culture meaning essay

So What Is Culture, Exactly?

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• Archaeology
• Ph.D., Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara
• M.A., Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara
• B.A., Sociology, Pomona College

Culture is a term that refers to a large and diverse set of mostly intangible aspects of social life. According to sociologists, culture consists of the values, beliefs, systems of language, communication, and practices that people share in common and that can be used to define them as a collective. Culture also includes the material objects that are common to that group or society. Culture is distinct from social structure and economic aspects of society, but it is connected to them—both continuously informing them and being informed by them.

How Sociologists Define Culture

Culture is one of the most important concepts within sociology because sociologists recognize that it plays a crucial role in our social lives. It is important for shaping social relationships, maintaining and challenging social order, determining how we make sense of the world and our place in it, and in shaping our everyday actions and experiences in society. It is composed of both non-material and material things.

In brief, sociologists define the non-material aspects of culture as the values and beliefs, language, communication, and practices that are shared in common by a group of people. Expanding on these categories, culture is made up of our knowledge, common sense, assumptions, and expectations. It is also the rules, norms, laws, and morals that govern society; the words we use as well as how we speak and write them (what sociologists call " discourse "); and the symbols we use to express meaning, ideas, and concepts (like traffic signs and emojis, for example). Culture is also what we do and how we behave and perform (for example, theater and dance). It informs and is encapsulated in how we walk, sit, carry our bodies, and interact with others; how we behave depending on the place, time, and "audience;" and how we express identities of race, class, gender, and sexuality, among others. Culture also includes the collective practices we participate in, such as religious ceremonies, the celebration of secular holidays, and attending sporting events.

Material culture is composed of the things that humans make and use. This aspect of culture includes a wide variety of things, from buildings, technological gadgets, and clothing, to film, music, literature, and art, among others. Aspects of material culture are more commonly referred to as cultural products.

Sociologists see the two sides of culture—the material and non-material—as intimately connected. Material culture emerges from and is shaped by the non-material aspects of culture. In other words, what we value, believe, and know (and what we do together in everyday life) influences the things that we make. But it is not a one-way relationship between material and non-material culture. Material culture can also influence the non-material aspects of culture. For example, a powerful documentary film (an aspect of material culture) might change people’s attitudes and beliefs (i.e. non-material culture). This is why cultural products tend to follow patterns. What has come before in terms of music, film, television, and art, for example, influences the values, beliefs, and expectations of those who interact with them, which then, in turn, influence the creation of additional cultural products.

Why Culture Matters to Sociologists

Culture is important to sociologists because it plays a significant and important role in the production of social order. The social order refers to the stability of society based on the collective agreement to rules and norms that allow us to cooperate, function as a society, and live together (ideally) in peace and harmony. For sociologists, there are both good and bad aspects of social order.

Rooted in the theory of classical French sociologist Émile Durkheim , both material and non-material aspects of culture are valuable in that they hold society together. The values, beliefs, morals, communication, and practices that we share in common provide us with a shared sense of purpose and a valuable collective identity. Durkheim revealed through his research that when people come together to participate in rituals, they reaffirm the culture they hold in common, and in doing so, strengthen the social ties that bind them together. Today, sociologists see this important social phenomenon happening not only in religious rituals and celebrations like (some) weddings and the Indian festival of Holi but also in secular ones—such as high school dances and widely-attended, televised sporting events (for example, the Super Bowl and March Madness).

Famous Prussian social theorist and activist Karl Marx established the critical approach to culture in the social sciences. According to Marx, it is in the realm of non-material culture that a minority is able to maintain unjust power over the majority. He reasoned that subscribing to mainstream values, norms, and beliefs keep people invested in unequal social systems that do not work in their best interests, but rather, benefit the powerful minority. Sociologists today see Marx's theory in action in the way that most people in capitalist societies buy into the belief that success comes from hard work and dedication, and that anyone can live a good life if they do these things—despite the reality that a job which pays a living wage is increasingly hard to come by.  

Both theorists were right about the role that culture plays in society, but neither was exclusively   right. Culture can be a force for oppression and domination, but it can also be a force for creativity, resistance, and liberation. It is also a deeply important aspect of human social life and social organization. Without it, we would not have relationships or society.

Luce, Stephanie. " Living wages: a US perspective ." Employee Relations , vol. 39, no. 6, 2017, pp. 863-874. doi:10.1108/ER-07-2017-0153

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• The Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
• The Importance Customs in Society
• Overview of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in Sociology
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• Understanding Diffusion in Sociology
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• The History of Sociology Is Rooted in Ancient Times
• How Emile Durkheim Made His Mark on Sociology

3.1 What Is Culture?

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you should be able to:

• Differentiate between culture and society
• Explain material versus nonmaterial culture
• Discuss the concept of cultural universals as it relates to society
• Compare and contrast ethnocentrism and xenocentrism

Humans are social creatures. According to Smithsonian Institution research, humans have been forming groups for almost 3 million years in order to survive. Living together, people formed common habits and behaviors, from specific methods of childrearing to preferred techniques for obtaining food.

Almost every human behavior, from shopping to marriage, is learned. In the U.S., marriage is generally seen as an individual choice made by two adults, based on mutual feelings of love. In other nations and in other times, marriages have been arranged through an intricate process of interviews and negotiations between entire families. In Papua New Guinea, almost 30 percent of women marry before the age of 18, and 8 percent of men have more than one wife (National Statistical Office, 2019). To people who are not from such a culture, arranged marriages may seem to have risks of incompatibility or the absence of romantic love. But many people from cultures where marriages are arranged, which includes a number of highly populated and modern countries, often prefer the approach because it reduces stress and increases stability (Jankowiak 2021).

Being familiar with unwritten rules helps people feel secure and at ease. Knowing to look left instead of right for oncoming traffic while crossing the street can help avoid serious injury and even death. Knowing unwritten rules is also fundamental in understanding humor in different cultures. Humor is common to all societies, but what makes something funny is not. Americans may laugh at a scene in which an actor falls; in other cultures, falling is never funny. Most people want to live their daily lives confident that their behaviors will not be challenged or disrupted. But even an action as seemingly simple as commuting to work evidences a great deal of cultural propriety, that is, there are a lot of expected behaviors. And many interpretations of them.

Take the case of going to work on public transportation. Whether people are commuting in Egypt, Ireland, India, Japan, and the U.S., many behaviors will be the same and may reveal patterns. Others will be different. In many societies that enjoy public transportation, a passenger will find a marked bus stop or station, wait for the bus or train, pay an agent before or after boarding, and quietly take a seat if one is available. But when boarding a bus in Cairo, Egypt, passengers might board while the bus is moving, because buses often do not come to a full stop to take on patrons. In Dublin, Ireland, bus riders would be expected to extend an arm to indicate that they want the bus to stop for them. And when boarding a commuter train in Mumbai, India, passengers must squeeze into overstuffed cars amid a lot of pushing and shoving on the crowded platforms. That kind of behavior might be considered rude in other societies, but in Mumbai it reflects the daily challenges of getting around on a train system that is taxed to capacity.

Culture can be material or nonmaterial. Metro passes and bus tokens are part of material culture, as are the buses, subway cars, and the physical structures of the bus stop. Think of material culture as items you can touch-they are tangible . Nonmaterial culture , in contrast, consists of the ideas, attitudes, and beliefs of a society. These are things you cannot touch. They are intangible . You may believe that a line should be formed to enter the subway car or that other passengers should not stand so close to you. Those beliefs are intangible because they do not have physical properties and can be touched.

Material and nonmaterial aspects of culture are linked, and physical objects often symbolize cultural ideas. A metro pass is a material object, but it represents a form of nonmaterial culture, namely, capitalism, and the acceptance of paying for transportation. Clothing, hairstyles, and jewelry are part of material culture, but the appropriateness of wearing certain clothing for specific events reflects nonmaterial culture. A school building belongs to material culture symbolizing education, but the teaching methods and educational standards are part of education’s nonmaterial culture.

As people travel from different regions to entirely different parts of the world, certain material and nonmaterial aspects of culture become dramatically unfamiliar. What happens when we encounter different cultures? As we interact with cultures other than our own, we become more aware of the differences and commonalities between others and our own. If we keep our sociological imagination awake, we can begin to understand and accept the differences. Body language and hand gestures vary around the world, but some body language seems to be shared across cultures: When someone arrives home later than permitted, a parent or guardian meeting them at the door with crossed arms and a frown on their face means the same in Russia as it does in the U.S. as it does in Ghana.

Cultural Universals

Although cultures vary, they also share common elements. Cultural universals are patterns or traits that are globally common to all societies. One example of a cultural universal is the family unit: every human society recognizes a family structure that regulates sexual reproduction and the care of children. Even so, how that family unit is defined and how it functions vary. In many Asian cultures, for example, family members from all generations commonly live together in one household. In these cultures, young adults continue to live in the extended household family structure until they marry and join their spouse’s household, or they may remain and raise their nuclear family within the extended family’s homestead. In the U.S., by contrast, individuals are expected to leave home and live independently for a period before forming a family unit that consists of parents and their offspring. Other cultural universals include customs like funeral rites, weddings, and celebrations of births. However, each culture may view and conduct the ceremonies quite differently.

Anthropologist George Murdock first investigated the existence of cultural universals while studying systems of kinship around the world. Murdock found that cultural universals often revolve around basic human survival, such as finding food, clothing, and shelter, or around shared human experiences, such as birth and death or illness and healing. Through his research, Murdock identified other universals including language, the concept of personal names, and, interestingly, jokes. Humor seems to be a universal way to release tensions and create a sense of unity among people (Murdock, 1949). Sociologists consider humor necessary to human interaction because it helps individuals navigate otherwise tense situations.

Sociological Research

Is music a cultural universal.

Imagine that you are sitting in a theater, watching a film. The movie opens with the protagonist sitting on a park bench with a grim expression on their face. The music starts to come in. The first slow and mournful notes play in a minor key. As the melody continues, the heroine turns her head and sees a man walking toward her. The music gets louder, and the sounds don’t seem to go together – as if the orchestra is intentionally playing the wrong notes. You tense up as you watch, almost hoping to stop. The character is clearly in danger.

Now imagine that you are watching the same movie – the exact same footage – but with a different soundtrack. As the scene opens, the music is soft and soothing, with a hint of sadness. You see the protagonist sitting on the park bench with a grim expression. Suddenly, the music swells. The woman looks up and sees a man walking toward her. The notes are high and bright, and the pace is bouncy. You feel your heart rise in your chest. This is a happy moment.

Music has the ability to evoke emotional responses. In television shows, movies, commercials, and even the background music in a store, music has a message and seems to easily draw a response from those who hear it – joy, sadness, fear, victory. Are these types of musical cues cultural universals?

In 2009, a team of psychologists, led by Thomas Fritz of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, studied people’s reactions to music that they’d never heard (Fritz et al., 2009). The research team traveled to Cameroon, Africa, and asked Mafa tribal members to listen to Western music. The tribe, isolated from Western culture, had never been exposed to Western culture and had no context or experience within which to interpret its music. Even so, as the tribal members listened to a Western piano piece, they were able to recognize three basic emotions: happiness, sadness, and fear. Music, the study suggested, is a sort of universal language.

Researchers also found that music can foster a sense of wholeness within a group. In fact, scientists who study the evolution of language have concluded that originally language (an established component of group identity) and music were one (Darwin, 1871). Additionally, since music is largely nonverbal, the sounds of music can cross societal boundaries more easily than words. Music allows people to make connections, where language might be a more difficult barricade. As Fritz and his team found, music and the emotions it conveys are cultural universals.

Ethnocentrism and Cultural Relativism

Although human societies have much in common, cultural differences are far more prevalent than cultural universals. For example, while all cultures have language, analysis of conversational etiquette reveals tremendous differences. In some Middle Eastern cultures, it is common to stand close to others in conversation. Americans keep more distance and maintain a large “personal space.” Additionally, behaviors as simple as eating and drinking vary greatly from culture to culture. Some cultures use tools to put the food in the mouth while others use their fingers. If your professor comes into an early morning class holding a mug of liquid, what do you assume they are drinking? In the U.S., it’s most likely filled with coffee, not Earl Grey tea, a favorite in England, or Yak Butter tea, a staple in Tibet.

Some travelers pride themselves on their willingness to try unfamiliar foods, like the late celebrated food writer Anthony Bourdain (1956-2017). Often, however, people express disgust at another culture's cuisine. They might think that it’s gross to eat raw meat from a donkey or parts of a rodent, while they don’t question their own habit of eating cows or pigs.

Such attitudes are examples of ethnocentrism , which means to evaluate and judge another culture based on one’s own cultural norms. Ethnocentrism is believing your group is the correct measuring standard and if other cultures do not measure up to it, they are wrong. As sociologist William Graham Sumner (1906) described the term, it is a belief or attitude that one’s own culture is better than all others. Almost everyone is a little bit ethnocentric.

A high level of appreciation for one’s own culture can be healthy. A shared sense of community pride, for example, connects people in a society. But ethnocentrism can lead to disdain or dislike of other cultures and could cause misunderstanding, stereotyping, and conflict. Individuals, government, non-government, private, and religious institutions with the best intentions sometimes travel to a society to “help” its people, because they see them as uneducated, backward, or even inferior. Cultural imperialism is the deliberate imposition of one’s own cultural values on another culture.

Colonial expansion by Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, and England grew quickly in the fifteenth century was accompanied by severe cultural imperialism. European colonizers often viewed the people in these new lands as uncultured savages who needed to adopt Catholic governance, Christianity, European dress, and other cultural practices.

A modern example of cultural imperialism may include the work of international aid agencies who introduce agricultural methods and plant species from developed countries into areas that are better served by indigenous varieties and agricultural approaches to the particular region. Another example would be the deforestation of the Amazon Basin as indigenous cultures lose land to timber corporations.

When people find themselves in a new culture, they may experience disorientation and frustration. In sociology, we call this culture shock . In addition to the traveler’s biological clock being ‘off’, a traveler from Chicago might find the nightly silence of rural Montana unsettling, not peaceful. Now, imagine that the ‘difference’ is cultural. An exchange student from China to the U.S. might be annoyed by the constant interruptions in class as other students ask questions—a practice that is considered rude in China. Perhaps the Chicago traveler was initially captivated with Montana’s quiet beauty and the Chinese student was originally excited to see a U.S.- style classroom firsthand. But as they experience unanticipated differences from their own culture, they may experience ethnocentrism as their excitement gives way to discomfort and doubts about how to behave appropriately in the new situation. According to many authors, international students studying in the U.S. report that there are personality traits and behaviors expected of them. Black African students report having to learn to ‘be Black in the U.S.’ and Chinese students report that they are naturally expected to be good at math. In African countries, people are identified by country or kin, not color. Eventually, as people learn more about a culture, they adapt to the new culture for a variety of reasons.

Culture shock may appear because people aren’t always expecting cultural differences. Anthropologist Ken Barger (1971) discovered this when he conducted a participatory observation in an Inuit community in the Canadian Arctic. Originally from Indiana, Barger hesitated when invited to join a local snowshoe race. He knew he would never hold his own against these experts. Sure enough, he finished last, to his mortification. But the tribal members congratulated him, saying, “You really tried!” In Barger’s own culture, he had learned to value victory. To the Inuit people, winning was enjoyable, but their culture valued survival skills essential to their environment: how hard someone tried could mean the difference between life and death. Over the course of his stay, Barger participated in caribou hunts, learned how to take shelter in winter storms, and sometimes went days with little or no food to share among tribal members. Trying hard and working together, two nonmaterial values, were indeed much more important than winning.

During his time with the Inuit tribe, Barger learned to engage in cultural relativism . Cultural relativism is the practice of assessing a culture by its own standards rather than viewing it through the lens of one’s own culture. Practicing cultural relativism requires an open mind and a willingness to consider, and even adapt to, new values, norms, and practices.

However, indiscriminately embracing everything about a new culture is not always possible. Even the most culturally relativist people from egalitarian societies—ones in which women have political rights and control over their own bodies—question whether the widespread practice of female genital mutilation in countries such as Ethiopia and Sudan should be accepted as a part of cultural tradition. Sociologists attempting to engage in cultural relativism, then, may struggle to reconcile aspects of their own culture with aspects of a culture that they are studying. Sociologists may take issue with the practices of female genital mutilation in many countries to ensure virginity at marriage just as some male sociologists might take issue with scarring of the flesh to show membership. Sociologists work diligently to keep personal biases out of research analysis.

Sometimes when people attempt to address feelings of ethnocentrism and develop cultural relativism, they swing too far to the other end of the spectrum. Xenocentrism is the opposite of ethnocentrism, and refers to the belief that another culture is superior to one’s own. (The Greek root word xeno-, pronounced “ZEE-no,” means “stranger” or “foreign guest.”) An exchange student who goes home after a semester abroad or a sociologist who returns from the field may find it difficult to associate with the values of their own culture after having experienced what they deem a more upright or nobler way of living. An opposite reaction is xenophobia, an irrational fear or hatred of different cultures.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for sociologists studying different cultures is the matter of keeping a perspective. It is impossible for anyone to overcome all cultural biases. The best we can do is strive to be aware of them. Pride in one’s own culture doesn’t have to lead to imposing its values or ideas on others. And an appreciation for another culture shouldn’t preclude individuals from studying it with a critical eye. This practice is perhaps the most difficult for all social scientists.

Sociology in the Real World

Overcoming culture shock.

During her summer vacation, Caitlin flew from Chicago, Illinois to Madrid, Spain to visit Maria, the exchange student she had befriended the previous semester. In the airport, she heard rapid, musical Spanish being spoken all around her.

Exciting as it was, she felt isolated and disconnected. Maria’s mother kissed Caitlin on both cheeks when she greeted her. Her imposing father kept his distance. Caitlin was half asleep by the time supper was served—at 10 p.m. Maria’s family sat at the table for hours, speaking loudly, gesturing, and arguing about politics, a taboo dinner subject in Caitlin’s house. They served wine and toasted their honored guest. Caitlin had trouble interpreting her hosts’ facial expressions, and did not realize she should make the next toast. That night, Caitlin crawled into a strange bed, wishing she had not come. She missed her home and felt overwhelmed by the new customs, language, and surroundings. She’d studied Spanish in school for years—why hadn’t it prepared her for this?

What Caitlin did not realize was that people depend not only on spoken words but also on body language, like gestures and facial expressions, to communicate. Cultural norms and practices accompany even the smallest nonverbal signals (DuBois, 1951). They help people know when to shake hands, where to sit, how to converse, and even when to laugh. We relate to others through a shared set of cultural norms, and ordinarily, we take them for granted.

For this reason, culture shock is often associated with traveling abroad, although it can happen in one’s own country, state, or even hometown. Anthropologist Kalervo Oberg (1960) is credited with first coining the term “culture shock.” In his studies, Oberg found that most people are excited at first to encounter a new culture. But bit by bit, they become stressed by interacting with people from a different culture who speak another language and use different regional expressions. There is new food to digest, new daily schedules to follow, and new rules of etiquette to learn. Living with this constant stress can make people feel incompetent and insecure. People react to frustration in a new culture, Oberg found, by initially rejecting it and glorifying one’s own culture. An American visiting Italy might long for a “real” pizza or complain about the unsafe driving habits of Italians.

It helps to remember that culture is learned. Everyone is ethnocentric to an extent, and identifying with one’s own country is natural. Caitlin’s shock was minor compared to that of her friends Dayar and Mahlika, a Turkish couple living in married student housing on campus. And it was nothing like that of her classmate Sanai. Sanai had been forced to flee war-torn Bosnia with her family when she was fifteen. After two weeks in Spain, Caitlin had developed more compassion and understanding for what those people had gone through. She understood that adjusting to a new culture takes time. It can take weeks or months to recover from culture shock, and it can take years to fully adjust to living in a new culture.

By the end of Caitlin’s trip, she had made new lifelong friends. Caitlin stepped out of her comfort zone. She had learned a lot about Spain, but discovered a lot about herself and her own culture.

