A Practical Definition of Culture

MCL Guidance

By Dan Dohan

It is an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.

Culture? No. This is Obi Wan Kenobi’s description of The Force, the energy that allows Jedi to see the future, levitate machinery, and manipulate the weak-minded. The Force is only real in Star Wars. Culture exists right here on earth but can feel every bit as mysterious.

Culture is notoriously difficult to define. Ask two researchers how they define culture, you may get three answers. Disciplines use the term in different ways, and researchers borrow widely as they craft their own understanding. A definition of culture is thus a slice of science, a piece of culture itself. Far from being a straightforward statement of what culture is, a researcher’s definition of culture reflects what they consider important and reveals where they trained and the flavor of their politics.

Some definitions are precise yet impenetrable while others capture culture’s flexibility at the cost of clarity. Both precision and flexibility are essential for scholarship on culture, but they do not provide much guidance for a non-professional interested in understanding the culture of medicine and culture’s role in equity. The Medical Cultures Lab needs a definition that meets these non-professional needs while remaining in dialog with the precise and flexible approaches in our disciplines.

A practical definition uses everyday language and avoids jargon and abstraction. It helps policymakers, clinicians, and advocates grasp how culture matters to their constituents, patients, and causes, and it can help them see how culture undergirds their own professional work. I crafted this practical definition for a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Pioneer project on culture and decision-making in the context of aging and dementia:

Culture includes shared values, beliefs, and practices of a group of people. Culture exists in informal communities, such as a neighborhood or ethnic group, and formal institutions, such as a profession or organization.

This definition reflects a sociological pedigree and an intellectual debt to sociologist Ann Swidler who proposed

an image of culture as a ‘tool kit’ of symbols, stories, rituals, and world-views, which people may use in varying configurations to solve different kinds of problems..(These tools are) integrated into larger assemblages, called here “strategies of action.”

Swidler focuses on how culture works rather than what it is. People draw on cultural tool kits to navigate the social dynamics of everyday life. From a practical standpoint, however, it difficult to be sure what counts as a symbolic tool versus what is a kit or when we are seeing a strategy in action. Recognizing Swidler’s debt to French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu can help us see how her tool kit operates in real life.

Bourdieu does not explicitly define culture, but his term habitus is an approximation. The habitus includes “systems of durable, transposable dispositions” that “function as structuring structures.” Unpack the academic jargon: Bourdieu is interested in the habits and sensibilities of groups. How do our usual ways of doing things come to feel natural? Why is a particular understanding of the world accepted as common sense?

Bourdieu examined these questions through anthropology of everyday life in low-income societies as well as in sociological studies of class, education, and taste in wealthy nations. His empirical work emphasizes key qualities of culture. It is historical and contingent, it has a magical ability to achieve goals without trying to, and it self-adjusts so as to be consistent with outcomes it did not aim for. Bourdieu notes that science exists within, not apart from, these cultural rules even when we fool ourselves into believing our analyses can see the world with objectivity.

To make the practical definition of culture workable, let’s start with Swidler’s notion of tools. This focuses our attention on shared stories, rituals, and world-views within a group. We can document and analyze these empirically.

Next, let’s follow Bourdieu and focus on how these tools show up in peoples’ habits and common-sense. This helps us see links between cultural tools and the communities or institutions they birth and support.

Third, recall Bourdieu’s admonition that cultural tools and social outcomes have a dangerously slippery relationship. We humans tend to believe that our habits and common-sense are objectively so and correct. In fact, they are always historically-derived and contingent. And because powerful people have greater social influence, habits and common-sense always reflect power and powerlessness.

Which means, fourth, that a practical definition is most practical when used comparatively. Cultural comparisons must include history, contingency, and power. They focus on how habits and common-sense are similar and how they differ. They must be empirically anchored in the symbolic tools that create everyday realities in communities and institutions.

This practical definition differs from extant approaches to research on culture’s role in health. UCLA cultural anthropologist Marjorie Kagawa-Singer has long appreciated the practical need to navigate culture in health. In recent work, she polled a prominent group of social scientists doing applied research on culture and health who arrived at a consensus definition of culture.

Culture is an internalized and shared schema or framework that is used by group (or subgroup) members as a refracted lens to “see” reality, and in which both the individual and the collective experience the world.

Culture is always some mix of individual and collective experience, and in any definition of culture it is telling which experience is emphasized. This consensus definition highlights individual experience and how an individual lens shapes experiences of the world. The term “refracted” implies an external reality upon which each person’s lens focuses. Swidler and Bourdieu offer definitions focused more on the collective. By focusing on socially-shared symbols (Swidler) and collectively-shared habits and sense (Bourdieu), they both side-step the difficult question of how much of culture resides in our heads and how much exists outside in the social world.

I think a practical approach examines how culture in the world shapes communities and institutions not how culture in our heads informs individual perceptions, desires, and choices. Measuring what is in our heads is challenging, and it is not clear to me it is even possible in a culturally-neutral fashion. Cultural comparisons are a defensible way of perceiving and explaining how communities and institutions resemble each other culturally as well as how they differ. Comparisons help us appreciate the implications of resemblances and differences for individual life-experiences and decision-making.

And a final thought. Politically, how we define culture has implications for who is empowered to speak and own culture. I want a practical definition that doesn’t tempt physicians and biomedical researchers to think about culture as an individual characteristic or marker. Biomedicine is already a powerful force for individualism. Why give it a definition of culture that focuses on individual mental states? I prefer to situate culture in the shared stories, rituals, and world-views of communities and institutions — communities and institutions we scientists can then observe, talk to, learn with, and learn from about how culture surrounds, penetrates, and binds us together.