile generalisation it was seen as inviting (for similar calls, see Clifford 1988, 274; Ingold 1993, 230; Kahn 1989; Wikan 1999). This critical stance also inspired ethnographic work, such as through a focus on individuals’ quests for autonomy against the social expectations they were facing rather than on culture as a collective phenomenon (e.g. Abu-Lughod 1993).

Others disagreed, arguing that ‘classical’ anthropology had never embraced the concept in the crude form that the critics now attacked (Brightman 1995, Brumann 1999). The empirical reality of culture—the fact that most Japanese greet each other in different ways than most Italians, for example—was difficult to deny, and banning the word would leave that phenomenon without a general label. When acknowledging its uneven distribution over given populations and groups, there was nothing wrong about sticking with ‘culture’, these scholars argued (Handwerker 2002, Hannerz 1992, Rodseth 1998). Despite such objections, however, it appears that scepticism won out: anthropologists have become significantly less likely to speak of culture or of specific cultures and are less inclined to debate the concept these days. Much ethnographic and theoretical work also stays at a level of particularity where there is no need for talking of cultures in the first place.

Yet even when employing other terms, such as ‘lifeways’ or ‘habitus’ or when avoiding any such notion, anthropologists remain crucially interested in social sharing of all stripes—conscious or unconscious, voluntary or enforced—if only for properly appreciating their interlocutors’ creative divergences from what society demands from them. Moreover, many adjacent disciplines continue to use the term quite matter-of-factly. In the following, this entry shall therefore summarise what anthropology and other disciplines have found out about culture as an empirical phenomenon as defined above, what happens to it in modernity, of what exactly culture is thought to consist, and how it can be methodologically captured. Subsequently, the entry shall address the complications arising from the popularity of culture in contemporary public discourse—as a word, a concept, or both—and what this entails for anthropologists and other scholars.

Culture, animals, genes, and evolution

Culture is not exclusive to humans. Social sharing has now been documented for a considerable number of animal species, most prominently the great apes and cetaceans (i.e. whales, dolphins, and porpoises) but also other vertebrates such as songbirds and even insects. It can play a role in food choices, tool use, communication, mate selection, or the coordination of hunting (Schuppli and van Schaik 2019, Whiten 2021).

Distinguishing social sharing from other factors such as genetic transmission or independent individual discovery can be challenging: When the habit of washing sweet potatoes before consumption spreads through a group of Japanese macaques within months, for example, this might not be more than what the co-presence of sweet potatoes, sand, and water will make attentive primates find out each by themselves sooner or later (Boesch and Tomasello 1998, 591–2). Likewise, chimpanzees learning a sign language devised for them not just from human instructors but also from each other (Fouts et al. 1984) demonstrate a capacity for social transmission but no independent production of culture. Considerable efforts have therefore been made to prove social sharing beyond any doubt, through identifying distinct traditions in genetically similar groups inhabiting identical environments, so that other factors are ruled out (e.g. Luncz and Boesch 2014, 2015).

Such studies that prove animal culture through finding group specifics, along with the curious fact that the teaching of offspring one sees in other species is rare among the great apes (Hoppitt et al. 2008, 491), may have led to underestimating its role for them. For example, observations of how extensively young orangutans ‘peer’ in the wild—that is, watch their fellows and then try out themselves what they see them do—have led to the hypothesis that among the great apes, ‘immatures learn virtually all of their skills socially’ (Schuppli and van Schaik 2019, 48). Most of these skills are just not limited to sub-groups but have spread through the entire species, so that they are difficult to distinguish from what is caused by genes.

Such extensive reliance on culture as a second system of adaptation could emerge because culture, while less stable than genetic transmission, is vastly more flexible and adaptable. Culture can even affect genes: Comparing primate species has yielded evidence for culture increasing both brain size and brain functionality. Culture also lengthens life spans in primates and cetaceans, even beyond fertility, which has been attributed to a fitness boost for juveniles that comes with learning from experienced models (Street et al. 2017, Whitehead et al. 2019). The cultural paths chosen can isolate particular populations to a degree that genetic co-evolution, of both supportive and unrelated traits, advances alongside. As a result, some bird and cetacean species are on the verge of splitting up genetically because of their cultural differences (Whitehead et al. 2019, 6–8).