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Definition of culture

 (Entry 1 of 2)

Definition of culture  (Entry 2 of 2)

transitive verb

• accomplishment
• civilization
• cultivation

Examples of culture in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'culture.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Noun and Verb

Middle English, cultivated land, cultivation, from Anglo-French, from Latin cultura , from cultus , past participle — see cult

15th century, in the meaning defined at sense 4

1510, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Phrases Containing culture

• culture shock
• culture of success
• self - culture
• cancel culture
• co - culture
• tissue culture
• Maker culture

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Cite this Entry

“Culture.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/culture. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of culture.

Kids Definition of culture  (Entry 2 of 2)

Medical Definition

Medical definition of culture.

Medical Definition of culture  (Entry 2 of 2)

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Britannica.com: Encyclopedia article about culture

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Notes towards the Definition of Culture

Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Notes towards the Definition of Culture

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 5, 2020 • ( 0 )

Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948) Eliot himself gives an uncustomarily detailed account of the publication of Notes towards the Definition of Culture in his brief preface to the booklength edition first published in November 1948. Four years earlier, what he calls “a preliminary sketch” of the eventual work was published, under the same title, in three consecutive issues of The New English Weekly, accounting for Eliot’s apparent coyness later in calling such a thoughtful work, as the completed study turned out to be, mere “notes.” He goes on to tell his readers that those preliminary notes were subsequently perfected into a longer paper, “Cultural Forces in the Human Order,” and published in a 1945 volume, Prospect for Christendom . Revised, it is the first chapter of the finished book. He also tells his readers that the second chapter is a revised version of a paper first published in The New English Review in October 1945, and that there is an appendix compiled from three radio broadcasts he had made, in German, to the German people in 1946.

While Eliot may not have had any specific intention behind presenting such a detailed bibliographical history for the material at hand, the reader ought to be impressed by the fact that the ideas expressed therein did not simply spring full-blown onto the page in some effort of Eliot’s to write a book on the topic, but were themselves the products of much working out of issues and nuances over an extended period of time and in a variety of contexts and venues. One can go further than that, however. So much did Eliot’s literary criticism begin to merge with social criticism, social criticism with religious criticism, and religious criticism with cultural criticism, that anyone would have to say that Notes towards the Definition of Culture, his last major published prose work, is a culmination of Eliot’s thinking to date on a wide range of issues, all of which can be safely gathered together under the single heading, culture, at least inasmuch as he will set about defining the term. So much, indeed, are these earlier positions and opinions, though modified, embedded in the text of Notes that, for the sake of moving on into a consideration of its content, it would be more effective to contrast Eliot’s earlier with his present views as these relevant issues are raised and brought to bear by him the pages of Notes towards the Definition of Culture.

Eliot states at the outset that his sole purpose, rather than to propose a social or political philosophy, is to define culture , a term that he feels “has come to be misused.” He imagines that, as a result, perhaps, of the destructiveness of the recent war, the term has come to be used by journalists, for example, as if it were a term synonymous with civilization. Eliot does not deny that those two words may be interchangeable in certain contexts, so his aim is not to erect any artificial distinctions between them but to define the one, culture, in such a way that it will not continue to be easily mistaken for being a synonym for “art” in general or, even more vaguely, for “a kind of emotional stimulant.” It is the latter case that he implies, and fears, is becoming the more and more common.

As he outlines his approach to the topic in the coming essay, Eliot also reveals, of course, his personal bias, which is that there is a relation between culture and religion, so much so, indeed, that “the culture [of a people] will appear to be the product of the religion, or the religion the product of the culture.” Furthermore, he believes that a culture is “organic,” that is, that it grows and changes so that it may be transmitted through succeeding generations; that it should be reducible to more and more local manifestations, as is implied by regionalism; and that, as far as religion is concerned, it should reflect both unity and diversity.

By way of an example of his meaning here, readers familiar with the ideas that Eliot had already expressed in his book-length essay The Idea of a Christian Society a decade earlier would already be acquainted with his hope that, at least in the Christian nations of Western Europe, a universality of doctrine would be mitigated, but not diluted, by local devotional custom and practice. Where these three conditions—transmission through generations, regional flexibility, and diversity in unity—are not met, Eliot goes as far to say, a high civilization is not possible.

Finally, Eliot promises that any such discussion must close itself by “disentangling” just such a definition of culture from any consideration of the educational and political life of the community. Here Eliot freely admits that he is liable to trample on what others may regard as sacred ground by appearing to be elitist or exclusive in his definition of culture. That, however, he argues, underscores his very reason for wishing to define the term: If a culture is to be sacrificed in the name of other social and political goals, so be it, Eliot would say. But, he would add, let it be clear what one means to sacrifice when they speak of sacrificing culture.

This is an Eliot who, far back in his own career as a social commentator, in essays such as The Function of Criticism in 1923 and After Strange Gods in 1934, had been arguing, sometimes stridently but always with a passionate cogency, against literary and other intellectual forces that he saw to be at enmity with his own cherished beliefs and attitudes. Now he appears to be ready to accept that such intellectual and moral conflict is inevitable as long as it is recognized as a necessary conflict, not as a foregone conclusion. He seems to be ready to make peace with those positions with which he does not agree by continuing to explain why he does not agree with them rather than by trying to present the opposing position as patently disagreeable, as he had done in many an earlier diatribe.

Here now, Eliot makes every effort to establish himself as one who is opposed neither to change nor to opposition. Rather, he is opposed to those who “have believed in particular changes as good in themselves, without worrying about the future of civilisation, and without finding it necessary to recommend their innovations by the specious glitter of unmeaning promises.” Eliot would like to see enter such dialogues a “permanent standard” by which one could compare one civilization with another, not just one’s own with others’, but one’s own with the civilization that it has been at various times or may be becoming. So, then, his essay will ask “whether there are any permanent conditions, in the absence of which no higher culture can be expected.” Culture, for Eliot, is not something that one can “deliberately aim at” achieving, nor, one might suspect, changing either. The conditions of culture, he asserts as he concludes his introduction, are “natural” to human beings. If he places quotation marks around the word natural, it is only to suggest that one need not know what it means in order to recognize that it does nevertheless apply. In any event, it will be this emphasis on the naturalness of culture, as opposed to the idea, for example, that it can or should be consciously manipulated, that the reader should keep in mind, for Eliot certainly will as he continues to frame his definition.

In his first chapter, Eliot discusses “The Three Senses of ‘Culture.’ ” (Again, putting quotation marks around the word culture reminds the reader that these are uncharted seas that nevertheless seem deceptively familiar.) Culture, then, can describe the development of an individual, he says, a group or class, or the society as a whole. Since the last comprises the other two, it is there that he wishes to begin. Normally, however, it has been the other way around, Eliot argues, for he demonstrates convincingly that sociological and other treatments of culture, such as Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, generally begin and end by focusing on the class or group if not even, as in Arnold’s case, just the individual. Such lapses, Eliot contends, give the term culture the “thinness” with which it is often popularly associated.

Furthermore, there are various contexts in which one may think of culture—in terms of manners, for example, or of learning, of philosophy, or of the arts—and these are all too often neither taken into account or accounted for. The net result is that people are thus encouraged to think of themselves as persons of culture when they are versed in one area of it but are totally unaware that there are other areas as well.

Eliot’s point is that all these various senses, then, and all these various levels of culture must be taken into account in a coherent manner if anything approaching an adequate definition can ever hope to be achieved. These various characteristics and categories of culture overlap; there is, for example, even in more primitive cultures, distinct separation between art and religion or between the activities of the individual and the goals of the group. The more advanced a culture, the more abstract distinctions are forced on these critical activities of any culture, specifically, religion, science, politics, and art, so that there begin equally abstract struggles for dominance of one over the other three. Those tensions, Eliot argues, may further become tensions within individuals, citing for his example the contention between the demands of the state and the demands of the church that form the basis for the tragedy in Sophocles’ Antigone.

A culture in which these kinds of conflicts begin to occur represents a very advanced stage of civilization, Eliot proposes, for it requires an audience already aware of those tensions in order for a dramatist to articulate them.

Little by little then, the culture of the class or group emerges from the intracultural tensions formed between the individual and society. These more highly cultured groups—groups, that is, whose motive for being is shaped by cultural tensions—lead to further specialization, and that, of course, can lead to cultural disintegration, a point that enables Eliot to begin to focus his discussion on the contemporary scene. “Cultural disintegration,” he writes, “is present when two or more strata so separate that these become in effect distinct cultures,” and this can result from a separation of classes as well. The religious sensibility becomes separated and distinct from the artistic, for example, or manners become a class distinction unique to a particular economic stratum within the society. This process of disintegration and stratification leads inevitably to a decline of the total culture, a decline manifested, internally, in social ailments and, on a global scale, in relations among nations. In the latter case, it becomes a matter of defining a nation or people in terms of its state or political identity rather than on the basis of each people’s own cultural cohesion, abstracting human-to-human interaction all that much more. These difficulties ultimately influence matters of education as trivial-seeming on the surface as the decline of a national cuisine, since that implies a lack of cohesion in the culture resulting in a disconnect between the requirements of life and the quality of life. “Culture,” Eliot can say at this juncture, “may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living.”

Thus, Eliot’s presentation arrives at a critical moment: “[N]o culture can appear or develop except in relation to a religion.” Indeed, Eliot goes even further in linking a people’s culture to their belief system by noting that all that he has just said by way of describing how a culture may decline and disintegrate may also be said of the same phenomena as they would occur in the history of a religion. Here, of course, he can again bring to bear as evidence present conditions in Western Europe, a situation that he had already addressed in 1939 in The Idea of a Christian Society. The divergence of belief in Christianity that commenced in the 16th century may not be, in Eliot’s view, anywhere near as pernicious a sign of its decline as a cultural mainstay as much as an increasing tradition of a nurtured skepticism is. Not only can culture, as Eliot views it, not be preserved or extended in the absence of religion, but in the absence of a religious foundation, it is possible, Eliot is afraid, to adopt an indifferent attitude toward culture.

Rather, Eliot would like to imagine a society in which “both ‘religion’ and ‘culture’ . . . should mean for the individual and for the group something toward which they strive, not merely something which they possess.” Religion can thus be “the whole way of life of a people, . . . and that way of life is also its culture,” or it may be a way of life that a people share with other peoples but with whom they do not share a common culture, as in the case of Christian Europe. Ultimately, then, if culture “includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people”— and here Eliot cites numerous English interests and activities as disparate as Derby Day and beetroot in vinegar—then all those interests and activities are “also a part of our lived religion.”

But if culture is a people’s lived religion, the converse is not necessarily true: that religion is a people’s lived culture. “[T]he actual religion of no European people has ever been purely Christian, or purely anything.” Indeed, Eliot contends, “behaviour is also belief,” and the purity of line between how a people believe and how a people behave colors every aspect of their being and constitutes, ultimately, what may be called their culture, even if it is not seen exclusively as their religion. Or, as Eliot puts it, “bishops are a part of English culture, and horses and dogs are a part of English religion.” Put yet another way, a people’s culture is “an incarnation of its religion,” no matter how well they profess the particular faith that they otherwise adhere to. The truth or falsity of a faith, then, does not matter as far as culture is concerned, so that a people with a “truer light” may have a culture inferior to a people who live a lesser faith with a greater intensity.

Eliot is wise to avoid particular examples, but who would deny that a people who do not believe in the values by which the culture claims that lives ought to be led are leading a sham cultural existence that cannot long sustain itself? Eliot therefore can conclude his first chapter by proposing that “any religion, while it lasts, . . . gives an apparent meaning to life, provides the framework for a culture, and protects the mass of humanity from boredom and despair.”

Eliot begins his next chapter, “The Class and the Elite,” by carefully addressing two sensitive issues even for his time: the notion of higher civilizations versus lower or primitive societies, and the notion of cultural elites.

It has understandably become more and more difficult if not embarrassing to pronounce a particular way of life as more “advanced” than another or a particular social class as more inherently privileged than another, yet qualitative differences, whether or not such distinctions are openly addressed by a society, are made nevertheless and permeate every human society. Indeed the potential for allowing the pernicious nature of these ways of thinking and of behaving to dominate a society’s way of life and treatment of others is increased especially when distinctions of that kind are not openly addressed, analyzed, and questioned. For then it becomes an unspoken commonplace that the making of such judgments is “the way it’s always been done.”

Eliot’s addressing the entire matter, then, forms a very real part of the analysis that he is carrying on in order not to prescribe but to describe those elements that constitute a “definition of culture.” Seen from that perspective, his interest in describing how class and, ultimately, a class of elites eventually emerges in so-called higher civilizations is a way neither of justifying or condemning such a state of affairs but, rather, a necessary part of the analytical processes that enable definition. That said, Eliot quickly in his second chapter establishes a fact that is presented not as something to be praised or lamented, but merely understood. While a classless society remains the ideal at higher stages of development, a culture divides into classes. Higher classes emerge wherein “superior individuals” in political administration, the arts, science, philosophy, and physical prowess form “into suitable groups, endowed with appropriate powers, and perhaps with varied emoluments and honours.” These groups, he tells his readers, telling them nothing that they do not already know, “are what we call élites.”

Not to belabor the matter, but it is necessary for the reader to note that Eliot is neither defending nor attacking a cultural elitism, only describing the manner in which such a state of affairs comes about. Indeed, he imagines that at some future point in the development of a society stratified by class distinctions, congregations of elites will replace class structure by transcending it. Today such an idea might be called a meritocracy, and it seems to foster its own inequitable divisions.

Nevertheless, all that Eliot is really suggesting is that when a culture begins to identify inherent skill and talent, class distinctions are seen for the artificial criteria that they are and thus class is not a measure or reflection of the relative merits of an individual’s potential for contributing to the larger community. The result of the emergence of elites would, therefore, be that “all positions in society should be occupied by those who are best fitted to exercise the functions of the positions.” The danger of investing all cultural integrity in the hands of elites, however, is that they tend to become further and further isolated, one group from another, whereas the notion that there is within a culture, guiding and forming it, the elite enables its various groupings to interact more harmoniously for the common good.

Eliot takes up the views of Dr. Karl Mannheim to espouse his own opposing view. Mannheim, Eliot tells his readers, fails to distinguish between elites, with their tendency to cluster and become isolated in their various fields, and the elite, who through separate interests would nevertheless operate in concert in support of the common interest of a common culture. This elite may represent or be constituted of the ruling or governing class in some instances, but “in concerning ourselves with class versus élites,” which is what for Eliot has been a primary focus of his argument throughout, “we are concerned with the total culture of a country, and that involves a good deal more than government.”

It may be that, rather than a “classless” society, Eliot is making a case for what a society should want its so-called “ruling” class to be. So, then, “[w]hat is important is a structure in which there will be, from ‘top’ to ‘bottom,’ a continuous gradation of cultural levels.” This culture must, meanwhile, be transmitted primarily by the family rather than what Eliot calls educationists, inasmuch as the latter will dispute whether or not there ought to be a class structure present in the society at all, while the family, rather than concerning itself with the pros and cons of a class structure, will naturally represent the values of the culture in miniature, whatever class the particular family embodies or belongs to.

However, in order to ensure the viability of the family unit, Eliot ends his second chapter with what sounds like an impossible requirement for a modern industrial state such as England: that there must be “groups of families persisting, from generation to generation, each in the same way of life.” And he follows that stipulation by sounding once more his ominous caution that while such conditions may not bring about a higher civilization, “when they are absent, the higher civilization is unlikely to be found.”

Eliot’s chapters 3 and 4 are continuations of each other, inasmuch as he now sets out to describe how a unified culture must nevertheless both enable and express diversity in order to remain viable. In a manner of speaking, Eliot’s entire essay throughout to this point has been tacitly endorsing the same proposition, what with its talk of higher and lower levels of society acting in concert to make a way of national life constitute what, by his definition, can be rightfully called a culture. None of this should come as any surprise to present-day readers, who should already be well schooled in the idea that differences among and between groups and regions, nations and peoples, are both inevitable and welcomed.

Eliot’s contemporary readers would have been as equally well versed in that same proposition, however. Those political organizations that are now defined as “nations,” which may by now seem to have been the building blocks of diverse human societies since time immemorial, are actually fairly recent historical developments. There was not, for example, any such political entity as Germany or Italy before 1865, less than 100 years before the time of Eliot’s writing, and even Great Britain’s “United Kingdom” of England, Scotland, and Ireland is a political invention of the late 18th century. For Eliot to speak of regions and sects and cults within the context of a Christianized Western Europe is mandatory, then, since post-Reformation Europe, even within the relatively insular realms of the British Isles, had long ago become as fragmented religiously as it had always been regionally and, in the oldest sense of the term, tribally.

“Unity and Diversity,” the general title that Eliot gives to chapters 3 and 4, is hardly proposed as an original conceptualization by Eliot, who then discusses “The Region” in his third chapter and “Sect and Cult” in his fourth. Instead, it is his yielding to the social, spiritual, ethnic, and even geographical realities of the varied peoples of the very English culture that he had earlier defined as the “whole life of the whole people.” If these two chapters have a common thesis, as Eliot’s titulary way of linking them suggests that they do, it can be found in the epigraph from the 20th-century British thinker A. N. Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World that Eliot cites at the opening of chapter 3: “A diversification among human communities is essential. . . . Other nations of different habits are not enemies: they are godsends. Men require of their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration.”

In summary, if differences inspire competition, that competition ought to be itself inspired by emulation. From that, the health of the entire human community emerges. What is true of the benefits of a healthy diversity between nations and peoples, Eliot happily and wisely contends in his next two chapters, must be true as well of the diversity among an otherwise common people sharing what, from the outsider’s point of view, appears to be a common culture.

Eliot’s is always the time-honored media via, middle way, of the Anglican tradition of England that was itself inspired by that people’s desire, during the Reformation, to be free of the dominance of what they regarded as a foreign culture, Rome’s, over their national religion and yet to remain true, by and large, to long-standing Catholic Christian practices, rituals, and devotions. Thus, Eliot is always taking pains to point out that a totally classless society is as pernicious to the maintenance and growth of a healthy national culture as a society that is very rigidly organized by class distinctions.

Rather, he writes, “[t]he unity with which I am concerned must be largely unconscious,” that is to say, it should not be something that is being perpetually identified and celebrated, “and therefore can perhaps be best approached through a consideration of the useful diversities.” Region is one. Citizens, then, should be encouraged to think of themselves as citizens not of the nation, but “of a particular part of [their] country, with local loyalties.” By the same token and in the same spirit, however, one’s loyalty to a locality or region, no matter how exotic or unique its cultural heritage may seem to be in its own right, cannot be fostered in such a way that it ends up taking precedence over one’s sense of belonging to those ever-enlarging groups that eventually make up the whole people and the whole culture.

Nor is this sense of locality or region limited to geographical entities, even when it may seem to be defined or interpreted in that manner. Dialects provide a point of immediate reference, and Eliot uses the Irish for an example. While as a people they had long since, at least in Eliot’s time, lost their own language and were for the most part, as a result of English colonial policies in Ireland, English- speaking, the English that they speak retains idiomatic and other markers of their original Gaelic tongue. Furthermore, it would be unfair to define their ethnic background and the dialect and other idiosyncratic habits that have emerged from it as distinctions peculiar of a region inasmuch as Irish could be found in every major metropolis in England itself. Still, such distinctions can nevertheless be identified as “regional” for all the other reasons already cited.

These satellite cultures, as Eliot comes to call them, using Ireland, Scotland, and Wales as outstanding examples, must be encouraged to maintain and nurture their original identities as well, but not so much as to cut themselves off completely from the primary culture, in this case England’s, through which they are linked to Europe and, through Europe, the world. Eliot does take a tangent here, however, that may not find universal agreement. When a satellite culture has become united by language to another, he argues, it ought to abandon its own language in favor of the central culture for literary purposes. This sort of cultural imperialism should certainly strike most as inexcusable, including even Eliot, who only a few years earlier, in “The Social Function of Literature,” had rightfully commended the Norwegians, just recently liberated from the control of Nazi Germany, for tenaciously clinging to a national, Norwegian-language literature and arguing that it is vital that every people do so for the benefit of all other peoples.

A special exception could be made in the case of English, nevertheless, as a common tongue for all the peoples of the British Isles. (The same phenomenon, for example, has occurred in modern Italy, a land of many dialects and of long literary traditions in each, where, nevertheless, the Tuscan dialect of Dante Alighieri has, since national unification, become what the world knows as the Italian language, a situation of which Eliot would have been well aware, although he does not cite it.) His argument, in any case, regards the transmission of a culture, not the dynamics of its political and often military history. A culture, he insists, is “a peculiar way of thinking, feeling and behaving.” He continues: “[F]or its maintenance, there is no safeguard more reliable than a language. And to survive for this purpose it must continue to be a literary language— not necessarily a scientific language but certainly a poetic one. . . .” Regarded from that point of view, in fact, his comments on the maintenance of Norwegian as a literary language under Nazi rule are no less in keeping with his remarks here on the various peoples of the British Isles writing solely in English, although all individuals of Welsh, Irish, and Scottish extraction might not find themselves in agreement with his position.

Eliot himself would go as far as to defend and encourage such disagreements, for they too form a part of a culture. Whereas friction in the mechanical universe may be a waste of energy, in human cultures, all those frictions created by class and region, including those just discussed involving satellite cultures that have been reduced to secondary roles, “by dividing the inhabitants of a country into . . . different kinds of groups, lead to a conflict favourable to creativeness and progress.” As he puts it, paraphrasing the Whitehead epigraph for effect, “One needs the enemy.” Indeed, the disastrous transformation of Italian and German cultures by the ideological single-mindedness of fascism provides Eliot with a vivid and recent illustration of what can occur when dialogue and debate cease within a culture.

As the reader might have already observed, Eliot appears to be proposing a model of culture that involves ever-widening but concentric circles, from the village to the region to the nation to the world. The difficulty there, of course, is that once one transcends the idea of a national culture, one has to abandon most of the political associations that culture also implies. The United Nations had already been formed by the time of Eliot’s writing, and the visionary ideal of a world government had become a utopian commonplace ever since U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s proposing a League of Nations following hard on the catastrophe of World War I in 1919.

Still, Eliot contends that if his pleading for the integrity of local cultures has any practical validity, then “a world culture which was simply a uniform culture would be no culture at all.” Eliot is forced to conclude that although we are “pressed to maintain the ideal of a world culture,” we are at the same time forced to admit “that it is something we cannot imagine. ” Indeed, the “colonization problem,” as he terms the imposition of one culture on another by force by an outside power, would only be exacerbated to an intolerable degree by any effort to impose a world culture, since cultures do not all follow the same processes of growth, a condition that such an imposition would require. Some areas of the world, Eliot notes in ending his remarks on unity and diversity as regional issues, citing as an example India, where a Hindu and Muslim culture existed side by side at the time, have seen the evolution of competing cultures to a degree that would make Eliot’s comments on British regionalism seem a mockery.

In his fourth chapter, as previously noted, Eliot takes up the topic of cultural unity and diversity as it is affected by cults and sects. Specifically, he defines his topic as “the cultural significance of religious divisions.” He begins by lamenting, in what he terms “more developed societies” such as one might find in Western Europe, the sort of cohesion between religious and nonreligious activities that one would expect to find in more primitive or less developed societies, keeping in mind that he is speaking of degrees of complexity and abstraction here, not quality and significance. As he puts it, the more conscious belief becomes, the more conscious unbelief becomes, leading to habits of indifference, doubt, and skepticism.

In The Idea of a Christian Society a decade earlier, Eliot had already addressed many of these same difficulties attendant on maintaining a meaningful national religious life in a postindustrial, highly materialistic, and contentious modern society. Now, however, he emphasizes that he wishes to explore those same issues not from the point of view of the Christian apologist but from that of the sociologist. As a result, “[m]ost of my generalisations are intended to have applicability to all religion, and not only Christianity.” If, then, he nevertheless appears to be discussing matters that are wholly Christian, it is because he is “particularly concerned with Christian culture, with the Western World, with Europe, and with England.” Finally, he emphasizes as well that whether one is a believer or an unbeliever, no one can be so completely detached from the religious experience as to approach and discuss it in a wholly objective manner.

That said, he continues by undertaking a consideration of “unity and diversity in religious belief and practice” in order to “enquire what is the situation most favourable to the preservation and improvement of culture.” Those religions that have the greatest universality, as he sees it, are most likely to “stimulate culture,” and their universality is determined in part by their being able to appeal to and be accepted by peoples of different cultures. Christianity certainly fills that bill; however, Eliot observes that there is always the danger that too broad a cross-cultural appeal can also result in the dilution of a religion’s core values.

These general premises established, Eliot announces that he will devote the remainder of this discussion to the relation of Catholicism and Protestantism in Europe, as well as to the diversity of sects that Protestantism has itself produced. It serves his purpose, for he finds himself compelled to admit that Europe since the 16th century, a convenient period reference for the Protestant Reformation, has certainly not suffered in terms of overall cultural development. While he must also admit that it is impossible to say what sort of cultural developments may have occurred instead had Europe remained Catholic and Christian, he cannot avoid the obvious conclusion that, based on the European experience, “[e]ither religious unity or religious division may coincide with cultural efflorescence or cultural decay.”

When he uses England itself as the focus for a similar discussion, however, he is less sanguine, for while the two dominant religious cultures in England are both Protestant—the Established Anglican Church and the various Protestant sects that have splintered from it during the centuries—the English atheist still shares in the religious life of culture when it comes to signficant social events such as births, marriages, and deaths. Nevertheless, Eliot sees the major Protestant cultures of Northern Europe, where the Protestant Reformation suffered its widest and most enduring successes, as having cut those regions off from the mainstream of European cultural development, which is largely Latin in origin. While he avoids evaluating the pros and cons of that separation for the cultures of the north, he returns again to its consequence for the English.

Since Anglicanism as an offshoot of Catholicism was the result of a decision made at the top, in this case by Henry VIII in his own dispute with Rome, whereas the Protestant dissenters were opposing themselves on native ground specifically against what they saw as little more than a national expression of Catholicism, England may be culturally more stratified religiously in ways that are themselves modified by cultural distinctions among classes. This Eliot is willing to attribute to the regional divisions based on ethnicities that he desribed in the preceding chapter. In the most basic terms, he is willing to concede that the British Isles’ having been home to many peoples makes it ripe for frequent dissension and stratification in all areas of culture, but especially religion.

The next logical step is to consider the ecumenical movements that are becoming more common. After making a distinction between intercommunion and reunion, he observes that complete reunion would entail a “community of culture.” The result would not, however, be that dreaded uniform culture worldwide, but rather a “Christian culture” manifested in its various local components. Here again, the danger would lie in such a Christianity’s attempting to be all things to all people, reducing “theology to such principles that a child can understand,” which he sees as a cultural debility. A worse danger, in keeping with the modern tendency to be polite to avoid the risk of appearing assertive, is that a sort of “cultural equality” may begin to prevail, and again the lowest-common-denominator approach to both theology and ritual might very well follow. When it comes to determining whether there should be an international church—Roman Catholicism—or a national church—here Anglicanism would provide a good example—or separated sects, Eliot takes the moderating position as he so often has done in this present treatise, proposing that the maintenance of a persistent tension among all three possibilities is desirable. “Christendom should be one,” but “within that unity there should be an endless conflict between ideas.”

Eliot devotes his last two chapters to culture and politics and culture and education. That he treats both topics in a far more cursory fashion than he had culture and class, culture and region, and culture and religion suggests that he does not view those last two categories as being as critical to the maintenance and transmission of cultural values. However, culture and religion, politics, and education together form a broader category, which is culture and the nation. Politics and education, from that point of view, are relatively equal to religion in forming the bedrock of a people’s culture as a nation, although the reader should recall at all times that, as far as Eliot is concerned, religion and culture are virtually inseparable.

No wonder, then, the short shrift that he gives to politics, which is in and of itself, though dominant in the short term, a transitory aspect of any culture’s ongoing health. Still, Eliot is enough a child of his time to recognize the importance that the culture itself, particularly in the postwar environment in which he is writing, attaches to the political sphere, so he treats it gingerly but with a profound respect for its genuine even if superficial importance. The political, for one thing, bandy the word culture about quite freely. Yet, while all may engage in the political process, by voting, for example, or paying taxes, few actually engage in politics, so that, in view of the considerable power that they wield, these few form a virtual elite unto themselves. It is that idea, if not practical reality, that Eliot hopes to short circuit somewhat as he now defines what he sees to be the place of the political in a culture.

“In a healthily stratified society,” he observes, “public affairs would be a responsibility not equally borne.” Nevertheless, the governing elite must not itself become one “sharply divided from the other elites of society.” To achieve this aim, he would not like to define the governing elite as opposed to the other elites as if the first were men of action as opposed to men of thought. Rather, he says, the relationship should be regarded as one “between men of different types of mind and different areas of thought and action.”

A society that is graded accordingly, Eliot contends, with “several levels of power and authority,” might find the politician “restrained” in his use of language by his fear of censure if not ridicule from “a smaller and more critical public,” composed of those other segments of the elite who are not directly involved with the governing elite. In other words, these “men of action,” the political, would not be isolated in their own dangerously and disproportionately powerful subculture but would instead be subject to the judgment of those who respect thought over action. This governing elite should, then, be required to study history and political theory, so that they are inculcated in the life of the mind.

Eliot has a pointed reason for bringing the political to the broader cultural table: “Today, we have become culture-conscious in a way which nourishes nazism, communism and nationalism all at once; in a way which emphasises separation without helping us to overcome it.” A more culturally astute governing elite would obviously go a long way toward overcoming those separations that are otherwise exposed to the exploitation of unscrupulous parties with agendas of their own.

Eliot cites present-day communist Russia as an example of a culture attempting to export their revolution to all kinds of disparate cultures throughout the world by presenting theirs as a culture condoning the equality of cultures at all cost—a successful strategy despite its patently obvious contradictions. The democratic West, meanwhile, does little better. Eliot cites the British Council, an official body created to promote “cultural exchanges,” to show how those tactics are little different, since it too makes the transmission and exchange of culture a function of the state apparatus.

Eliot rightfully wonders when it “again will be possible for intellectual elites of all countries to travel as private citizens.” As should be apparent, he imagines that that can occur only if there is a governing elite who do not imagine that the national culture and its dissemination and transmission is not the exclusive prerogative of the state. Eliot concludes chapter 5 on culture and politics by reiterating that we cannot “slip into the assumption that culture can be planned. Culture,” he says emphatically, “can never be wholly conscious.”

When Eliot, in chapter 6, takes up the topic of culture and education, the reader may recall that Eliot had, in chapter 2, argued that culture is better maintained and transmitted by the family than by those he calls educationists for the simple reason that the family unconsciously embodies the culture, while education, to be successful, must be a conscious process. And, as the reader is amply cautioned at the conclusion of chapter 5, culture can never—should never—be a “wholly conscious” affair. Rather than revisit that earlier argument in chapter 6, then, Eliot analyzes the general expectations associated with the idea of education by the culture, in order to extrapolate a more general idea of how education might best serve cultural purposes. To do so, he first sets out to examine and set in order the prevalent assumptions regarding education.

The first examination, involving the prevailing notions of the purpose of education, entails the most extensive summary on Eliot’s part, citing such contemporary authorities as H. C. Dent, Herbert Read, and C. E. M. Joad. In each instance, he convincingly demonstrates that to varying degrees education has come to be seen as an instrument for advancing social ideals. He remarks that it is therefore unfortunate if education as a means for individuals to acquire wisdom, knowledge, and a respect for learning is overlooked in the interest of serving broader social aims. If nevertheless it is finally agreed that education’s purpose is “making people happier,” then that assumption ought too to be examined. Eliot quickly concludes in this particular case that “education is a strain” that very often “can impose greater burdens upon a mind than that mind can bear.”

Eliot deals with his three other “assumptions” regarding the value and purpose of education in equally quick succession. (He could have as easily called them “myths” except that he has a poet’s respect for the meaning of words.) Thus, he is happy to debunk the notion that everyone wants an education. (“A high average of general education,” he observes, “is perhaps less necessary for a civil society than a respect for learning.”) He dismisses the notion that education makes for an “equality of opportunity” (he imagines instead that expanding educational opportunity can as likely lower educational standards) and the somewhat related notion that an exposure to education will unleash latent abilities that may otherwise lay dormant (the “Mute Inglorious Milton dogma” he calls it, invoking a central image from Thomas Gray’s sentimental masterpiece, “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”).

If there is a commonality to these assumptions that he raises only to challenge them, it is that they all emphasize the social benefits of education rather than promoting it for its own sake and as a force to help shape individual lives. The emphasis on opportunity and education, for example, he sees as indicative of the “depression of the family” and the “disintegration of class.” The reader should recall how integral Eliot sees the role of the family and class to be in the maintenance, dissemination, and transmission of culture.

Eliot goes as far as to assert that in the modern world education has become an abstraction, “remote from life” and implying a disintegrated society. Meanwhile, education is thought to be the panacea for “putting civilisation together again.” If by education in that regard, Eliot continues, we mean “everything that goes to form the good individual in a good society,” then he has no problem with that, revealing in the process his own definition of education. If, however, education means a standardized curriculum mandated by government bureaucracies, then “the remedy is manifestly and ludicrously inadequate.”

Ideally, education, he continues, defining the term as he goes, is the “process by which the community attempts to pass on to all its members its culture.” But when in practice education becomes what today would be called a government-sponsored and -directed entitlement, thereby bringing preselected aspects of the whole culture to bear in order to satisfy social and political agendas, the more systematically is the root culture betrayed. “Whether education can foster and improve culture or not, it can surely adulterate and degrade it,” Eliot concludes, imagining a future in which, the root culture lost to living human memory by the distortions of programmatic education, all that would be left of the culture would be “barbarian nomads . . . encamp[ed] in their mechanised caravans.”

Eliot closes by reminding his reader of what he clearly thinks is a cardinal point, perhaps the cardinal point of his entire presentation thus far: “. . . we cannot set about to create or improve culture, . . only will the means which are favourable to culture.” To do as much, returning to his purpose for composing the essay at hand, one must at least know what one means, what values of behavior, habits, and institutions one refers to, in invoking the term.

European Culture

In an appendix, which comprises the English-language transcriptions of three radio broadcast talks that Eliot originally made in German in 1946, he comments on the unity of European culture. Addressing a German-speaking audience in their own language within a year after they had suffered a deserved and total defeat in World War II, Eliot introduces himself as a poet and editor—a man of letters. He begins by commenting on the rich variety of languages that make up modern English, which he identifies as the best language for writing poetry, for that reason. It has extensive elements from German, Scandinavian through Danish, French through the Normans, not to mention the Celtic that has infiltrated the language through the Welsh, Irish, and Scottish peoples of the British Isles.

He goes on to comment on the other great contributions that Europeans, in particular the Italians, French, Germans, and English, have made in painting, music, and poetry, but he ends by singling out the advances that the French made in poetry in the 19th century under the leadership of poets such as Charles Baudelaire and Paul Valéry, who influenced later poets such as W. B. Yeats but who had themselves been influenced by the American poet Edgar Allan Poe. Musing so, he points out the irrefutable fact that “no one nation, no one language, would have achieved what it has, if the same art had not been cultivated in neighbouring countries and in different languages.” From there, using the experiences of the American contemporary poet Ezra Pound, Eliot also establishes the influences of Asian, in this case Chinese, poetry on the languages of modern Europe to make a further point: “For when I speak of the unity of European culture, I do not want to give the impression that I regard European culture as something cut off from every other.” He holds this to be as true of painting and music as of poetry, and in the second of his three broadcasts, he extends the notion that there is a unified European culture as much to be found in ideas as to be found in the arts.

Besides the fact that the thoughts expressed in this appendix are a reflection of Eliot’s overall thinking at the time, as they tended beyond his earlier parochial considerations toward broader and far less exclusive views of what values and behaviors ought to prevail in the human community, the appendix is appropriate to the overall topic of human culture. Throughout the book, Eliot has been defining culture as those inherited values, behaviors, and institutions that define the same people living in the same place, an idea borrowed somewhat from the early 19th-century German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel’s definition of nation . That while this culture is the expression of the whole people, that expression is continuously being modified, revised, and adjusted by the sometimes conflicting interactions and goals of the various groups, classes, and regions that make up any single culture.

Furthermore, because a culture so defined is as living and as organic a thing as any other natural product of the thinking, feeling universe, it is best transmitted by the human families that compose its most central collective unit. In any event, what must be most avoided is any effort by the state or other more rigidly organized entities, such as educators, to “stage-manage” cultural developments and dissemination in any conscious way, since that will automatically truncate the natural processes of growth and change that any culture requires. It should be apparent that Eliot would then, of necessity, take a long step back from English culture, which, sensibly enough, had been the primary focus of his presentation till now, to take a look at the same phenomena from the point of view of a larger cultural sampling, the European experience.

As he continues his survey of European cultural unity, he is indeed able to bring his own experience to bear by recounting in general but nevertheless detailed terms the 17 years, from 1922 to 1939, that he edited a literary review, the Criterion. Though it was published in English, he made every effort to publish, in translation, continental writers as well, particularly those who might otherwise be overlooked by the general reading public. In the process, he was in regular contact with other, similar reviews. That all these reviews failed he regards as the result of “gradual closing of the mental frontiers of Europe.” After 1933, the year that the Nazis came to power under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, for example, contributions from Germany became less and less easy to find; the same could be said of Fascist Italy, although in that case it had occurred even earlier. “A universal concern with politics does not unite,” Eliot can report with considerable authority, “it divides.”

Before then, foreign ideas, in all senses of the term, had been welcomed “without hostility, and with the assurance that you could learn from them.” More, there was the sense that within Europe there was “an international fraternity of men of letters” who were as united by a common respect for ideas as others were by a national or religious loyalty. That Eliot mourns the passage of such a time and spirit is very clear, but it also permits him, in the third and final part of his presentation, to introduce the idea of a European culture.

There can be no such thing, he asserts, if the countries of Europe are isolated from each other, as they had been, catastrophically, for the decade or more preceding his talk. After defining culture much in the same terms as he subsequently does in Notes, he makes it clear that, ultimately, there is no demarcation totally separating one human culture from another; still, he can insist on a unity of European culture. That unity is based, he feels, on Christianity, not as a communion of believers but as a common tradition. “If Asia were converted to Christianity tomorrow,” he says in order to illustrate his meaning, “it would not thereby become a part of Europe,” because although Asia would have embraced Christian beliefs, it would not have acquired the traditions in the arts, law, and thought that have developed over centuries in Europe as a result of its own unique Christian experience.

So, then, Eliot can assert as well that “[t]o our Christian heritage we owe many things besides religious faith,” and that “this unity in the common elements of culture . . . is the true bond between us,” a bond that, unlike political or economic bonds, does not require one loyalty; indeed, it may flourish best under many. Universities across Europe, however, should have “their common ideals” and “their obligations to each other.”

Eliot concludes on an ominous note regarding circumstances unique to the times, but that may reoccur without warning at any time. Because of the economic and other restrictions on personal freedom brought about by years of devastating warfare, men of letters throughout Europe are not as free to travel and to communicate with each other as they ought to be. They can try, he nevertheless pleads, to preserve the legacy of Greece, Rome, and Israel to which Europe is heir, for, as he sees it, “these spiritual possessions are also in imminent peril.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY

For the present-day reader reasonably well-schooled in the idea of culture, there may not seem to be anything new about Eliot’s observations in their most general sense. Since the Smithsonian Institution decided to include Elvis Presley’s guitar among those artifacts that define American culture, for example, individuals had become used to the idea that culture is not limited to highbrow pursuits and interests but is, much as Eliot defined it, the whole expression of the whole people. A critical point not to be missed, however, is that that very dramatic and necessary sea change in the common perception of what culture means and of what it constitutes has Eliot’s own work and thought on the topic in part to thank.