While current research might not yet have grasped more than the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of non-human animal cultures (Schuppli and van Schaik 2019), there is no doubt that culture has acquired a much larger weight among Homo sapiens and the other extinct members of the Homo genus. The ‘ratchet’ effect of new culture building on older culture, such as the bicycle building on the wheel or baking arising from fire use, may not be exclusive to human cultures (Whiten 2021, 5), but is vastly more developed in them. The emergence of such cumulative traditions in stone tool production around 600,000 to 800,000 years ago—defined as exceeding what a single individual can independently develop in a lifetime—aligned with the development of hearths and domestic spaces, the possible emergence of language, and advances in brain mass among the hominins of that pre-sapiens and pre-Neanderthal period (Paige and Perreault 2024). In time, humans have come to rely on such cumulative culture for almost all their environmental adaptation, allowing them to spread all over the planet. Humans are also the only animals to systematically transmit culture to each other and their children, facilitated by longer life spans, longer periods of dependency, more bi- and non-parental involvement in childcare than among other primates (Richerson and Boyd 2020), and sophisticated linguistic communication, an essential part of human cultures.

This presents the question of whether culture (or specific cultures) evolve and whether it does so in similar ways as our genes. Anthropology’s founders were sure that the diversity of human cultures represented different historical stages. From a still rather imperfect ethnographic record, they derived lines of cultural development leading from group marriage over polygamy to monogamy (Morgan 1870), from animism over polytheism to monotheism (Tylor 1871), from savagery over barbarism to civilisation (Morgan 1877), and from magic over religion to science (Frazer 1890). While these grand evolutionist schemes demonstrated a comparative commitment, their speculative components and factual errors were duly exposed.

Taking the most elaborate of these schemes as an example, anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan was convinced that ‘group marriage’ or generalised promiscuity was the original human condition, which gave way in time to increasingly monogamous forms of first matrilinearity and then patrilinearity (Morgan 1870). However, this has found no support in the archaeological record or among recent hunter-gatherers (where monogamy is most common and descent often plays a limited role). And while the ancient Maya and Aztecs did not process iron, and the Inca had only a limited writing system and no phonetic alphabet, all of them did develop the state organisation that Morgan had thought impossible without these achievements (1877).

Despite a mid-twentieth century revival in the less speculative form of neo-evolutionism (Fried 1967, Service 1962, Steward 1955, White 1943, 1959), cultural evolution is somewhat of a niche interest in contemporary anthropology. Acknowledging the general advantage of culture for human adaptation is one thing; identifying the units undergoing variation, selection, and reproduction—the equivalents to genes in natural evolution, that is—is quite another, given that people copy, share, and recombine one another’s ideas and practices so easily. Also, the discrete and bounded societies of old-style evolutionist theory no longer exist, if they ever did. From a Darwinian perspective, the totality of human culture(s) has worked to our species’ advantage, as demonstrated by the eight billion of us, even when this has come at the cost of many other present and past natural species, perhaps also of the other recent—and themselves richly cultured (Breyl 2021)—members of the Homo genus. However, human culture includes any number of accomplishments—say, warrior ideals, monastic celibacy, or wingsuit flying—whose adaptive benefits, even under the broadest notions of inclusive fitness, can be questioned. A future deadly turn of the ‘ratchet’, such as nuclear disaster wiping us from the planet, remains conceivable as well.

The application of a Darwinian evolutionary perspective to human culture keeps occupying an interdisciplinary field of anthropologists, evolutionary psychologists, human behavioural ecologists, and paleogeneticists (Boyd and Richerson 2024). They address such questions as why large-scale cooperation is a human specialty (Boyd and Richerson 2024, 4–5) or connect the psychological tendencies and prosperity of ‘WEIRD’ societies—Western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic—to factors such as their marriage rules and religions (Henrich 2020). They and others also study gene–culture co-evolution in humans: The increased occurence of lactase (i.e. the enzyme that allows for the digestion of milk sugar) in populations that adopted dairy production is the textbook case, but there are more candidates, for example the way skin pigmentation diversified when some of our ancestors moved to the less sunny climes north of Africa (Kasser et al. 2025).