From early in his career as a literary and social thinker, Eliot had invoked the idea of tradition and had taken his stand more and more as a conservator of those practices and beliefs and attitudes that he personally associated with the Anglo-American experience and, with it and by extension, the European experience as well. That he equally as often associated those concerns with England and Europe’s Christian background and traditions gave even him, perhaps, the impression that his was an exclusionary and conservative stance, one that may have beguiled him into making his extremely unfotunate remark regarding “free-thinking Jews” in After Strange Gods.

As his career as a social commentator and Christian apologist continued, however, it seems to have become apparent to him that his defense of Christian England and its traditions was not any endorsement of being Christian and English. Rather it was an argument that any individual should foremost be mindful of and loyal to the cultural legacy of his or her own people, not to the exclusion of an exposure to and respect for other cultures and their values, but in order better to appreciate those other cultures as a part of the continuing and mandatory dialogue regarding not what it is to be English and Christian, but what it is to be human. At least that is the turn that Eliot’s thought begins to take in The Idea of a Christian Society and that terminates in his literally definitive statement on this important matter in Notes towards the Definition of Culture.

To define culture, Eliot attempts to demonstrate in that work, is to define humanity at all its various levels—individually, ethnically, regionally, nationally, globally. Whether or not he succeeds in doing as much, his title boldly suggests that his is only a preliminary contribution to a dialogue that, once begun, can never be abandoned. Cultures may best develop unconsciously, but humanity can never be too overly conscious of how much the interactions of the world’s various cultures through time form what is called history. To shape that history to everyone’s benefit requires each person’s mindfulness of the culture that has nurtured him and an equal admiration for all those other cultures that nurture others. It is Eliot’s considered view that only the broadest and most generous definition of culture can acquaint individuals with the importance of that ongoing endeavor.

Meanwhile, there are other crucial considerations, to say the least. In a nutshell, the increasing abstractedness of the state and its more and more total control of the instruments of education at the expense of more natural units of human association, such as the family and the region, can result only in the stultification of culture, a prospect that humanity has never contemplated before. The shape of that future, Eliot would be the first to admit (as he was also one of the first to contemplate), is anybody’s guess, but its arrival is ensured if the maintenance and transmission of culture become consciously treated as the official prerogative of bureaucratic and commercial interests. As a bulwark against that possibility, Eliot envisions an elite of individuals in the arts, sciences, religion, philosophy, and government who are respected not for their inherited or appointed position in the culture but for the inherent capacity that they each exhibit for keeping the cultural life of the community viable and active, so that change occurs as a result of the shaping power of natural talents and skills among individuals, and most certainly not of preconceived public policies.

It is possible, however, that after all is said and done, Eliot may have missed a critical beat in his analysis of what makes human cultures work and develop, a lapse for which he can be forgiven but which still should be brought to the attention of interested readers. Quite simply, the processes by which cultures are formed and fostered may themselves have been undergoing a radical transformation in the 20th century, one that required an entirely new assortment of social methodologies for maintaining and transmitting them. Eliot himself had been able to speak of progressive stages and levels of cultural development. As much as such terms may make thinkers nowadays blush, he could point to primitive and high cultures in explaining how different rules and practices apply as cultures advance. If primitive and high were to be replaced by simple and complex, or if those words, too, seem too prejudiciously evaluative, then perhaps cluttered and uncluttered might do as well.

The point is that the more complex or cluttered a culture becomes, as the cultures of Western Europe certainly have over the past several hundred years of their development, the more they need precisely what Eliot, from his vantage point, is justified in regarding as the death blow of a viable culture, and that is a conscious management imposed from above. Perhaps there is, in other words, a point at which culture ceases to advance best by advancing unconsciously, and Eliot could not possibly have known that he was living through just such a period of not catastrophic but cataclysmic change, bringing with it not an end but the sort of new beginning that Eliot otherwise has always cherished. No doubt it remains to be seen how much the increasing pressure of both population growth and widespread urbanization on a virtually global scale during the 20th and 21st centuries may alone require an entirely new set of paradigms than Eliot’s. The only certainty is that Eliot’s efforts in that same regard and in the midst of that same pivotal century should at least provide a worthwhile point of reference for future thinkers and thinking on this critical and sensitive topic.

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Democratic societies are often characterized by extensive pluralism of religions, cultures, ethnicities, and worldviews, on the basis of which citizens make claims against their state. Democratic states are additionally characterized by a commitment to treat all citizens equally, and so they require fair and just ways to wade through and respond to these claims. This entry considers cultural claims in particular.

Cultural claims are ubiquitous in political and legal spaces. Not only do individuals and groups both make cultural claims against the state, often for legal or political accommodations, but the state often explains its choices in terms of protecting particular aspects of its culture. This entry will first examine the ways in which “culture” is defined by political and moral philosophers: culture-as-encompassing group, culture-as-social-formation, culture-as-narrative/dialogue, and culture-as-identity. Over the course of this discussion, the “essentialist” challenge will be introduced: an essentialist account of culture is one that treats certain key characteristics of that culture as defining it and correspondingly all of its members must share certain key traits in order to be treated as members (for more, see Phillips 2010). In particular, the entry goes on to note that early conceptions of culture-as-encompassing groups are criticized for being essentialist, and later conceptions are attempts to reformulate culture in ways that avoid the essentialist challenge.

Following an articulation of these main ways of understanding culture, the entry turns to an assessment of distinct (though occasionally overlapping) types of cultural claims that are pressed against the state by minority groups: exemption claims, assistance claims, self-determination claims, recognition claims, preservation claims (and claims against coerced cultural loss), defensive claims in legal settings, and exclusive use claims (claims against cultural appropriation). There are both justifications for, and objections to, these claims, and they often hinge on how “culture” is understood. In many cases, the disputes about the justifiability of these claims hinge on competing understandings of what culture is, and especially, how valuable it is to those who are members, as will be shown below. Finally, the entry will close with an assessment of cases where a majority community makes cultural claims to justify actions, mainly in the context of controlling immigration and, in some cases, refusing entry to potential migrants all together, as well as the cultural demands it makes of those who are admitted, and the range of justifications and objections offered in these cases. This section considers the content of the majority culture, to which newcomers are asked to adhere, as well as how forcibly they can be “asked” to do so.

1.1 Culture-as-encompassing-group

1.2 culture-as-social-formation, 1.3 culture-as-dialogue, 1.4 culture-as-identity (or identity rather than culture), 2.1 exemption rights, 2.2 assistance rights, 2.3 self-determination rights, 2.4 recognition rights, 2.5 cultural preservation rights, 2.6 rights against cultural loss, 2.7 cultural defense rights, 2.8 exclusive cultural use rights (or rights against cultural appropriation), 3.1 cultural continuity and exclusion rights, 3.2 cultural continuity and integration enforcement rights, 4. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries, 1. defining culture.

Defining the term “culture” is very challenging: it has been described as both a “notoriously overbroad concept” (Song 2009: 177) and a “notoriously ambiguous concept” (Eisenberg 2009: 7). It is deployed in multiple ways: as the entry will go on to consider in more length, the term “culture” can refer to the set of norms, practices and values that characterize minority and majority groups, for example by noting that the Hasidic Jewish communities in New York practice a unique “culture”, or by describing Italian or Senegalese culture. But it is also used in other ways, for example, to refer to “bro” culture or “hipster” culture, or the culture of British football fans. Moreover, any one person can be a member of multiple cultures—someone (like this writer!) can be a member of the Canadian culture, the Ottawan culture, the Jewish culture, and the academic culture at the same time. Contextual considerations will explain why the norms, practices, and values that define each of these cultures become relevant at a particular moment. Moreover, only some of these cultures have political and legal relevance; only those that do are the focus of this entry.

In the political and legal spheres, there is widespread disagreement about what culture is , and the next section is focused on elaborating these distinct views of culture. There is however considerable agreement that whatever it is, it matters to people and the meaning and value it provides to the lives of individuals are among the most important reasons, if not the most important ones, to defend and protect it in legal and political spaces. This value is why it is important to attempt to discover what culture is and correspondingly why, and which aspects of it in particular, should or should not be protected in the public sphere. Notice that the observation that cultures are valuable to people, and indeed that they bring value to the lives of individuals, is not the same as saying that individual cultural practices are all good. Any defensible account of culture must take seriously the importance of culture in general without defending all of its instantiations. There are four main ways in which culture has been interpreted: as an encompassing group, as social formation, in dialogic terms, and in identity terms.

One way to think about culture is as a kind of all-encompassing whole, which shapes all or most dimensions of our lives. It is perhaps Will Kymlicka’s formulation of a “societal culture” that is most responsible for generating serious reflection on the nature of culture understood in this way. A societal culture

provides its members with meaningful ways of life across the full range of human activities, including social, educational, religious, recreational and economic life, encompassing both public and private spheres. (Kymlicka 1996: 76)

Kymlicka explains that a vibrant societal culture provides a “context for choice”, i.e., it provides the resources that individuals rely on to make sense of their world and the choices it offers. On this account, nation-states are well-described as having a societal culture, as are Indigenous groups and sub-state national minority groups (for example, the Catalans or the Tibetans); immigrant groups which sustain a range of cultural practices and norms even as they integrate into a larger “societal culture” are not.

Kymlicka is not alone in offering an encompassing account of culture. Michael Walzer too offers such an account, proposing that we understand political communities as “communities of character”, in which members are bound by a “world of common meanings” (Walzer 1983: 28). Avishai Margalit and Joseph Raz also describe so-called “encompassing” groups, in which their members

find in them a culture which shapes to a large degree their tastes and opportunities, and which provides an anchor for their self-identification and the safety of effortless secure belonging. (Margalit & Raz 1990: 448)

Avishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal say of an encompassing group that its culture “covers various important aspects of life”, and in so saying, they offer as an example the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish culture:

it defines people’s activities (such as Torah study in Ultra-Orthodox culture), determines occupation (such as circumciser), and defines important relationships (such as marriage). It affects everything people do: cooking, architectural style, common language, literary and artistic traditions, music, customs, dress, festivals, ceremonies…the culture influences its members’ taste, the types of options they have and the meaning of these options, and the characteristics they consider significant in their evaluation of themselves and others. (Margalit & Halbertal 1994: 498)

Whereas Kymlicka emphasizes the freedom that is offered by a robust societal culture, Margalit and Halbertal speak of its role in securing members’ “personality identity” (Margalit & Halbertal 1994: 502) and Walzer of its importance in shaping a “collective consciousness”. Although these scholars justify the protection of a robust culture for many reasons, they agree that what culture does, fundamentally, is offer a background value system that helps members select among options and interpret their value, including for example with respect to certain forms of employment, or education, or family structure and child-rearing. Walzer captures the way in which culture informs how even the most basic of things are understood:

a single necessary good, and one that is always necessary—food, for example—carries different meanings in different places. Bread is the staff of life, the body of Christ, the symbol of the Sabbath, the means of hospitality, and so on. (Walzer 1983: 8)

Much is illuminated by these accounts of culture, including especially why depleted societal cultures may be less able to provide the context for choice that Kymlicka emphasizes, or why one’s “personality identity” may thereby be threatened: if a cultural group’s educational, political, or economic systems are weakened, their capacity to support members to make sense of the world, and choose among options, is likewise weakened. Moreover, this account illustrates the wrong of undermining the cultures of others: if a culture is undermined, the choices available to its members are thereby reduced. We can see this with respect to Indigenous culture in many states: where states have actively attempted to erase Indigenous culture, the result has been severe social dislocation and alienation among Indigenous peoples whose context for choice has been substantially weakened.

However, multiple objections have been launched at this way of understanding culture, most of which are variants on what is termed the “essentialist” objection; notice, though, that the views described above are not believed by their holders to be essentialist. The essentialist objection targets what it sees as an assumption that members of a culture will hold the same set of practices, norms, and values to be important, and in the same measure. But, say critics, this assumption does not hold: in any actual culture, members will be differently committed to its defining practices and norms, and indeed, there will necessarily be disagreement around which of its practices and norms are defining in the first place. The essentialist objection says, roughly, that treating culture as encompassing wrongly does one of the following things: 1) it proclaims that certain features of a culture are at its core and therefore immutable, on pain of dissolving the culture (Eisenberg 2009: 120), and correspondingly that cultures are necessarily bounded and determinate rather than contested and fluid (Moore 2019; Patten 2014: 38); 2) having identified these features as at a culture’s core, it excludes those who believe themselves to be members but do not  conform to, display, or respect these features (Parvin 2008: 318–19); and, 3) it ignores the reality that most people in a liberal society “draw their identity from a multiplicity of roles and communities and memberships at any one time” (Parvin 2008: 321), which can variously have social salience, depending on the context, both independently of, and sometimes in conjunction with, cultural identities (Moore 2019). In summary, a too-encompassing account of what culture is for its members runs the risk of treating the boundaries of a culture as if they are determinate, unshifting, and as though its members display no variance (and perhaps cannot display variance) in their commitment to the culture as a whole and its defining practices.

The alternative accounts of culture that are considered below are all, at least in part, intended to respond to the essentialist challenge; their objective is, in other words, to generate a plausible account of what culture is , and correspondingly what it means to be a member of a particular cultural group, that can be deployed to make sense of legal and political controversies, and ideally adjudicate among them, without succumbing to the essentialist challenge. A caveat: the views of culture treated below should be understood as “ideal types”, characterized so as to understand its key features, how it is differentiated from other views, and why it does not fall victim (in its own estimation) to the essentialist challenge.

One attempt to reconceive culture in a way that responds to the essentialist challenge, but which retains a view of culture as largely encompassing, proposes that cultures are defined by their members’ shared experience of social formation (Patten 2014: 39). On this “social lineage” account of culture, what makes a culture is that its members are subject to a “set of formative conditions that are distinct from the formative conditions that are imposed on others” (Patten 2014: 51). The experience of being subjected to common institutions, understood broadly to include shared educational spaces, languages, media, as well as shared historical traditions and stories, overlapping familial structures, and so on, shapes a sense among cultural group members that they share a distinct way of seeing the world, and that certain assumptions that they possess are shared by, or at least understood by, others. This view emphasizes a culture’s historical trajectory, but does not require that its defining norms, values and practices are unchanging over time. On the contrary,

internal variation is possible because subjection to a common set of formative influences does not imply that people will end up with a homogeneous set of beliefs or values. (Patten 2014: 52)

As a result, cultures are sites in which members can contest and deliberate their meaning with enough shared assumptions about the way the world works that they can recognize each other as engaged in the same project.

Patten writes of the institutions to which cultural group members are subject that they are at least to some degree “isolated from the institutions and practices that work to socialize outsiders” (Patten 2014: 52), and thus serve to distinguish one culture from another. On this view, significant emphasis is placed on who is controlling the levers of the institutions that shape members’ formation: that is, it matters that members are in control of the institutions to which they, themselves, are subject, so that they can plausibly shape their own social experience, and the experience of younger members, in fundamental ways. Where the control over this social formation is denied, a culture’s members are thereby harmed; when it is coercively denied, there is very likely an injustice demanding remedy.

By focusing on the shared experience of subjection to common cultural institutions, this account avoids the accusation that what defines a culture is the stability of its basic norms and values over time: culture is not, on this view, a static entity. Instead, what matters is that cultural group members believe themselves to be members of a cultural group, and that this belief’s foundation is in the experience of common cultural institutions, rather than in the specific practices that are central to the group. These central practices can change fundamentally, without the cultural group itself dissolving. However, this view is subject to criticism by scholars who worry that those who control the levers of formation do not represent the views of all members (Phillips 2018), that instead they are using their relative positions of power to create and enforce cultural norms and practices that do not command (or would not command, without coercion) widespread agreement.

The latter objection—that a so-called culture is the product of some but not all of its members leads some scholars to rearticulate culture in terms of the ways in which it is constructed via dialogue among members and their engagement with each other. The purpose of emphasizing that a culture’s members are the source of its main practices, values and norms, is to emphasize that a culture is not “given” to its members from above, as a fixed and unalterable entity. Rather, members of a culture are, in a fundamental way, its authors. Here is James Tully explaining this: cultures are

continuously contested, imagined and reimagined, transformed and negotiated, both by their members and through their interactions with others. (Tully 1995: 11)

Seyla Benhabib similarly emphasizes the narrative aspect of cultures, noting that insiders

experience their traditions, stories, rituals and symbols, tools, and material living conditions through shared, albeit contested and contestable, narrative accounts. (Benhabib 2002: 5)

That there is contestation among members, and that its main elements are under constant negotiation, does not render a culture any less meaningful for its members. What may seem confusing is the idea that a contestable and constantly shifting culture warrants protection; perhaps protection means artificially halting the natural changes that a culture would undergo, by protecting elements of it at a moment in time. But defenders of this view demand protection in the form of ensuring that the forums in which culture is negotiated, shared and transmitted, are sustained in robust and inclusive ways, and without unwanted interference by forces external to the culture. As with the culture-as-formation account, the emphasis is on the capacity of group members to shape the norms and practices that are central, rather than with the norms and practices themselves.

How does this view respond to the worry about asymmetrical power distribution within a cultural group? Focusing on the ways in which a culture’s central characteristics are determined via negotiation among members is an attempt to be attentive to the power structures that shape whose voice is heard during these negotiations, in minority and majority cultures (Dhamoon 2006). In many, and indeed perhaps in most, cultures, historically the dominant voices have been male, and one impact of that has generally been a gendered view of the how best to organize cultural life, that has reduced the rights of women (and other minorities) in myriad ways, often to their disadvantage as well as against their will. For some, the oppression of less powerful members by those who hold the levers of power generates at least partial skepticism about the value of protecting or accommodating culture in liberal, democratic states, especially in cases where it may seem that “multiculturalism is bad for women” (Okin 1999). On this view, cultural practices that undermine the rights of women (and other minorities) should not be tolerated in liberal democratic states.

The recognition that many cultural practices are disadvantageous to women (and other minorities) does not propel all political theorists to adopt a skeptical attitude towards them in all cases. For some, it is an opportunity to see that cultures can be valued even by those who are putatively oppressed, even as they work from the inside to influence the direction of their culture, towards less oppressive norms and practices. For example, although often sidelined from their centres of power, many women value their cultures in ways that press them not to exit, but rather to engage in processes of reforming inegalitarian practices and norms, from within (Deveaux 2007). This way of thinking about culture and its contents celebrates, and encourages, moves to “democratize” the mechanisms by which a cultural group’s main norms, values and practices are adopted, and defends public cultures that are genuinely open to multiple voices (Lenard 2012).

This narrative or dialogic account of culture thus responds well to the essentialist challenge, by denying that the defining features of a culture must be static and equally valuable to all members of a cultural group. But, it must respond to another challenge, namely, the individuation challenge (Moore 2019). If an account of culture is going to be robust enough to define the entities that should be entitled to additional political and legal consideration in various ways, including with respect to additional rights protections or exemptions from certain legal and political requirements, it must also be able to identify with some specificity the boundaries of a particular, discrete, culture and who legitimately counts as a member for the purposes of respecting the political and legal claims made as a result. But this can be a challenge to accomplish.

To see why, consider Benhabib’s account of the ways in which cultures are observed from the outside, and the way they are experienced from the inside. The observer is largely responsible, she says, for imposing “unity and coherence on cultures”, whereas from the inside, its participants

One effect of understanding the culture in this way is that while many of its members will hold deeply to the central values and take deep satisfaction in participating in the central cultural traditions, many others will dip in and out of its central practices, and pick and choose among its central values and norms. So, just who counts as a member is blurry, and this blurriness may appear to be a problem when membership is said to confer rights and privileges that are not available to non-members. There is an inevitable tension between the need to individuate cultures for political reasons and the boundaries of cultures which are inevitably poorly demarcated. Only context will enable us to resolve the political questions that will thereby emerge.