Modern cultural distributions

The sheer richness and variety of recent and contemporary human culture has filled anthropological libraries and ethnographic museums; it is amply illustrated by the other entries of this encyclopedia. Yet almost from the outset, anthropologists have worried that this cultural variety is in decline, either for certain kinds of cultures or across the board, as in Bronislaw Malinowski’s famous lament that, right on the verge of anthropology’s professionalisation, ‘the material of … study melts away with hopeless rapidity’ (1922, xv). The popular idea that Western-derived modernity squashes everything else has been called ‘radical diffusionism’ (Hannerz 1989).

Prominent anthropologists of globalisation disagreed, pointing to the production of new diversity. This could happen through ‘creolisation’ (Hannerz 1987, 1992, 1996) or ‘indigenisation’ (Appadurai 1990, 1991); that is, the modification of imported culture according to local needs. They also emphasised the local terms and understandings in which cultural borrowing always occurs (Sahlins 1993). The increasing intersection of different ethnic and national cultures with various ages, genders, professions, or legal statuses might even create a new cultural ‘super-diversity’ in immigration hotspots such as London (Vertovec 2007).

But not all anthropologists agree. More recently, a connection between the decline of cultural and biological diversity has been drawn, with capitalist corporations and the state identified as the main drivers for both as they require upscaling and standardisation for their own smooth functioning. This leads to the loss of languages and indigenous lifeways, while new cultural elements are subject to constraints, as they must be communicable to play their part in identity-building processes (Eriksen 2021).

It is difficult to deny the global spread of uniform models in technology, economy, medicine, administration, politics, and law. The forms and materials of clothing, housing, and everyday objects in the world are certainly less varied than they were two centuries ago, even when modern consumption preferences may produce a wealth of detail (see also Hannerz 1996, 24). A convergence of social and religious lifeways is less obvious, however, in spite of the nuclear family or companionate marriage being identified as global trends (Esteve and Reher 2024, Hirsch and Wardlow 2006). At the same time, scientific, technological, and creative advancement keep turning out novelties that expand the portfolio of what can be socially shared, and the growing reach of mass and social media simplifies access to these novelties.

The upshot is a world in which most people participate, to variable degrees, in global culture, using the products of mass manufacturing and world trade, following global news and entertainment, and mastering global educational standards. Most people also absorb one or more national and ethnic cultures by growing up in social contexts shaped by them, thereby learning one or more of the associated mother tongues, school contents, the taste for the typical foods, etc., with whatever uniformity nationalism and the state have imposed on these. But then, by way of class, habitus, economic specialisation, and the interests, passions, and missions they choose, most people also share certain concepts, ideas, and practices only with, for example, their professional colleagues, fellow hobbyists and fans, or fellow believers in some higher religious or political cause. These circles of sharing often transcend ethnic, national, or linguistic boundaries.

Think of the large international conferences in academic disciplines, such as anthropology, that many of us attend: Here, we share a body of knowledge, orientations, and aspirations with most participants, despite our differences in nationality, age, and other respects. Yet, we each have people much closer and often more similar to us, starting with our family and friends, who know little about what these conferences discuss. Anthropologists are increasingly studying such specialised, professional spheres, such as architects and urban planners (Hagen 2015, Houdart and Minato 2009, Mack and Herzfeld 2020, Yaneva 2009, Yarrow 2019).

In my own ethnographic study of Kyoto, Japan (2012), architects told me that they were reared with the modernist International Style in their training, discovering the merits of vernacular wooden architecture only belatedly. At the same time, in drafting their renovation plans for these old and locally specific houses, they continue to apply tools of the trade that are used by their colleagues all over the world and are thus part of a border-crossing professional culture—from computer-aided design to static calculations. In a similar fashion, urban planners in Kyoto knew much more about the intricacies of German planning law—generally viewed as a model to emulate—than I myself as a German layperson did, even when some of them had never even visited my home country.

Age- and gender-specific ideas and practices exist in all societies, including those where professional and other specialisations are minimal, such as when everyone spends their days foraging and cultivating subsistence crops. Therefore, finding a truly mono-cultural individual has become next to impossible in today’s world, and instead, simultaneous participation in many circles of sharing—often overlapping; often with a weakened territorial anchor or none at all—is the new normal. It follows that, compared to an earlier age, the likeliness of finding others very culturally similar or very culturally dissimilar to oneself has decreased.