To answer the challenge of how to identify a culture, and its members, one proposal focuses on the subjective component associated with belonging to a cultural group. Take this example, described by Margaret Moore: although there is deep division in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants, the differences are neither religious (the conflict is not about distinctive interpretations of a religious text, and religious figures are not targeted for violence), nor cultural, since surveys of cultural values of both communities reveal considerable overlap among the values that competing communities hold (Moore 1999: 35). She says, rather, a focus on shared identities among rival groups makes more sense of the conflict.  A largely or partly identity-focused view highlights that one key dimension of culture is the way in which it shapes the identity of cultural group members. As well, such a view highlights that culture is a thing to which many people will have important connections, but which will be defining for them in multiple and distinct ways. An identity-focused view has clear merits: for example, it can explain why individuals remain nominally attached to a culture, even though its centrally defining features shift historically over time, and even if they do not engage with some of its more traditional aspects.

Additionally, an identity-focused view can accommodate identities that are not obviously culturally based, for example, including LGBTQ+ identities (Eisenberg 2009: 20; for a discussion of cultural/identity claims in an LGBTQ+ context, see Ghosh 2018: chapter 4). Indeed, an identity-focused view aims to circumvent the difficulty of identifying what specific material is legitimately cultural material. As noted above, scholars of minority cultures frequently note that there is a wide variety of claims made by a wide variety of groups, and these groups are defined by an assortment of distinct characteristics, including race, ethnicity, religion and sexuality. Say its defenders, a focus on identity rather than culture may be preferable because

the term identity covers more ground in the sense that it can refer to religious, linguistic, gendered, Indigenous and other dimensions of self-understanding. (Eisenberg 2009: 2)

2. Minority Cultural Rights Claims

The four views of culture described above inform the cultural claims that both individuals and groups make against the state. The specific threats that individuals and groups face, and which demand a kind of protection, are distinct, as are the responses that states may have in response to the claims made by individuals and groups (Eisenberg 2009: 20–21). In some cases, claims are made for accommodations for all members of a group qua group; in others, claims are made with respect to particular individuals; and there may well be connection among these. For example, a group may demand language protection policies, or an individual may claim a right to speak her mother tongue in legal proceedings. These rights are related to each other, and may be in some cases derived from one another: one reason an individual has a right to speak her mother tongue in legal proceedings may be because the state has recognized her language as an official language either of the state, or of a sub-state jurisdiction, for example. As a matter of accommodation , it will be important in what follows to notice when claims are made for accommodations that apply to individuals and when they are accommodations that apply to groups; although some philosophers are keen to assess whether cultural rights are best understood as individual or group rights (Casals 2006), the analysis below proceeds by assuming that they can be both (following Levy 2000: 125).

Notice as well that the term “accommodation” is a kind of catch-all to include the wide range of claims an individual or group can make against a state on the basis of culture. Political philosophers have attempted to distinguish among these claims in myriad ways, in order to make sense of them. Many such rights are claimed by immigrant groups (typically) to a state, who require certain accommodations from the state in order to better integrate into that state. In the larger debate around the value of multiculturalism, there is considerable discussion about which sorts of accommodations encourage the integration of, especially, culturally distinct newcomers, and which sorts permit or even encourage their separation from the larger society (e.g., Sniderman & Hagendoorn 2007). Some scholars worry, as well, that a focus on how best to accommodate cultural minority groups travels with ignoring (perhaps wilfully) more important questions of redistribution to those who are less well off (Barry 2001; Fraser 1995). In general, however, multicultural theorists agree that accommodation rights are most defensible when they support the integration of minorities in general, and newcomers in particular, as well as when they are aimed at remedying persistent inequalities between majority and minority groups.

It is worth noting that not everyone readily agrees that “culture” should be treated as a source of distinct legal and political claims, however. For example, Sarah Song points out that so-called “multicultural” claims are often in fact claims to accommodate a wide range of groups, including racial, religious and ethnic groups. Many political theorists of cultural rights appear to believe that there are distinct and recognizable cultural groups, making distinctive cultural claims, whereas in their example-giving they rely on a “wide range of examples involving religion, language, ethnicity, nationality, and race” (Song 2009: 177). Rarely is “culture” alone the basis for a claim against a state. Rather, says Song, so-called cultural claims are in fact often demands for other well-understood and defensible democratic goods. Most such demands are for religious accommodations, well-defended by standard liberal defenses of freedom of conscience; others are demands for reparations for past and ongoing wrong, in the form of affirmative action; others yet are demands for democratic inclusion, often rooted in a morally problematic history of deliberate exclusion. Once the reasons for these “cultural” demands are revealed clearly, we will often find democratically defensible reasons to respect and accommodate them, without needing to resort to relying on culture as a distinct entity, giving rise to a distinct set of rights-claims. The result is that the controversy associated with properly defining cultures and identifying their members can be avoided in many instances. However, this analysis can make it difficult to treat cases where something called “culture” interacts with, or supplements, religious, ethnic, and racial claims.

Take the case of the choice, made by referendum, to ban minarets on mosques in Switzerland. The defensibility of the ban has been the subject of deliberation among political philosophers, and one key point of contention has been whether and to what extent minarets are religiously required by Islam. Many interpreters propose that, since minarets are not obligatory according to Islamic religious requirements, the choice to ban them is regrettable (because of what it says about the public place of Islam in Switzerland), but it does not violate the religious freedom of practising Muslims in Switzerland, and as a result is permissible (Miller 2016). In making this claim, however, what is ignored is the cultural significance of minarets. Without a recognition of the distinct place of culture in certain claims, a full understanding of the minaret case cannot be reached. The same challenge can be seen in deliberations around whether Muslim women should be permitted to wear face coverings in public spaces. Some commentators suggest that, because (according to some interpretations) Islamic texts do not appear to require face coverings, women can be denied the right to engage in this practice, without violating their religious freedom. In making this argument, its defenders notice that the choice to cover faces is in effect a (mere) cultural interpretation of Islamic requirements, as evidenced by the fact that only some communities of practising Muslims engage in the practice. For some scholars, it is essential to separate religious from cultural claims—liberal democratic states take religious claims very seriously as matters of conscience, and have a long history of zealously protecting religious freedom. So, having determined that a claim is not one of religious freedom, such scholars believe they can comfortably deny the request for permission to cover faces in public spaces. However, ignoring the cultural dimensions of the claim—or treating them as though they are obviously of less significance than the underlying religious claim—fails to treat the case properly. In particular, it fails to take seriously that religious obligations necessarily have cultural interpretations, that a full recognition of religious freedom entails recognizing their cultural interpretations, and that specifically cultural legal and political accommodation (of a religious commitment) will thereby be called for.

In what follows, distinct types of cultural claims, made against a state’s major institutions, will be examined. These claims are, as will be seen, sometimes made by individuals and sometimes by groups. Where relevant, the analysis will highlight whether the concept of culture that is being deployed is culture-as-encompassing group, culture-as-social-formation, culture-as-narrative, or culture-as-identity. The analysis will not always be neat. In some cases, there will be multiple defenses of a cultural right, which rely on distinct understandings of culture.

Perhaps the most familiar type of cultural claim made against the state is in the form of request for exemptions from rules and regulations that typically apply to all citizens. Exemption rights respond to the fact that, in liberal democracies, laws and practices are meant—genuinely—to treat all citizens equally, but that there are some which inadvertently impose disadvantage on certain minorities. The worry to be resolved is that minority citizens are unintentionally or accidentally burdened by the normal application of certain laws (Levy 2000: 130), in ways that treat them unfairly, which can be resolved by exemptions from certain laws and normal practices (Quong 2006; Gutmann 2003). The extension of exemption rights then is understood as a

a recognition of that difference, as an attempt not to unduly burden the minority culture or religion en route to the laws’ legitimate goals. (Levy 2000: 130)

For example, some Sikhs request exemption from laws that require wearing motorcycle or construction-site helmets. Although Sikhism is a religion, Sikhs describe the requirement that they wear a turban not quite as a religious requirement, but rather as a symbol of their faith and commitment to Sikh values, as well as an expression of their identity (Sikh Faith FAQs in Other Internet Resources ). Without exemption from these laws, Sikhs would be excluded from taking advantage of opportunities that are meant to be available to all citizens on an equal basis. The same is true of Indigenous communities, who have requested exemptions from generally applicable laws that limit hunting and fishing, explaining that such limits undermine their traditional way of life, or make it hard (or impossible) for them to sustain themselves (Levy 2000: 128). Before Sunday-closing laws were abandoned in Canada and the United States, religious minorities were occasionally granted exemptions from them. In these cases, as described above and without legally provided exemptions, people (usually minorities) must choose between participating in opportunities that should be available to all citizens on an equal basis or to respect their (cultural) understanding of what their religion requires of them.

The request for exemption can be lightly distinguished from the request for rule modification. As indicated, exemption requests are, as they sound, requests that individuals be exempted from certain requirements that are meant to apply to all citizens equally; modification requests ask for changes in existing, majority, practices to accommodate certain other, minority, practices. Sikhs sometimes request exemption from laws that would, otherwise, require them to remove their turban as above; in other cases, they request uniform modifications, so that turbans are treated as one among several available head coverings for those carrying out a specific role. The same is true of uniform modification requests made by Muslim women who cover their faces or heads, and Jewish men who wear yarmulkes, where uniforms have traditionally required an uncovered head or face, or where they have required particular head coverings (as in the Sikh case, they may also be presented as requests for exemptions). Similarly, when observant Muslims request short breaks in their work day to pray at specific times of day, or when Jewish and Muslim students ask for changes in the provision of foods (to accommodate kosher and halal obligations) in school cafeterias, the request is for modification rather than exemption.

In most cases, the early failure of a legitimate law to modify or exempt new practices is unintentional. That is, the laws or practices in place were not adopted intentionally with the purpose of excluding, but were rather adopted under the assumption that they treat the existing population fairly. But widespread immigration has diversified many populations in substantial ways. Immigrants often travel with practices and norms that are, when they arrive, unfamiliar to the states they are joining, and as a result states are asked to modify certain laws, and exempt newcomers from certain others. There may be cases where there are legitimate public reasons to persist in applying certain laws in spite of the disadvantage they generate for newcomers. As well, there are cases where states persist in demanding obedience to laws and practices that clearly disadvantage newcomers attempting to integrate, but where there are no good mitigating factors to justify persisting in the imposing of disadvantage (as when the Danish town of Randers passed a law requiring that pork be served “on an equal footing with other foods” in school cafeterias). In these latter cases, the exclusionary impact of the laws is no longer inadvertent, and they are generally condemnable for perpetuating unnecessary and unjustified exclusion from political, economic and social spaces.

It is not always the case that individuals or groups claiming cultural rights to exemption and modification are immigrants, but that is often the case. Indigenous communities ask for exemptions, as do certain orthodox religious communities. These cases will be discussed below in the section focused on cultural preservation.

Demands for assistance call on the state to preserve the conditions under which various elements of a culture can persist and even thrive, especially minority languages, or to promote and protect cultural associations in various ways, including by offering financial support to artists from within these cultural groups, or by providing resources to permit the production and distribution of ethnic-language media. The justification for assistance rights is the same as for exemption and modification requests: it is to prevent persistent unfairness in access to rights or goods that are meant to be available for all citizens on an equal basis. In the case of assistance rights, cultural minority groups argue that the majority group has access to these goods already, for example to a robust language or media space, and so they request state resources to secure these goods for cultural minorities as well. Here, whereas the justification overlaps with the one offered to defend exemption and modification rights—to generate fairness—the understanding of culture that underpins the demand for these rights is distinct. Typically, exemption and modification claims treat culture-as-identity or dialogue, whereas in the case of assistance claims, the background understanding of culture is often culture-as-social-formation or culture-as-encompassing group; the culture is treated as a whole that requires assistance to protect each of its central parts, in order to do the job of shaping members well.

Self-determination rights are those that confer substantial control to sub-state jurisdictions over a particular territory and in particular the right to run the major institutions on that territory. A self-determining community is one that, because of control over major institutions in a territory, is capable of making and enforcing decisions, without interference by outsiders, in multiple policy spaces (I. M. Young 2004). The justification for self-determination rights is sometimes based on reparation or corrective justice, for example where past state actions have undermined the capacity for a particular cultural group to be self-determining in the first place (Song 2009: 184). In other cases, the demand for self-determination is justified with respect to the importance of protecting the autonomy of a culturally distinct sub-state jurisdiction, that is, its capacity to run its own affairs in ways that are consonant with its particular cultural preferences. The right to self-determination typically relies on an understanding of culture-as-encompassing group, or culture-as-social-formation, suggesting that without significant control over the major institutions that govern the lives of citizens, the relevant group will not be able to be self-determining.

The right to self-determination is typically attributed to states, so its meaning in the context of minority communities operating at the sub-state level is not always clear. Among sub-state jurisdictions, the right is often claimed by Indigenous groups as well as sub-state national groups, like the Basques and the Scottish, whose “societal culture” is manifestly distinct from the majority’s societal culture. The demand for self-determination is a demand to make choices about how children are educated, what language is spoken by the relevant political authorities, and how the public space should be organized. The right claimed has at least three manifestations: 1) the right, at a minimum, to “maintain a comprehensive way of life within the larger society without interference”; 2) the right to recognition by the majority for its way of life, and 3) the right to active backing by the majority to affirmatively support the relevant way of life so that “the culture can flourish” (Margalit & Halbertal 1994: 498). These three interpretations make distinct demands on the state, running from simple non-interference to active participation in sustaining the conditions for self-determination. As a result, the larger state is sometimes tasked with assessing the extent to which it wants to direct its resources to supporting a particular request for self-determination, focused on whether associated claims to cultural preservation are warranted. These will be considered below.

The demand for formal recognition in legal and political documents often travels with the demand for self-determination, and is grounded in a desire to have the majority mark its commitment to the full and equal respect of a cultural minority group (Mcbride 2009). In the Canadian case, the Québécois have long fought for recognition as a nation, with a “distinct society”. Attempts to recognize Québec’s status in the Canadian constitution have repeatedly failed, though a motion that read “That this House recognize that the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada” was approved (with considerable controversy, however) by the House of Commons in 2006. The demand for recognition in this case is a demand for respect as an equal, national, founding partner of the Canadian state.

In the case of Indigenous communities as well, the right to self-determination often includes not only the demand to exercise authority over specific jurisdictions, but also for recognition. They seek recognition, for example, as original inhabitants of a particular state, or as nations in their own right, or as having been the victims of various crimes at the hands of colonizers, including the violation of early treaties between them, as well as demands for state support in sustaining and, in many cases, rebuilding communities that were actively devastated by colonizing/settler governments. In Canada, and other colonizing states, for example, it has become common to read land acknowledgement statements in advance of events (including as part of the “announcements” read at the beginning of a school day), recognizing that events and proceedings are taking place on unceded Indigenous land. Similarly, Australian Indigenous communities have long argued for official recognition in the Australian constitution. From the perspective of Australian Indigenous communities, the hope, and indeed the expectation, is that official recognition will give rise to additional rights and benefits, for example to greater voice and political access to members of the minority. The hope for additional rights and benefits is present in some, but not all, cases of recognition claims (for example, it largely was not present in the case of Québec).

Recognition comes in other forms beyond acknowledgement in legal and political documents, that are intended to confirm respect for minority groups. In some states, the languages of minority groups can be officially recognized as national languages. For example, the Romansh language in Switzerland is officially recognized as a national language, even though its speakers make up less than 1% of the country’s total population. By contrast, Turkish laws that banned the speaking of Kurdish in public spaces were an attempt to deny recognition to a national minority (lifted finally in 1991). As with demands for official recognition in binding constitutional documents, these sorts of recognition demonstrate respect for minority communities as well as a commitment to treating them as full and equal members of the larger state.

Cultural preservation rights are those that groups claim as key to sustaining a cultural group as a cultural group. This right is sometimes described as a right to the “survival of a culturally-specific people” (Gutmann 2003: 75). In some cases, the justification is based on the claim that certain forms of exposure to and engagement with the wider community will result in the erosion of a culture that is valued by its members. In others, the justification is historical, as in where orthodox religious groups, fleeing religious persecution in Europe, agreed to settle new land in Canada and the United States in exchange for religious freedom. In others, the central justification is that cultural diversity is valuable and worth preserving, in and of itself (Parekh 2000). (In some cases, cultural preservation rights are claimed as recompense for past wrong; this claim is considered separately, below.) Demands for cultural preservation are most controversial where they are made by illiberal groups, as will be detailed shortly.

It is worth dwelling here for a moment to notice that there are two ways to interpret cultural preservation: it could mean the preservation of a group as a distinct cultural entity or it could mean the preservation of certain practices and values that are believed, at a moment in time, to be central to the culture. Rights to cultural preservation come in multiple formats, including demands for exemption, parental autonomy, respect for internal conflict resolution mechanisms (in family law, mainly), and control over membership. These rights are justified with respect to preserving culture, and typically rely on an understanding of culture-as-encompassing groups or culture-as-social-formation, just as does the more general right to self-determination with which they often travel.

Many minority illiberal groups ask only for rights of forbearance against the state in which they live (Spinner-Halev 2000). In response, a state may permit an illiberal cultural group to be “left alone”, on the idea that so long as it can persist without state support of any kind, it may do so. A state may be asked to do more, however, to preserve the culture.

For example, a state may be asked to exempt community members from certain requirements that are typically demanded of all citizens, including mandatory schooling and child labour laws. Consider this example: many orthodox Amish communities live a life that is largely segregated from the wider community. They live a religiously structured way of life which dictates whom members marry, how they raise children, how they produce an economy that permits their way of life to continue. In most cases, they demand neither recognition nor additional financial support in order to protect their communities’ way of life. They had previously demanded only non-interference, for the most part. But, in the 1970s, some American Amish communities demanded, and were granted, the right to withdraw their children from mandatory education at the age of 14, arguing that where their children were required to remain in school until the age of 16, they were more likely to exit the community. This high rate of exit would, they argued, result in the failure of the Amish way of life to persist over time (Burtt 1994). The right of exemption the Amish claimed was, in this case, derivative of the larger demand for cultural self-preservation; without the exemption, they said, the culture itself might fade away.

A state may also be asked to respect certain domains of legal authority, perhaps most frequently in the domain of family law. Minority communities often regulate the conditions of marriage, and custody of children, as well as divorce, and request the legal authority to do so. Respecting the legal authority of minority communities to exercise jurisdiction in family law is the kind of request that often troubles critics of cultural minority rights, since it may entrench disadvantages to women, for example in divorce settlements or custody agreements (Shachar 2001; Bakht 2007). In general, then, states that acknowledge the legal authority of minority communities in the space of family law also demand that those who are participating in these adjudication proceedings do so willingly; majority states therefore often retain permission for themselves to interefere in these proceedings, in support of those who may be inadequately protected. The state must attempt a balance here, between offering its support to the most vulnerable members of a minority group (for example to ensure that their constitutional rights are protected) and interference of a kind that is inattentive to the rightful claims of minority groups to persist over time, in part by exercising its authority in key spaces.

Another common form of cultural preservation rights are exclusion rights, that is, the right of a cultural group to refuse to admit others to territory or membership, because of a worry that more generous terms of admission threatens to undermine it by, in effect, diluting it. Just as states have the putative right to control their borders (discussed below in section 3), and who can claim membership rights even after admission, so do some sub-state jurisdictions claim this double right of exclusion, citing the importance of cultural preservation. Indigenous communities have sometimes claimed the right to exclude non-Indigenous individuals from settling on their territories or the right to exclude others (for example non-Indigenous spouses of Indigenous persons) from certain membership benefits, including the right to vote (or otherwise have a say) for those who will govern. State courts have been asked to adjudicate the rightful authority of Indigenous communities to make these determinations (see Song 2005).