Culture, meanings, and methodologies

Anthropologists have not reached an agreement of where exactly to look for culture. While Tylor’s definition above is comprehensive, including as it does artefacts, habits, and beliefs, North American anthropologists, as the main proponents of the concept, developed an ideational take on it in the post-war period. They were partly motivated to do so by an intellectual division of labour that left social systems to sociologists (Kuper 1999, 47–72). Many of them thus agreed that culture consisted of meanings, values, and symbolic systems—‘whatever one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to [a society’s] members’, as Ward Goodenough put it (1957, 167)—regardless of whether they were interpretative anthropologists (Geertz 1973, Ortner 1973, Sahlins 1976, Schneider 1968), proponents of cognitive anthropology (D'Andrade 1995, Strauss and Quinn 1997) or cultural psychologists (Shweder and LeVine 1984). This take on culture could go along with ascribing great autonomy to it, to the neglect of social and economic structures and constraints. Their British colleagues in particular objected: all the way from A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (1940) to Adam Kuper (1999), they insisted that anthropologists study ‘societies’ and their social structures and political and economic realities, rather than ‘cultures’ located largely in the mind.

In other social sciences, there is a somewhat related tendency to treat culture as a residual category. It is often placed alongside economics, politics, social systems, and the like, and typically gathers whatever cannot be captured by the operational logics of these other fields. This makes culture the domain of softer, more ideational, and ‘irrational’ aspects of life. However, concrete practices and material products of what humans think and do are no less subject to social sharing than ideas and values, which is why many anthropological definitions of culture have included either practices or material products or both. By the same token, an emphasis on social sharing does not require giving explanatory primacy to mental phenomena. Given that elements of the cultural, the individual, and the universal suffuse all walks of life, there is also no need to see culture as separate from the economy or social systems, rather than cross-cutting them.

Culture also does not imply cultural determinism, another common motive for rejecting the term. Were it for tying individuals to a set course, we still would have genes only. After all, culture could only emerge because it spreads the results of individual innovation—deviations from the beaten path, that is—and it does so more quickly than genetic transmission. Nor does the notion of culture commit anthropologists to finding as much of it as they can or glorifying whatever culture they find. Any number of repulsive practices—from waterboarding to online hate speech—are cultural too. Moreover, social sharing may just be a result of oppressive situations, such as when white Frenchmen from the countryside policing the Parisian suburbs reconfirm their stereotypes of being in a dangerous place through their every encounter with the youths of North and West African descent who live there (Fassin 2013).

Yet even in the most repressive groups and societies, some innovative scope remains. Therefore, change is—and cannot help but being—the default condition of culture, while its stable reproduction over long time periods calls for explanation. Culture is thus best conceived of as a toolbox, offering tried and tested responses to individuals who manoeuvre life’s challenges under greater or lesser social constraints (cf. also Swidler 1986). Rarely is there just a single response, and the multiplicity of cultures in which people take part these days cannot help but enlarge everyone’s toolboxes.

This raises methodological questions. The classical ethnographic practice was to mute variation, with a kind of cultural average passing as authoritative for an entire studied society. More recent ethnography often focuses on individuals that work against monolithic cultural constraints, as already mentioned. Casual reference to (presumably uniform) national and ethnic culture remains rather common even then, and efforts to systematically map cultural diversity, such as the Human Relations Area Files^[1], are few and far between. A sophisticated method to deal with differential distributions of culture is ‘cultural consensus analysis’, as developed and refined by cognitive anthropologists (Romney 1999; Romney et al. 1987; Romney et al. 1986). It determines the strength of consensus in a given semantic field, or the degree to which members of a group share ideas and values in common. It also distinguishes that which is socially shared from idiosyncratic content, and identifies the ‘cultural experts’, that is the individuals closest to the consensus. Cases of application have ranged from ways of grouping fish varieties (Boster and Johnson 1989) to lifestyle ideals (Dressler et al. 1996) and environmental values (Kempton et al. 1995). While consensus analysis has been mainly applied to interview and survey data, there is no obstacle to extending it to observed behaviour. It can also be brought to bear on multiple cultural models within the same society (Lacy et al. 2018) and axes of socially shared dissent that co-exist with a general consensus, such as in matters of aesthetic taste (Brumann 2012, 211–9, 362–81).