The cultural preservation rights described above pose a difficult challenge, connected to the critiques of treating culture as an encompassing group: any claim for cultural preservation, say some critics, translates in effect into problematic claims of control over members, which, moreover, are typically most restrictive for women and LGBTQ+ members of a cultural group. This is a challenge posed most forcefully where rights of cultural preservation are demanded by so-called illiberal groups like the Amish, and where they are (in the eyes of critics) imposed on children against their will. Illiberal groups are those which deny certain key liberal values, like autonomy and equality; in many cases, these communities are supported by educational systems that discourage autonomous choice-making, by avoiding the teaching of skills and capacities that typically enable it, and by enforcing hierarchical rules that elevate some members over others in ways that egalitarians find uncomfortable. The worry is that the community wants not only to preserve itself as a distinct cultural group, but also that it wants to protect a kind of cultural homogeneity that leaves no room for contestation or dissent over its central values and practices. These latter hierarchical rules often render women vulnerable to more powerful men, who may demand various forms of sexual subservience to them, who relegate them to the home to care for children, and who impose rigid codes of behaviour on them, for which harsh penalties are meted out in cases of violation. These kinds of so-called “cultural practices” are, for some critics, such that they render any form of state support in protecting minority cultural groups largely indefensible (Okin 1999). 

A worry that runs through objections to these many cultural preservation rights is that women may not be willing participants in these cultures, and therefore that respecting cultural preservation rights consigns women to lives they would not choose, do not want, and cannot escape. But for many it is a mistake to assume that women members are such only under duress, since many will deeply value the community itself and respect the norms and values that it seeks to protect, even if they reject certain among them. In these cases, and where political theorists consider them, there is an attempt to move from treating culture in encompassing terms towards treating it in dialogic and narrative terms. Cultures, even oppressive (to liberals) minority cultures, are subject to change, and perhaps the best source of change is deeply committed members who willingly endorse key values but reject others, including those that do not respect the equal rights of women. Monique Deveaux’s account of female adult participants in customary marriages in South Africa, who accept some elements of their culture, but who aim to gain a voice at the table to shift others, treats culture in dialogic terms (Deveaux 2007). Here, the key motivating thought is that cultures can and do shift over time, in response to how its members engage in it, and what matters is not the change itself, but who or what is its source. On this view, the objective of cultural preservation rights is not to preserve culture per se , a challenge that would prove impossible in any case, but rather the right to protect the ability of group members to shape their culture and to protect it against unwelcome sources of change.

Others argue that so long as women, and any others subject to rigid cultural demands, possess a right (or the capacity) to exit the community, their choice to remain should be treated as such (Kukathas 1992). For those who hold this view, efforts to render the right to exit genuinely exercisable are tremendously important (Kukathas 2012; Holzleithner 2012). In so doing, a state must make a choice about the resources it provides to those members who may desire to exit, but who do not have the means to establish themselves in the larger society. In some orthodox religious communities, property is owned in common and individual members do not have any personal property or resources; as a result, exiters have nothing on which to rely while they establish their new lives. In others, members are poorly educated, and unfamiliar with life outside of their own communities, and so exit without the capacity to sustain themselves in the larger society.  So, receiving states can offer support to exiters in various ways, for example by providing shelters to exiting women (and men), in which education is provided so that they may eventually attain self-sufficiency as a member of mainstream society. The choice to support exiters may seem to undermine a culture’s capacity for self-preservation. But supporting exiters is not well-understood as denying cultural preservation rights; rather, the choice to do so stems from a state’s commitment to protecting the rights of all of its members, including the most vulnerable, as best as it can do.

The right to cultural preservation described above should be distinguished from the slightly different right against coerced cultural loss, which focuses on preservation in cases where the potential loss is the result of coercion by outside forces against which a cultural group is relatively powerless. Of course, cultural change  is inevitable in some form, as highlighted above, and especially if one holds a culture-as-dialogue view, cultures are in fact never static. Rather, practices, norms, and values that are defining of a culture at one time may cease to be centrally defining of that culture, for a whole range of reasons including economic, environmental, and political. So, in fact, some amount of cultural loss is inevitable, and moreover, it is not always to be regretted. Sometimes, it is a normal response to external factors that are beyond a culture’s control, and sometimes it is welcome because the changes result in the better protection of human rights or more inclusive cultural traditions and practices. A cultural group may choose to shift their central modes of production in response to changing environmental factors, for example. So, as Samuel Scheffler has argued, the strong preservationist view of culture—that cultures should be insulated from all forms of change—must be rejected (Scheffler 2007).

Yet, especially minority cultures may sometimes have a reasonable claim that they are not able to protect themselves against unwanted cultural change, or that they are not able to control the pace of change. They may thereby be entitled to forms of state support, to help them create the conditions under which they can resist unwanted cultural change.  When linguistic minorities request state support to persist in educating children in a minority language, for example, sometimes the justification is in the name of protecting against the erosion of the language in the face of pressure to adopt or become fluent in the majority language.

In other cases, majorities are actively focused on undermining minority cultures, often over years and even decades. Colonial states have pursued genocidal policies against Indigenous communities for example, with the expressed purpose of undermining their capacity to survive as distinct peoples. In assessing cases of cultural loss, then, a key factor is whether the shift is forced upon minority groups, not necessarily by changing environmental or economic conditions, but by agents who intend to undermine the culture, by actively disvaluing it and thereby acting so as to undermine the conditions for its robust continuity. External, malicious, factors that engender cultural change that would not otherwise be expected, make the change not only regrettable, but generate a case for reparations, for example with respect to Indigenous communities, where there is “evidence of a history of dispossession, discrimination, or subordination” (Phillips 2018: 97).

In legal environments, wrong-doers sometimes deploy a cultural defense, explaining that minority cultural norms and values, which are in tension with those of the majority, are causally relevant in explaining why they committed a wrong. A cultural defense has, thereby, sometimes been treated as a relevant mitigating factor in assigning punishment. The right to offer a cultural defense is typically justified with respect to the importance of recognizing that minorities do not always operate according to the same values and norms that are represented in the majority’s legal system, and that these differences are entitled to some consideration in legal spaces. Earlier court decisions accepted explanations that, for example, men who murdered their unfaithful partners were moved to do so by a combination of shame and rage associated with cultural norms. For example, men who claimed that “gang rape” (known culturally as marriage by capture) was mandated by Hmong culture as a way to secure a wife, in which women were not only complicit but in fact willing partners, are no longer understood to have a defense in legal suits accusing them of rape (Song 2005). However, the power of “cultural” explanations in mainstream legal spaces has decreased over time, as states have come to see how many of these defenses are in fact cover for patriarchal, misogynist attitudes that persist, both in some minority communities and in the wider community.

“Cultural” defenses of crime often amount to treating culture as though it were a homogeneous whole, and as though perpetrators of crime rather than its victims have a lock on its interpretation. But “respect for culture cannot mean deference to whatever the established authorities of culture deem right” (Gutmann 2003: 46). Additionally, a generic imperative to “respect culture” in legal spaces can ignore the differences among types of cultural expectations, which can range from permissible acts, to encouraged acts and required acts, only some of which may justifiably be treated as legally relevant (Vitikainen 2015: 162). As well, it can permit and encourage the representation of minority (especially non-western) cultures as stereotypes, and “mobilizes culture in ways that encourage absurdly large generalizations about people from particular cultural groups” (Phillips 2007: 81 & 99). The danger represented by an uncritical acceptance of the cultural defense is in a treatment of culture as so encompassing that it treats its members as incapable of autonomous decision-making. But, say critics of the cultural defense, this is a mistake—along with many other factors, culture can be part of an explanation for engaging in wrong-doing, but should “never be mistaken for the whole truth” (Phillips 2007: 98).

A final cultural right that is claimed by some is the right to control cultural artifacts or expressions, or the use of cultural content in general (Matthes 2016). This is the right that is at issue in recent controversies focused on cultural appropriation, defined as the use, by a non-member, of “something of cultural value, usually a symbol or a practice, to others” (Lenard & Balint 2020). Familiar examples of actions that have been accused of engaging in cultural appropriation include the wearing of dreadlocks by whites; the donning of Indigenous clothing as Halloween costumes; the use of turbans in high fashion; the teaching of yoga by instructors who do not have South Asian backgrounds. In all of these cases, a non-member is accused of “appropriating” a particular cultural practice or symbol that is not their own. On this view, cultures have exclusive rights to use their cultural “products” as they see fit, often because that practice is understood to be central to their identity. This perspective is controversial, and often mocked, by those who observe that history just is the mingling and sharing of cultural practices and symbols, including in the spaces of cuisine, the arts, dress and spiritual practices; their mocking treats the rights claim as relying on an understanding of culture that is unchanging and immutable over time, which is historically inaccurate and, furthermore, undesirable. Correspondingly, key cultural artifacts are best understood as belonging to “humanity”: “it isn’t peoples who experience and value art: it’s men and women” (Appiah 2009).

The right claimed—to full or exclusive use of defining cultural practices or symbols—is perhaps not best enforced by the state, though states can and do engage in practices that are attentive to the harms allegedly caused by cultural appropriation. For example, centralized support for the arts, in the form of grants to produce artistic endeavours, can be sensitive to who is asking for support to produce what , and can direct funding towards artists from a particular tradition who aim to produce culturally specific products, and correspondingly refuse (unless very good reason is offered) to support endeavours by cultural outsiders to produce “insider” art (Rowell 1995; J. O. Young 2008). The right claimed is relatively stronger where a particular cultural community is the victim of a power imbalance, where the cultural community has expressly requested that a particular practice or symbol be “left alone” by a majority community, and where members of the majority community are  profiting on the basis of its use of the particular symbol or practice (Lenard & Balint 2020). As in other cases, the right claimed by a cultural group is strongest where there are persistent inequalities between the minority claimant and the majority group.

3. Majority Cultural Rights Claims

Section 2 considered the cultural rights claims that are, usually, made by minority groups. Majority groups make cultural claims as well, in particular with respect to excluding others from their territory as well as with respect to what can be demanded of those who are admitted.

One domain in which majority communities claim a cultural right is in the space of immigration. For some, the right of states to shape their culture can legitimately serve as a reason to exclude others, in general and sometimes specific others. This view is often attributed to Michael Walzer, who argues that the right of a state to control its borders is intimately connected to its capacity to

defend the liberty and welfare, the politics and culture of a group of people committed to one another and to their common life. (Walzer 1983: 39, emphasis added)

The right of a state to control its culture is therefore an essential one to protect its “collective consciousness”, as noted in Section 1.

This claim has encountered pushback from many scholars, for multiple reasons. One reason is that the claim that a state may exclude would-be migrants for cultural reasons has too often been, in fact, an attempt to enact discriminatory legislation aimed at excluding migrants whose beliefs and practices are said to be incompatible with, or even undermining of, the values and norms that define the majority’s culture. Exclusion based on so-called cultural reasons has often been a claim that a state prefers to remain culturally, religiously, ethnically, and racially homogeneous. Historically, states engaged explicitly in such discriminatory practices, which have now been repudiated, including for example variants of Asian Exclusion Acts which were in operation in North America in the early 1900s.

The same accusation is also merited in several recent cases, such as the implementation of the so-called Muslim Ban in the United States, or with respect to proposals during the height of the crisis in Syria (2015) in some countries to prioritize Christian over Muslim refugees (Song 2018). Among political theorists of immigration, there is however widespread repudiation of discriminatory immigration policies, both explicitly and implicitly, even among those who defend the general right of states to exclude would-be migrants and refugees, for many reasons including to preserve culture (Miller 2005).

A second source of pushback stems from a more general skepticism that a majority’s culture, even if genuinely valuable to its members, should be treated as sufficiently so to warrant excluding migrants, especially necessitous ones (the language of necessity is borrowed from Song 2018). Even if it is conceded that culture is valuable to a majority, many scholars believe that its protection cannot warrant excluding those in severe need of safety or subsistence.

Yet, say those who defend the view that culture can, at least in some cases, serve to exclude migrants, there is a case to be made for treating the state as possessing the right to cultural continuity (Miller 2005). This claimed right looks very much like the right to cultural preservation (or against cultural loss) described above, and it highlights not so much the sentimental dimensions of a majority’s attachment to its culture, but rather its pragmatic interpretation. On this view, any particular state is defined by a “shared public culture” which, because shared, underpins the trust that democratic states rely on to pursue political and social objectives in common. No particular value that makes up a shared public culture is valuable in and of itself. Rather, it is the combination of a set of values, norms, and practices, that produces “our” culture that is valuable, and in its presence, trust is higher; as a result, so is the willingness to cooperate to support policies that require some sacrifice, including for example, commitment to redistributive social policies that are especially to the benefit of those who are least well-off (e.g., see the essays in Gustavsson & Miller 2019). So, according to those who defend these views, a state that seeks to exert control over admission citing “cultural” reasons is neither racist nor discriminatory, but rather is seeking controlled admission (rather than closed borders) so that newcomers can, over a sufficient time period, come to adopt enough of the set of defining values, norms, and practices, to be able to warrant and extend the trust that underpins the policies that instantiate these objectively valued goods.

States that defend the right of cultural continuity at the level of admission to a state typically also deploy the right to adopt and enforce “integration” policies that encourage newcomers to adopt majority norms and values, arguing that the faster such adoption happens, the more rapid admission itself can be. Integration policies ask newcomers to adopt the norms and practices of the majority community, whereas accommodation policies ask the majority to accommodate practices that are distinct from those that define the majority’s culture. On this conventional multicultural view, the process by which migrants are admitted to the territory, and then to membership, is a “two-way” street, requiring that both newcomers and the host state adapt in response to each other (Kymlicka 1998).

Is the demand that newcomers integrate culturally reasonable? Is it reasonable, that is, to ask immigrants to adopt the norms, values, and practices that are central to the culture they have joined (l will leave aside the question of economic and political integration, here)? Notice that in the political and sociological literature in immigration incorporation, integration (culturally) is typically distinguished from assimilation, where the former focuses on welcoming newcomers with the distinct sets of norms and values that travel with them (and so accommodating them where possible), and the latter demands that immigrants adopt as fully as possible the set of norms and values that are central to the host society (Brubaker 2001; see also Modood 2007). In the political theory literature on multiculturalism, however, it is widely accepted that a demand for full assimilation is normatively problematic (it requires too much of immigrants, to abandon their histories and identities, as part of joining a new community), but that some form of encouragement to integrate is permissible.

Whether the integration demands are permissible depends on at least two connected things, however: first, on the content of the shared public culture and, second, on the accessibility of the venues in which the content of this public culture is deliberated. The space in which a culture is deliberated is amorphous as well as expansive. The source of key norms, practices, and values is multi-fold: some are historical, some are deliberately adopted through political processes, some are accidentally adopted in response to contingent circumstances. The demand that newcomers integrate, in the sense of adopt the norms and practices of the majority culture to at least a reasonable extent is more defensible in cases where access to spaces in which they are deliberated is public and therefore open to many voices. The precise meaning of “accessibility” to spaces that are not clearly defined, and entry to which is not monitored or policed in any formal way, is challenging to pin down. But the key point is that to the extent that cultures welcome and take seriously new voices—in public media, in political spaces, and so on—they can be described as publicly accessible. So, there is a connection between the legitimacy of demanding adherence to majority culture norms and practices, as part of the process of integration, and the genuine access that newcomers have to the spaces in which they are deliberated.

In considering the second question, with respect to the content of a majority’s shared public culture, I borrow from the literature in the political theory of nationalism (though I do not believe that the language of nationalism itself is essential to appreciate its relevance to the discussion here). A culture can be defined by features that are more or less inclusive. Where cultures are defined by characteristics that are typically used to describe ethnic nations, including shared history, religion, ethnicity/race, newcomers are less easily able to join them and be recognized as full members. Where cultures are defined by characteristics that are typically used, on the other hand, to describe civic nations, including shared commitment to political institutions and, usually, a commitment to liberal democratic principles, then they are more welcoming for newcomers. In the language adopted earlier in this entry, cultures that are defined by exclusive features are more likely to treat culture as encompassing, whereas cultures that adopt inclusive features, and emphasize accessibility to the forums in which its content is deliberated, treat culture in dialogic or identity terms. This need not be the case, though, since those who treat culture in dialogic terms may nevertheless believe that key elements of history or religion are central to it (though they are open to deliberation about the appropriateness of these elements as central) and similarly identities can be formulated on the basis of exclusionary features.

Another way to define inclusivity focuses attention on the extent to which a culture’s main norms, practices, and values can be adopted by newcomers without their giving up something they value (Lenard 2019). Key here is to define the permissible contours of an inclusive culture that, at the same time, can serve to distinguish it from others in ways that resolve what philosophers have called the “particularity” problem. If cultures are defined only by commitment to liberal democratic principles and the institutions that instantiate them, then a person will necessarily be committed to any state that is so defined. But this conclusion does not make sense of the reality that many citizens are attached to their state’s interpretation of these values—fundamental, abstract, liberal democratic principles are adopted, respected, and instantiated, in other words, in a culturally specific way. It is important, then, to delineate the boundary of permissible cultural content, which can include recognition of key historical moments, or political conversations, or cultural icons. No state can demand of newcomers that their emotional commitment be to their new state; but it can reasonably impart information about learnable key cultural markers, encourage newcomers to adopt the associated practices and norms, and hope that over time their emotional identification shifts to the host state, at least partially (Carens 2005). Under the condition that the public cultural content of a host state is reasonably accessible, and that the forums in which it is deliberated are likewise reasonably accessible, then the host state can permissibly encourage the integration of newcomers. This right is perhaps best understood as derivative of the right to cultural continuity that states claim in relation to immigration, which can permissibly be claimed if and only if the accessibility conditions described above are met.

Not all scholars agree on this point, of course, and some reject entirely the suggestion that newcomers can be asked to make accommodations to the culture of the state that they have joined. Those who adopt variants on this view treat the majority’s culture as nearly always homogeneous and oppressive in ways that are disrespectful of newcomers, and treat the demand for integration along at least some dimensions as “cleaned up” variations on the discriminatory and racist immigration policies of the past (Abizadeh 2002). This is a real worry. When the Netherlands demanded that potential migrants from majority Muslim countries watch a video and pass a test merely to gain entry to its territory—a video that showed gay men kissing and a topless woman—it was widely excoriated for its discriminatory intent, rather than (as was claimed) an attempt to ensure that migrants could adopt the liberal values that supposedly characterized the country’s culture. More generally, the mechanisms of encouraging the learning and adoption of the majority culture’s values, in addition to its actual content as delineated above, as well as the consequences for failure to do so, must be scrutinized for their reasonableness. This assessment is a tricky business, certainly, made trickier because in many (if not most) immigration situations, the potential newcomer is in a situation of vulnerability in relation to the host state: their interest in gaining entry is very strong and so in many cases, they will accept heavy-handed attempts to coerce their integration without complaint.

Both minority groups (many of which are immigrant groups) and majority groups claim that “culture” is important and deserving of accommodation in multiple ways. This entry began with an examination of the multiple ways in which culture has been understood, to unpack the ways in which it is deployed when specific cultural rights are claimed. It is important to notice that these cultural claims, on both sides, are often made in relation to each other: a minority group demands a particular cultural right and the majority responds by claiming a different cultural right. In many cases, the choice to respect or ignore claimed cultural rights is framed in terms of the impact that doing so will have on the culture of the majority, for example, by stating that a particular practice for which accommodation is requested is incompatible with the majority culture in general, or sometimes more specifically with a particular practice or norm that is believed to be particularly important. The latter claim was made, for example, in France, during “l’affaire du foulard”—the right to cover one’s head as a manifestation of Islamic (or Jewish) religious commitment was denied for the way in which it compromised the French’s commitment to laicity (Laborde 2008; Benhabib 2004).