Culture talk and its consequences

Anthropological unease with culture often stems less from strong disagreement with the above rather than from a concern over what culture has become in contemporary public discourse. The disciplinary debate occurring around the year 2000 reacted to a widespread sense that ‘culture is everywhere’ (Hannerz 1993), with all kinds of people labelling all kinds of phenomena with the word (Grillo 2003, 157–8; Kuper 1999, 1–5; Sahlins 1993, 3–4; Trouillot 2002, 37–8). The Google Books Ngram Viewer^[2], a tool for tracking the presence of words and phrases in printed books over time, does indeed confirm that from around 1960, use of the word ‘culture’ increased sharply in all included large languages.

Reference to ethnic and national cultures in particular burgeoned and troubled the anthropological critics, as it often came with a tacit or explicit denial of every insight that they had struggled to disseminate. Here, cultures were rigid and unchanging, forever tied to their point of origin, dominating their carriers’ thought and action, tightly wound up with collective identities, and coming in discrete packages whose mutual compatibility was limited at best. Cultures in this understanding were straightjackets, not toolboxes, and the cultures of ethnic and religious minorities all the more so, different from the majority who knew to be properly modern, not just mindlessly cultural (Wikan 1999). Such ‘cultural essentialism’ (Grillo 2003) and its ‘totalitarian’ concept of culture (Hann 2002, 260) were not limited to conservatives—proponents of ‘multiculturalism’ too would often conceive of (invariably ethnic) cultures in similar ways. But it was on the political right where ‘culturespeak’ (Hannerz 1999) and ‘cultural fundamentalism’ (Stolcke 1995) took their ugliest form, either by coating racist content with a non-controversial term or by justifying policies of discrimination and segregation with the insurmountable differences that culture was purported to erect. Deployed in this way, the anthropological critics were sure, culture was no more than ‘a new concept of race’ (Wikan 1999) and of merciless ‘othering’ (Abu-Lughod 1991).

One may doubt to what extent this was the fault of the culture concept or of the aforementioned tendency to describe foreign lifeways as static and homogeneous totalities—a tendency that is far older than the discipline and far more widely distributed. Still, there is no denying that much lay talk of culture, even when it refers to people’s everyday practices in an anthropological manner, remains pegged to assumptions that most modern anthropologists reject. Critics have also pointed out how in liberal democracies built on what are meant to be universal values, empowering a notion of culture(s) and attaching rights to it can generate friction (Boggs 2004).

Alongside ethnicised culture(s), however, phrases like ‘corporate culture’, ‘culture shock’, or ‘culture of silence’ blossomed as well, and in these phrases, the former elite and aesthetic connotations of the word were also gone, in a perhaps trivialising but more harmless adaptation of anthropological insights. Another instance of a quasi-anthropological but non-ethnicised use of the term is the labelling of controversies over gun control, drugs, free speech, gender, and sexuality as ‘culture wars’.

In addition, presumably static parts of desirable culture have attracted increased attention in the form of ‘cultural heritage’. A concern for heritage conservation has spread to all corners of the world, promoted by projects such as the World Heritage Convention and other UNESCO initiatives and by the popularity of the museum as a site of cultural display.

Material culture tends to be key here. While cultural artefacts can be appreciated for their aesthetic qualities alone, they are also often employed for nationalist, ethnic, and commercial purposes, as most of the ‘national museums’ around the world illustrate. This instrumentalisation of heritage has long been a key concern for the social sciences. Their analysis of it started with a large body of work inspired by arguments on the ‘invention of tradition’, which show that many seemingly ancient cultural things and practices are in fact relatively modern creations (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), and with critical analyses of the heritage industry (Lowenthal 1996, Walsh 1992). Studies of the instrumentalisation of heritage also show how UNESCO-style universalism is captured by nation-states’ contemporary pursuit of glory (Bortolotto 2024, Brumann 2021, Hafstein 2018, Meskell 2013). However, cultural heritage has served the political projects of minorities and the subaltern as well, and therefore cannot be seen as intrinsically reactionary (Brumann 2015; Samuel 1994, 288, 303).

The more general ‘anthropologisation’ of culture, i.e. a broad understanding of the term, has made inroads into cultural heritage: The World Heritage List has broadened from the initial famous monuments to now also include the vestiges of everyday life, and the separate UNESCO convention for ‘intangible cultural heritage’ (Bortolotto 2024) has brought whole new fields into the remit of conservation and adulation. As a result, rituals, musical styles, folk dances, cuisines, agricultural practices and other features of social life—Japanese farm houses, Belgian carnival parades, Jamaican reggae, German cooperatives, Korean kimchi making—now share the limelight of canonised heritage alongside Gothic cathedrals and Vermeer paintings. While these cultural practices are often reified and essentialised in the process, it can be argued that this has nonetheless democratised what respectable culture is supposed to look like, and this can have its empowering side. As a consequence, the need for selective cultural packages and for extensive ‘cultural editing’ (Volkman 1984) to make them attractive to external audiences often comes from the very people that anthropologists like to side with: ‘having’ and ‘owning’ a culture (Brown 1998, 2003)—at best, in presumably ‘authentic’ form—can become a critical resource for Indigenous Peoples and other marginalised groups (Bruner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Conklin 1997, 2002; Jackson 1989, 1995; Sylvain 2005; Volkman 1990). As a result, deconstructing the concept does not always place anthropologists in a comfortable position.

Through all these developments, the referent of ‘culture’ in public discourse has not just been widened but also considerably muddled, leading to ‘culture chaos’ (Brumann 2018): The old understanding of aesthetic high culture is not at all gone, such as when dispositions derived from the display of artworks are unthinkingly applied to the stone money discs on the Micronesian island of Yap striving for World Heritage status (Brumann 2018, 1214, 1224) or when in the periodically rekindled political debates about what defines German Leitkultur ('lead culture'), concrete examples keep shifting from classical poetry to pretzels. It is striking to see that hardly a thought is given as to how this debate conflates distinct registers—masterpieces by creatives intent on leaving their individual mark here; the collective, anonymous, and inconspicuous sediments of ‘congealed sociality’ (Hann 2002, 259) there.

Conclusion

The aforementioned Google Books Ngram Viewer shows that after peaks in the 2000s and 2010s, the use of ‘culture’ (or cultura, Kultur, kultura, etc.) in major global languages has dropped by as much as one half—why this is so, and why American English and Chinese (for wenhua) are the exceptions, calls for explanation. We might be witnessing the demise of a fad, in which culture was used for speaking about all kinds of issues that could also be framed otherwise. In any event, lay usage may be casting a correspondingly smaller shadow over what anthropologists choose to do with the concept in future, as their theoretical engagement with it continues (e.g. de Munck and Bennardo 2019, Schnegg 2024). Despite anthropologists’ success in popularising a broad understanding of culture, however, there is little hope for controlling what so many other scholars and ordinary people routinely invoke in so many contradictory ways (cf. also Hann 2002, 273). Using the term for transmitting anthropological insights to those who employ a kindred notion of social sharing is worthwhile while muting it out of existence has little chance of success. However, the risk of the discipline’s fine print being lost when the term is hijacked for half-baked or plainly malevolent understandings remains.

Meanwhile, what humans socially share continues to change, losing some ideas and practices along the way while integrating many new ones in an ever more complex landscape of overlapping social circles. Whichever label they choose or reject, anthropologists will not run out of cultures to study. They also should not tire of trying to get their understanding of culture right, emphasising that it is not intrinsically stable, does not strictly determine people’s thoughts and actions (shaped as these also are by individual specifics and pan-human universals), and is distinct from ethnicity and collective identities. Social sharing continues undiminished in human life, so that labelling its—inevitably interim—results as ‘cultures’ may appear reasonable to us. But this should go with ‘researching against culture’; that is, testing other and more specific explanations for people’s thoughts and actions (Brumann 1999, S21–S24). When doing so, the potential for a responsible and productive usage of the term remains.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Riddhi Bhandari, Rachel Cantave, Felix Stein, Rebecca Tishler, and three anonymous reviewers for their committed work on earlier versions. I also thank my colleagues in the Department of Economic Experimentation who discussed a first draft. Any remaining flaws are my own.

Note on contributor

Christoph Brumann is Head of Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, and Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the University of Halle-Wittenberg. His books include The best we share: Nation, culture and world-making in the UNESCO World Heritage arena (2021, Berghahn) and Tradition, democracy and the townscape of Kyoto: Claiming a right to the past (2012, Routledge). He also co-edited Monks, money, and morality: The balancing act of contemporary Buddhism (2021, Bloomsbury Academic) and World Heritage on the ground: Ethnographic perspectives (2016, Berghahn).

Christoph Brumann, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Advokatenweg 36, 06114 Halle, Germany. brumann@eth.mpg.de, ORCID 0000-0003-1866-6882