This entry has attempted to offer the resources that are essential to adjudicating these conflicts, in ways that take seriously both those who demand cultural rights and those who resist respecting them. Hopefully, future political theory can make use of this taxonomy to identify satisfactory conclusions to these conflicts when they arise.

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• Bakht, Natasha, 2007, “Religious Arbitration in Canada: Protecting Women by Protecting Them from Religion”, Canadian Journal of Women and the Law , 19(1): 119–144.
• Barry, Brian, 2001, Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Benhabib, Seyla, 2002, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 2004, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens , Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511790799
• Borchers, Dagmar and Annamari Vitikainen (eds.), 2012, On Exit: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Right of Exit in Liberal Multicultural Societies , Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. doi:10.1515/9783110270860
• Brubaker, Rogers, 2001, “The Return of Assimilation? Changing Perspectives on Immigration and Its Sequels in France, Germany, and the United States”, Ethnic and Racial Studies , 24(4): 531–548. doi:10.1080/01419870120049770
• Burtt, Shelley, 1994, “Religious Parents, Secular Schools: A Liberal Defense of an Illiberal Education”, The Review of Politics , 56(1): 51–70. doi:10.1017/S0034670500049500
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• Casals, Neus Torbisco, 2006, Group Rights as Human Rights: A Liberal Approach to Multiculturalism , (Law and Philosophy Library 75), Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. doi:10.1007/1-4020-4209-4
• Deveaux, Monique, 2007, Gender and Justice in Multicultural Liberal States , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199289790.001.0001
• Dhamoon, Rita, 2006, “Shifting From ‘Culture’ to ‘the Cultural’: Critical Theorizing of Identity/Difference Politics”, Constellations , 13(3): 354–373. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8675.2006.00406.x
• Eisenberg, Avigail, 2009, Reasons of Identity: A Normative Guide to the Political and Legal Assessment of Identity Claims , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199291304.001.0001
• Fraser, Nancy, 1995, “Recognition or Redistribution? A Critical Reading of Iris Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference ”, Journal of Political Philosophy , 3(2): 166–180. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9760.1995.tb00033.x
• Ghosh, Cyril, 2018, De-Moralizing Gay Rights: Some Queer Remarks on LGBT+ Rights Politics in the US , Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-78840-1
• Gustavsson, Gina and David Miller (eds.), 2019, Liberal Nationalism and Its Critics: Normative and Empirical Questions , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198842545.001.0001
• Gutmann, Amy, 2003, Identity in Democracy , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Holzleithner, Elisabeth, 2012, “Interrogating Exit in Multiculturalist Theorizing: Conditions and Limitations”, in Borchers and Vitikainen 2012: 13–33. doi:10.1515/9783110270860.13
• Kukathas, Chandran, 1992, “Are There Any Cultural Rights?”, Political Theory , 20(1): 105–139. doi:10.1177/0090591792020001006
• –––, 2012, “Exit, Freedom and Gender”, in Borchers and Vitikainen 2012: 34–56. doi:10.1515/9783110270860.34
• Kymlicka, Will, 1996, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 1998, Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ethnocultural Relations in Canada , Toronto: Oxford University Press.
• Laborde, Cecile, 2008, Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199550210.001.0001
• Lenard, Patti Tamara.,2012, Trust, Democracy and Multicultural Challenges , University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University State Press.
• –––, 2019, “Inclusive Identities: The Foundation of Trust in Multicultural Communities”, in Gustavsson and Miller 2019: 155–171. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198842545.003.0009
• Lenard, Patti Tamara and Peter Balint, 2020, “What Is (the Wrong of) Cultural Appropriation?”, Ethnicities , 20(2): 331–52. doi:10.1177/1468796819866498
• Levy, Jacob, 2000, Multiculturalism of Fear , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0198297122.001.0001
• Margalit, Avishai and Moshe Halbertal, 1994, “Liberalism and the Right to Culture”, Social Research: An International Quarterly , 61(3): 491–510.
• Margalit, Avishai and Joseph Raz, 1990, “National Self-Determination”:, Journal of Philosophy , 87(9): 439–461. doi:10.2307/2026968
• Matthes, Erich Hatala, 2016, “Cultural Appropriation Without Cultural Essentialism?”, Social Theory and Practice , 42(2): 343–366. doi:10.5840/soctheorpract201642219
• Mcbride, Cillian, 2009, “Demanding Recognition: Equality, Respect, and Esteem”,  European Journal of Political Theory , 8(1): 96–108. doi:10.1177/1474885108096962
• Miller, David, 2005, “Immigration: The Case for Limits”, in Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics , Andrew Cohen and Christopher Wellman (eds), Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 193–207.
• –––, 2016, “Majorities and Minarets: Religious Freedom and Public Space”, British Journal of Political Science , 46(2): 437–456. doi:10.1017/S0007123414000131
• Modood, Tariq, 2007, Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea , Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
• Moore, Margaret, 1999, “Beyond the Cultural Argument for Liberal Nationalism”, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy , 2(3): 26–47. doi:10.1080/13698239908403282
• –––, 2019, “Liberal Nationalism and the Challenge of Essentialism”, in Gustavsson and Miller 2019: 188–202. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198842545.003.0011
• Okin, Susan Moller, 1999, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Parekh, Bhikhu, 2000, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory , Basingstoke: Macmillan Press.
• Parvin, Phil, 2008, “What’s Special About Culture? Identity, Autonomy, and Public Reason”, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy , 11(3): 315–233. doi:10.1080/13698230802276447
• Patten, Alan, 2014, Equal Recognition: The Moral Foundations of Minority Rights , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Phillips, Anne, 2007, Multiculturalism without Culture , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 2010, “What’s Wrong with Essentialism?”, Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory , 11(1): 47–60. doi:10.1080/1600910X.2010.9672755
• –––, 2018, “What Makes Culture Special?”, Political Theory , 46(1): 92–98. doi:10.1177/0090591717696023
• Quong, Jonathan, 2006, “Cultural Exemptions, Expensive Tastes, and Equal Opportunities”, Journal of Applied Philosophy , 23(1): 53–71. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5930.2006.00320.x
• Rowell, John, 1995, “The Politics of Cultural Appropriation”, Journal of Value Inquiry , 29(1): 137–142.
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• –––, 2009, “The Subject of Multiculturalism: Culture, Religion, Language, Ethnicity, Nationality, and Race?”, in New Waves in Political Philosophy , Boudewijn de Bruin and Christopher F. Zurn (eds.), London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 177–197. doi:10.1057/9780230234994_10
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• Spinner-Halev, Jeff, 2000, Surviving Diversity: Religion and Democratic Citizenship , Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Tully, James, 1995, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in the Age of Diversity , Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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• Young, James O., 2008, Cultural Appropriation and the Arts , Malden, MA: Blackwell.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Sikh Faith FAQs , World Sikh Organization of Canada.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Matthias Hoesch, Margaret Moore, and Stéfanie Morris for comments on an earlier draft of this entry.

Copyright © 2020 by Patti Tamara Lenard < Patti . Lenard @ uottawa . ca >

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"Culture is a meaning-making practice" - Heather Paxson in "Said and Done" | 2022 | News

"culture is a meaning-making practice" - heather paxson in "said and done".

Series: Points of View | On Culture

Heather Paxson | SHASS "Said and Done" Magazine | photo by Allegra Boverman

April 15, 2022

POINTS OF VIEW | ON CULTURE Culture is a meaning-making practice Heather Paxson, William Kenan Jr. Professor of Anthropology

  "As a meaning-making practice, 'culture' is viewed by anthropologists as a way of making sense of, adapting to — and, sometimes, resisting — economic, political, and other structural conditions."

In this ongoing series sponsored by the Office of Tracie Jones, MIT SHASS Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, faculty and staff in MIT's humanistic fields share ideas, stories, and research-based commentary on the nature of culture and their experiences as part of the MIT community. We are honored that this inaugural commentary for the series is from Heather Paxson, the William Kenan Professor of Anthropology, head of MIT Anthropology, and a MacVicar Faculty Fellow. In this commentary, Professor Paxson provides some foundational thinking about how her field of anthropology — the scientific study of humanity including societies, behavior, cultural meaning, norms, and values — understands the concept of culture.   

Anthropology is the study of human cultural diversity. Anthropologists originated the modern understanding of “culture,” as describing a shared field of beliefs, values, and habituated ways of behaving that give meaning to daily life. What does anthropology have to say about “MIT culture”?

I often hear colleagues and students refer to “MIT culture” as if it were monolithic, a static obstacle to progressive change, or from the opposite perspective, as a precious inheritance continually under threat from top-down "reform." In fact, as a meaning-making practice, culture is viewed by anthropologists as a way of making sense of, adapting to — and, sometimes, resisting — economic, political, and other structural conditions.

In an influential 1991 essay, “Writing against Culture,” anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod cautioned against common uses of the culture concept that “freeze difference,” either by typifying groups (overemphasizing difference between “cultures”) or by homogenizing groups (overemphasizing coherence within them). “Cultures,” she reminds us, have long been in motion, accommodating global circulations of ideas, goods, media, and people. Culture is inherently dynamic.  

"In an influential 1991 essay titled 'Writing against Culture,' anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod cautioned against uses of the culture concept that 'freeze difference,' either by typifying groups ( overemphasizing difference between 'cultures' ) or by homogenizing groups ( overemphasizing coherence within them ) ."  

Frozen perceptions — of a dynamic reality Inspired by Abu-Lughod’s writing, Course 21A major, Caroline (Rubin) Charrow, ’08, wrote a brilliant essay, which she entitled “Writing against MIT Culture.” I still assign it in the class I co-teach on “The Meaning of Life.” Caroline observed that outsiders’ perceptions of “MIT culture” — typified by the student “nerd” (popularly imagined as white, male, socially awkward) — were “frozen” long before “demographic shifts in the MIT population took place.”

Although based on obsolete pictures of reality, such “outsider” frames of reference continue to influence how members of MIT’s community talk and act; as Caroline noted in 2008, “women and minority students are frequently put in the position of being seen as outsiders in their own home — they are MIT students, but may not be regarded as representative of ' MIT culture.'"

The same could be said of other constituencies. Caroline mentioned humanities scholars and students and faculty who are religious. Meanwhile, she continued, efforts by the Admissions Office to “unfreeze” the “lone nerd” stereotype by highlighting the collective playfulness of such cherished “MIT traditions” as hacking or the piano drop tend to “overemphasize coherence” and erase MIT’s heterogeneity.

“New freshmen [sic],” she added, “are often disappointed to realize how much time MIT students spend on mundane, ‘culture-free’ activities like doing homework and studying, as those tasks are not listed on the ‘Student Life and Culture’ page” of the Admissions Office website — even though “p-setting” may be one of the most broadly shared and distinctive features of MIT student life. Such narrow understandings of “MIT culture” reflect and reinforce broader value investments at MIT, which, Caroline writes, “take for granted that science and engineering are context-free and completely objective, and therefore good.”  

"MIT encompasses an international milieu that includes people from all over the world, representing multiple generations, faiths, disciplines, experiences of racialization and dispossession, and cultural backgrounds."

Culture is multifaceted and continuously changing I often thought back to Caroline’s essay during Fall 2019, when anguished outcry erupted across campus over the revelation that a handful of our faculty colleagues had accepted recurring financial donations from, and even invited to campus, a convicted, level-three sex offender. In a letter that I helped organize with a number of tenured women colleagues, we wrote: “The fact that this situation was even thinkable at MIT is profoundly disturbing, and is symptomatic of broader, more structural problems, involving gender and race, in MIT’s culture. It is time for fundamental change.” In underscoring structural problems within “MIT’s culture” (rather than blaming “MIT culture” per se), the letter acknowledged that culture is neither homogeneous nor neutral. The personal cultivation of habits, dispositions, and social relationships that we recognize as being “cultural” often also shore up social hierarchies and power dynamics. (At MIT, for example, our invaluable staff too often have reason to feel that their experiences and are overlooked by others.) But culture’s entanglement with power is no reason to throw up one’s hands in passive resignation. The "culture” at MIT, like any culture, is both multifaceted and continuously changing. Some changes have been hard fought through sustained advocacy and concerted effort. The Institute community's responses to the donations from a felon led, for example, to a values-driven tightening of the review process for donations and outside collaborations, and it arguably helped spur the establishment of an ad hoc committee to strengthen graduate mentoring and advising.  

What is the best way to cultivate greater community on our campus? "Rather than debate what threatens or counts as features of a fixed 'MIT culture' — which would inevitably uphold some individuals and experiences as 'typical' in ways that obscure or sideline others — we might instead ask what it means to live and work at MIT."

We are not a bubble Over the years, other changes have crept in, almost imperceptibly, as an effect of broader, historically conditioned cultural shifts. It turns out that MIT is not a bubble. It is subject to government laws and regulations, as we’ve experienced with masking requirements and other Covid-19 public health precautions. It is embedded in the nation’s fraught politics, having to do, for example, with immigration law or legal changes to Title IX procedures. And it encompasses an international milieu that includes people from all over the world, representing multiple generations, faiths, disciplines, experiences of racialization and dispossession, and, yes, cultural backgrounds.

How, then, can we work most effectively to improve the conditions of collegiality and community on our campus? Habituated, “cultural” behavior is learned through processes of emulation and elicitation. By modeling through our own actions the values we hold we invite others to do the same. At the same time, ongoing review and revision of our policies and procedures is necessary to ensure that the behaviors our structures elicit and condone remain aligned with our collective values, which are themselves fragmentary and dynamic and require periodic assessment and reaffirmation. The meaning of life at MIT Rather than debate what threatens or counts, or should count, or shouldn’t count, as features of a fixed or frozen “MIT culture” — which would inevitably uphold some individuals and experiences as “typical” in ways that obscure or sideline others — we might instead ask what it means to live and work at MIT. To me, this invites curiosity about the range of activities, dispositions, and relationships that give diverse members of our community a sense of purpose, while bringing critical attention to behaviors, policies, and symbols that can be harmful, limiting, or exclusionary.

By encouraging universal, though not uniform, participation in the organization and life of the Institute, and in fostering for everyone, on their own terms, an experience of belonging, we can "write against" the limitations of "MIT culture," and endeavor to live creative and meaningful lives at MIT.

In this ongoing series sponsored by the Office of Tracie Jones, MIT SHASS Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, faculty and staff in MIT's humanistic fields share ideas, stories, and research-based commentary on the nature of culture and their experiences as part of the MIT community. We are honored that this inaugural commentary for the series is from Heather Paxson, the William Kenan Professor of Anthropology, head of MIT Anthropology, and a MacVicar Faculty Fellow. In this commentary, Professor Paxson provides some foundational thinking about how her field of anthropology — the scientific study of humanity including societies, behavior, cultural meaning, norms, and values — understands the concept of culture. 

Read the full story

What Is Culture Essay Writing – Expert’s Guide

• Essay Tips&Tricks
• Essay Writing Guides

Culture is an important component of human life, which helps to find like-minded people. We should not forget that culture can be expressed in different situations, such as food, music, outlook on life, and even clothing. It is important to understand that despite differences in different cultures, you should always respect and be friendly to others.

Culture Essay Explained

To begin with, let’s figure out what a culture essay is. Simply put, this is a kind of description of a culture, starting from your thoughts and opinions. In society, culture helps to understand what norms exist for people. You can write culture essays on completely different topics related to culture because it manifests itself in all components of our lives. These are dances, art, technology, and even music.

Culture determines what is acceptable and what is unacceptable in any society. Based on this, it can be understood that a culture essay is a popular writing style because it can describe your personal opinion about culture and express your thoughts and views.

What Is the Importance of Culture in Human Life?

Culture plays a very important role in our life. It helps people to ensure social well-being in society and find like-minded people. Culture in society is one of the main life factors that help people express their education and development. You can understand a cultured person or not by the way he communicates with people in society.

For many people, culture is as important a factor as their personal lives and family values. Watching people, you might notice that people who adhere to the same culture immediately have an inextricable connection and many common interests because such people are connected not only by common views on the world but also by tastes in food, traditions, and much more.

How to Write a Culture Essay Outline

To write a successful culture essay, it is important to understand where to start and stick to a clear plan. A writing plan should be in each piece so the reader can understand and navigate the article’s essence.

This is especially true for a research paper and an argumentative essay because, in such reports, you must specifically describe the subject of research and argue your conclusions. But writing structure is just as important for culture essays, so here are the important steps in writing a plan:

First, you need to consider the introduction because it is regarded as one of the most important parts of the essay. Here you should present the most important information discussed in the main part so that the reader is interested and wants to read the text further.

Create a short thesis with which you will convey the essence of the essay to the audience and briefly express your opinion on this topic.

Work on the basic information you will be using. It is very important to write about those things that are interesting to you and that you understand. Suppose this is a new topic for you. In that case, it is best to check the integrity of the information on several sources several times so as not to misinform the reader and arouse the desired interest in your article.

Write your findings. In many essay examples, the author writes his conclusion based on personal experience and thoughts. Never try to write similarly. For a successful culture essay conclusion, noting how you feel and conveying your emotions from personal experience and knowledge is important.

Writing an Introduction to a Culture Essay

The introduction is one of the most important parts of any essay. When starting to write an introduction, you should already understand what you will talk to the reader about in the future. It is important to remember that the information you use in this section should be discussed in the main part and be argued with facts and supported by your real-life examples.

Writing an introduction is often difficult and energy-consuming for a writer because this paragraph should contain only the most important information from your text that will be able to interest the reader.

To make it easier, you can write the introduction after you’ve completed the main text, but it’s important to decide on the topic and abstract first. For example, at the beginning of the culture essay, you need to tell the audience about the issue you will be discussing and then familiarize the readers with the thesis.

Next, talk with the reader about your opinion on this topic and tell a little about yourself so that people can imagine the person who writes about the issue of interest to them.

Writing a Body of a Culture Essay

The body of your culture essay should introduce the reader to the culture you are researching. Therefore, it is important to convey all the emotions when writing so that people have a clear picture and understanding of the culture. A culture essay is a combination of a descriptive essay and an argumentative essay where you also describe and argue your opinion on a given topic.

The body of your essay may include several paragraphs and headings. In each paragraph, you will describe different aspects of this culture and your arguments for them. This section should explain to the reader why you have chosen this particular topic for writing so that people clearly understand your interest in the topic of culture.

Using personal examples and arguments from your life best draws the reader. It is important to write in a language understandable to the reader. Try to use simple, uncomplicated phrases with which you will arouse confidence and pleasant emotions in your audience. Imagine that you are talking to a reader. Writing an essay is a simple and accessible language that will help connect the reader and keep them interested.

Writing a Conclusion for a Culture Essay

After you have written the main part of your essay, you should summarize all of the above. To do this, you must analyze all the information and briefly state it to the reader. It is important not to deviate from your opinion and only try to back it up with appropriate phrases. In conclusion, you can once again repeat your statement about this culture or emphasize its main nuances.

In many essay examples, the authors write a huge paragraph with conclusions, touching on other topics there that have nothing to do with this, so you shouldn’t do it because, in conclusion, the main thing is to write it short and clear so that the reader can immediately understand the whole essence of what you wrote on this section.

Try to choose the right words and not pour water just like that. The main thing in this paragraph is the logical compilation of the results of all of the above.

The Most Interesting Cultural Topics

Culture essays are one of the best ways to do personal research about culture. In this kind of descriptive essay, you can analyze a huge number of topics and traditions of a particular culture and learn about the cultural origins of different types of people.

When choosing a topic for writing a culture essay, you need to be very serious and try to select the case that you will be interested in discussing, and you can describe all aspects of culture in such colors so that the reader can share your point of view and get carried away reading the article. So here are some interesting topics to talk about in your culture essay:

• Similarities between different cultures
• The influence of religion on culture
• The difference between the cultures of other continents
• Gender characteristics and the impact of cultures on them
• The role of culture in the personal growth of a person
• Popular cultures
• How is the Internet changing culture?

Tips for Writing a Successful Culture Essay

It’s no secret that before you start writing an essay, you need to create a so-called draft, in which you indicate for yourself all the most important points of the article and determine the sequence in which information is presented.

In a culture essay, it is important to adhere to the structure for the reader to understand what you are writing about. Here are some tips on how to make your essay successful and interesting:

Be Responsible in Your Topic Selection Process

The cultural topic is very relevant and extensive, so you should have no problem choosing. However, suppose you cannot decide which topic you would like to consider. In that case, you have the opportunity to look at a list of interesting and relevant issues on the Internet and then write an essay with a personal opinion on this matter. You can read other essay examples, but the main thing is not to use another author’s opinion in your article; this essay should be written based on personal experience and your own opinion.

Choosing a topic can seem quite complicated because you have to decide what you will have to communicate with your readers about, having previously studied all the nuances and made certain personal conclusions about it.

Make Sure to Express Your Unique Views

Culture essay aims to express personal views and thoughts on the topic you are discussing. Therefore, try to describe your opinion and understanding of this topic as clearly and reasonably as possible.

Despite this, you can use knowledge and information from other sources, but if you use it in your text, it is important to indicate exactly where you got this information from so that no plagiarism is detected during the critical writing report assessment, which is very important for an essay of this kind.

Avoid Repetition

For example, if you use the same phrase several times in the text, the best option would be to rephrase it so that it does not change its meaning but sounds different at the same time.

Use Only Proven Information

Imagine that you are writing a research paper and carefully studying the chosen topic. In no case do not use fictitious facts in the text. Instead, only reliable information should be supported by your arguments.

Utilize Linear Writing Style

Use the linear writing style of the culture essay. This will help the reader to read your article in a logical and structured way continuously.

Write a Clear Thesis and Stick To Your Position Throughout the Essay

Write in plain language that is easy for the reader to understand. Do not use complicated terms and phrases. The reader should feel as if you are talking to him.

Example of a Culture Essay and Essay Writing Services

We will look at the culture essay, which reveals the meaning of culture and how it changes and develops in the modern world. This one of the decent essay examples discusses how culture affects our lives and explains how different cultures exist worldwide.

Introduction

1.1 Definition of the term “Culture”

1.2 A story about the origin of culture and its development

1.3 Thesis: Culture is one of the main factors in our life and the lives of every person. Although culture changes over time, it remains in each of us

• What does culture mean?

2.1 Culture reflects the inner qualities of a person

2.2 Culture develops according to the development in our life

• Differences between different cultures

3.1 What are the differences, and why do you need to understand cultural differences

• What is the purpose of culture in human life?

Culture is a kind of collection of all parts of society. This is a huge complex of different beliefs and thoughts of people that were created over time. Culture can change depending on the other factors that influence it, as it keeps up with the times, and we all know that concepts and views can change over time. Each country has its own culture and traditions, and people in different countries express themselves in this way.

Having studied the culture of another country, you can understand the way of thinking of the people who live there and understand their values. To understand a person of another nation, it is enough to study his culture in detail.

Since culture is an indicator of human fulfillment, it can change at different times and places and remain individual for each nation.

What Does Culture Mean?

Culture describes the concepts and attitudes of people in different groups. People themselves create their own culture, this does not happen immediately, but after a long time, despite this, it exists. Other groups of people can be of the same culture, but they will still have completely different views on life and concepts. In the process of life, a person’s opinions and thoughts may change, but faith in one’s culture remains unchanged.

Differences Between Different Cultures

The differences between different cultures can depend on many factors, personal moral principles, political views, and even differences in musical tastes or food tastes. For example, in many countries, people do not eat pork meat, while in others, it is the norm. Therefore, when communicating in or coming into a society where there are people of other cultural concepts, it is important to consider other people’s interests so that respect appears in the group.

Understanding cultural differences of this kind will help to find mutual understanding among people and make them a single whole. Each person must respect the culture and views of other people, and only then will understanding and love reign in our world.

What Is the Purpose of Culture in Human Life?

Culture is important in all moments of human life, especially when you are in society. For example, when you come to a new job, you find yourself in a team where everyone has different thoughts and views. Therefore, it is important to respect the opinions of other people and in no case try to prove your point of view to others. Culture is also very important because, to some extent, it helps to find like-minded people and create a warm and friendly atmosphere in society.

If you have any difficulties writing a culture essay, you can always turn to essay writing service , where you will meet real professionals who will answer all your questions and do the hard work for you at an excellent price and in a short time. Moreover, you can be sure that each author has a degree in the field of culture, and your essay will be written with high quality and success.

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Table of contents

Cultural Identity Essay

27 August, 2020

12 minutes read

Author:  Elizabeth Brown

No matter where you study, composing essays of any type and complexity is a critical component in any studying program. Most likely, you have already been assigned the task to write a cultural identity essay, which is an essay that has to do a lot with your personality and cultural background. In essence, writing a cultural identity essay is fundamental for providing the reader with an understanding of who you are and which outlook you have. This may include the topics of religion, traditions, ethnicity, race, and so on. So, what shall you do to compose a winning cultural identity essay?

Cultural Identity Paper: Definitions, Goals & Topics 

Before starting off with a cultural identity essay, it is fundamental to uncover what is particular about this type of paper. First and foremost, it will be rather logical to begin with giving a general and straightforward definition of a cultural identity essay. In essence, cultural identity essay implies outlining the role of the culture in defining your outlook, shaping your personality, points of view regarding a multitude of matters, and forming your qualities and beliefs. Given a simpler definition, a cultural identity essay requires you to write about how culture has influenced your personality and yourself in general. So in this kind of essay you as a narrator need to give an understanding of who you are, which strengths you have, and what your solid life position is.

Yet, the goal of a cultural identity essay is not strictly limited to describing who you are and merely outlining your biography. Instead, this type of essay pursues specific objectives, achieving which is a perfect indicator of how high-quality your essay is. Initially, the primary goal implies outlining your cultural focus and why it makes you peculiar. For instance, if you are a french adolescent living in Canada, you may describe what is so special about it: traditions of the community, beliefs, opinions, approaches. Basically, you may talk about the principles of the society as well as its beliefs that made you become the person you are today.

So far, cultural identity is a rather broad topic, so you will likely have a multitude of fascinating ideas for your paper. For instance, some of the most attention-grabbing topics for a personal cultural identity essay are:

• Memorable traditions of your community
• A cultural event that has influenced your personality 
• Influential people in your community
• Locations and places that tell a lot about your culture and identity

Cultural Identity Essay Structure

As you might have already guessed, composing an essay on cultural identity might turn out to be fascinating but somewhat challenging. Even though the spectrum of topics is rather broad, the question of how to create the most appropriate and appealing structure remains open.

Like any other kind of an academic essay, a cultural identity essay must compose of three parts: introduction, body, and concluding remarks. Let’s take a more detailed look at each of the components:

Introduction 

Starting to write an essay is most likely one of the most time-consuming and mind-challenging procedures. Therefore, you can postpone writing your introduction and approach it right after you finish body paragraphs. Nevertheless, you should think of a suitable topic as well as come up with an explicit thesis. At the beginning of the introduction section, give some hints regarding the matter you are going to discuss. You have to mention your thesis statement after you have briefly guided the reader through the topic. You can also think of indicating some vital information about yourself, which is, of course, relevant to the topic you selected.

Your main body should reveal your ideas and arguments. Most likely, it will consist of 3-5 paragraphs that are more or less equal in size. What you have to keep in mind to compose a sound ‘my cultural identity essay’ is the argumentation. In particular, always remember to reveal an argument and back it up with evidence in each body paragraph. And, of course, try to stick to the topic and make sure that you answer the overall question that you stated in your topic. Besides, always keep your thesis statement in mind: make sure that none of its components is left without your attention and argumentation.

Conclusion 

Finally, after you are all finished with body paragraphs and introduction, briefly summarize all the points in your final remarks section. Paraphrase what you have already revealed in the main body, and make sure you logically lead the reader to the overall argument. Indicate your cultural identity once again and draw a bottom line regarding how your culture has influenced your personality.

Best Tips For Writing Cultural Identity Essay

Writing a ‘cultural identity essay about myself’ might be somewhat challenging at first. However, you will no longer struggle if you take a couple of plain tips into consideration. Following the tips below will give you some sound and reasonable cultural identity essay ideas as well as make the writing process much more pleasant:

• Start off by creating an outline. The reason why most students struggle with creating a cultural identity essay lies behind a weak structure. The best way to organize your ideas and let them flow logically is to come up with a helpful outline. Having a reference to build on is incredibly useful, and it allows your essay to look polished.
• Remember to write about yourself. The task of a cultural identity essay implies not focusing on your culture per se, but to talk about how it shaped your personality. So, switch your focus to describing who you are and what your attitudes and positions are. 
• Think of the most fundamental cultural aspects. Needless to say, you first need to come up with a couple of ideas to be based upon in your paper. So, brainstorm all the possible ideas and try to decide which of them deserve the most attention. In essence, try to determine which of the aspects affected your personality the most.
• Edit and proofread before submitting your paper. Of course, the content and the coherence of your essay’s structure play a crucial role. But the grammatical correctness matters a lot too. Even if you are a native speaker, you may still make accidental errors in the text. To avoid the situation when unintentional mistakes spoil the impression from your essay, always double check your cultural identity essay. 

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Culture in Sociology (Definition, Types and Features)

Culture, as used in sociology, is the “way of life” of a particular group of people: their values, beliefs, norms, etc.

Think of a typical day in your life. You wake up, get ready, and then leave for school or work. Once the day is over, you probably spend your time with family/friends or pursue your hobbies. 

Almost every aspect of this—your means of travel, how you behave among your colleagues, or what kind of recreation you prefer—comes under culture. It is something that we acquire socially and plays a huge role in shaping who we are.

Sociologists have come up with various theories about culture (why it exists, how it functions, etc.), which we will discuss later. But before that, let us learn about the concept in more detail and look at some examples.

Sociological Definition of Culture

Edward Tylor 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.” (1871)

Another definition comes from Scott, who sees culture as “all that in human society which is socially rather than biologically transmitted” (2014). 

Since the beginning of civilization, humans have lived together in communities and developed common ways of dealing with life (acquiring food, raising children, etc.). These common ways are what make culture. 

Culture consists of both intangible and tangible things. The former is known as nonmaterial culture, which includes things like ideas or values of a society. In contrast, material culture has a physical existence, such as a clothing item. 

Both nonmaterial and material are linked because physical items often symbolize cultural ideas (Little, 2016). For example, you wear a suit (not a pair of shorts) to a business meeting, which is linked to the workplace values of formality & decorum.

Two of the most important elements of culture are its values & beliefs. Values refer to what a society considers good and just: individuality, for example, is a key value in most Western countries. Beliefs are the convictions that people hold to be true, such as the American belief that hard work can make anybody successful.

Values and beliefs are deeply entrenched in a culture, and going against them can have consequences. These can range from minor cultural sanctions (say being frowned upon) to major legal actions. In contrast, upholding values & beliefs leads to social approval. 

Cultural values differ across cultures. The individualism of Western cultures seems solipsistic & arrogant to many Non-Western cultures, who instead value collectivism. Besides such variations, values also evolve with time.

Culture vs Society

The terms “culture” and “society” are often used interchangeably in everyday speech, but they refer to different things.

Society refers to a group of people who live together in a common territory & share a culture. This common territory can be any definable region, say a small neighborhood or a large country. 

When we use the term “society”, we are referring to social structures & their organization.

Culture, in contrast, is the “way of life” of a group of people; it consists of values, beliefs, and artifacts. 

For example, in the United States, African-Americans have historically been oppressed, and even today, they often do not get equal opportunities. Here, we are talking about social structures, which include race and class. 

African-American culture has—such as the literary works of Zora Neale Hurston or the jazz music of Duke Ellington—developed in response to these (unfair) social structures. So, both society & culture are mutually connected; neither can exist without the other.

Features of Cultures

The following are 10 key features of culture that we explore in sociology:

• Symbols: Symbols can be words, gestures, or objects that carry particular meanings recognized by those who share the same culture. For instance, the bald eagle functions as a symbol of freedom and authority in American culture .
• Language: Language is a key aspect of culture, as it is the means of communication that conveys cultural heritage and values. For example, the French language, rich in literature and philosophy, reveals much about French culture’s emphasis on art, intellect, and romance.
• Rituals and Traditions: These are practices or ceremonies that are regularly performed in a culture and bear symbolic meaning. An example of a ritual would be Diwali, the festival of lights celebrated by Hindus, symbolizes the spiritual victory of light over darkness, good over evil.
• Norms: Norms are behavioral standards and expectations that culture sets. In British culture, for instance, queueing is a significant societal norm, signifying order and fairness. See: cultural norms .
• Values: These are the learned beliefs that guide individual and collective behavior and decisions, such as respect for human rights evident in many democratic societies. See: cultural values .
• Social Structures: Social structures are the arranged relationships and patterned interactions between members of a culture, like the extended family system prevalent in many Latin American cultures.
• Artifacts: Physical objects or architectural structures that represent cultural accomplishments, such as the Pyramids in Egypt representing ancient Egyptian civilization. See: cultural artifacts .
• Rules and Laws: Codified principles that guide societal behavior. For example, the constitution in the U.S. reflects its cultural emphasis on democracy and individual freedom.
• Religion and Spirituality: Beliefs about a higher power, rituals related to this belief, and moral codes derived from these beliefs. Buddhism, for instance, is a significant part of East Asian cultures.
• Food and Diet: Specific to each culture, these are dietary habits and special cuisines, like the Mediterranean diet filled with seafood, olives, and vegetables, reflecting coastal cultures of Greece and Italy.

Types of Culture in Sociology

• National Culture: This represents the shared customs, behaviors, and artifacts that characterize a nation, for instance, the Brazilian culture marked by energetic music and vibrant festivals.
• Subculture : A cultural group existing within larger cultures distinguished by their unique practices and beliefs. For example, The Amish in the United States have a distinct lifestyle centered around simplicity and community.
• Counterculture : This represents groups that reject mainstream norms and values, seeking to challenge the status quo. The Punk movement of the 1970s in the UK, known for its rebellious attitudes and alternative fashion, is a clear example. Countercultures often cause widespread moral panic among the dominant culture in a society .
• Folk Culture : Traditional, community-based customs representing the shared cultural heritage, such as folk music and folklore of Irish culture.
• Pop Culture : Mainstream trends influenced by mass media, fashion, and celebrities, like K-Pop’s influence on global music and fashion trends.
• High Culture : Artifacts and activities considered ‘refined’ or ‘sophisticated’ by elite society, such as opera and ballet in European cultures (Bourdieu, 2010). This is contrasted to low culture , which represents the culture of the working-class.
• Material Culture : Tangible artifacts of human society like architecture, fashion, or food. The medieval castles peppered throughout France offer insight into its material culture. This is of great concern, for example, to archaeologists.
• Non-Material Culture : Intangible aspects of a culture, such as values and norms. The continued emphasis on politeness in British culture is an example of this. This is of great concern, for example, to sociocultural anthropologists.
• Professional Culture: Standards and behaviors specific to a particular profession. The Hippocratic Oath and an emphasis on patient care are integral to medical culture.
• Organizational Culture: Refers to the shared values, beliefs, and behaviors that form the unique social and psychological environment of an organization. Google’s culture of innovation and employee freedom reflects this.

For More, Read: 17 Types of Culture

Theoretical Approaches to Culture in Sociology

Sociologists have come up with various theories of culture, explaining why and how they exist. 

1. Functionalism

Functionalism sees society as a group of elements that function together to maintain a stable whole.

Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of sociology, used an organic analogy to explain this. In a biological creature, all the constituent body parts work together to maintain an organic whole; in the same way, the parts of a society work together to ensure its stability. 

Under such a view, culture is something that helps society to exist as a stable entity: cultural norms, for example, guide people’s behavior and ensure that they appropriately. Talcott Parsons said that culture performs “latent pattern maintenance”, meaning that it maintains social patterns of behavior and allows orderly change (Little).

To put it in one sentence, culture ensures that our “way of life” remains stable. Functionalism can provide excellent insights into all cultural expressions, even ones that seem quite irrational. For example, sports in themselves may seem quite “useless”.

What exactly is the point of trying to hit a ball far or kicking one into a net? Functionalists would explain that sports brings people together and creates a collective experience. It provides an outlet for aggressive energies, teaches us the value of teamwork, and of course, makes us physically fit.

Real culture allows a given society to see how far its aspirations lie from its achievements, allowing it to take redressal steps.

Read More about Functionalism in Sociology Here

2. Conflict Theory

Conflict theory focuses on the power relations that exist in society and believes that culture is entrenched in this power play.

These sociologists emphasize the unequal nature of social structures, and how they are related to factors of class, race, gender, etc. For them, culture is another tool for reinforcing and perpetuating these differences.

A key focus of conflict theory is on critiquing “ideology”, which is seen as a set of ideas that support or conceal the existing power relations in society. For example, as we discussed earlier, one of the key beliefs in the United States is the “American Dream”: anyone can work hard to achieve success.

But this belief hardly takes into account larger social factors (historical oppression, generational wealth, etc.). For a white, middle-class man, it may certainly be possible to work hard and achieve incredible success. But for a poor black woman, the American dream is mostly a myth. 

Case Study: Conflict Theory and Culture

Conflict Theorists (and some functionalists) argue that there are two types of culture: ideal and real. The ideal culture is the culture that society strives toward – it’s the standard that maintains a goal of society. This is contrasted to real culture , which sociologist Max Weber says is the real-life manifestation of culture. This includes the elements of oppression and inequalities, which ideal culture does not consider. For example, if ideal culture talks about democracy, real culture points out how politics is biased toward privileged people.

3. Symbolic Interactionism

Symbolic interactionism focuses on face-to-face interactions of individuals and sees culture as an outcome of these. 

Such sociologists believe that human interactions are a continuous process of finding meaning from the actions of others and the objects in the environment (Little). All these actions & objects have a “symbolic meaning”.

Culture is how this symbolic meaning is shared and interpreted. Symbolic interactions also believe that our social world is quite dynamic: instead of obsessing over rigid structures, they emphasize how situations and meanings are constantly changing.

For a symbolic interactionist, something as simple as a t-shirt communicates a symbolic meaning. They would argue that clothes do not simply play a “functional” role (protection) but also express something about the wearer. 

See Also: Examples of Symbolic Interactionism

Culture includes the values, practices, and artifacts of a group of people; it is our shared “way of life”.

Most human behavior —from what we eat at breakfast to when we go back to sleep—is socially acquired through culture. It gives us a shared sense of “meaning” and guides human behavior, helping to maintain a stable society. However, it is also entrenched in power relations and can both enforce/challenge those relations. 

Little, William. (2016). Introduction to Sociology – 1st Canadian Edition . OpenEd.

Murdock, George P. (1949). Social Structure . Macmillan.

Scott, Taylor. (2014). A Dictionary of Sociology. Oxford.

Tylor, E. B. (1871). Primitive culture: Researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art, and custom. J. Murray.

Sourabh Yadav (MA)

Sourabh Yadav is a freelance writer & filmmaker. He studied English literature at the University of Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University. You can find his work on The Print, Live Wire, and YouTube.

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Chris Drew (PhD)

This article was peer-reviewed and edited by Chris Drew (PhD). The review process on Helpful Professor involves having a PhD level expert fact check, edit, and contribute to articles. Reviewers ensure all content reflects expert academic consensus and is backed up with reference to academic studies. Dr. Drew has published over 20 academic articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education and holds a PhD in Education from ACU.

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How to Write an Essay about Your Culture

Do you need to write an essay about your culture but don’t know where to start? You’ve come to the right place! I’m Constance, and I’ll show you how to write an essay about your culture. I’ll guide you step by step, and we’ll write a sample essay together. Let’s dive in. 

Writing an essay about your culture includes 5 steps:

Step 1. Plan how many words you want in each paragraph.

When you know the exact number of words you need for an essay, planning the word count for each paragraph will be much easier. 

For example, a 300-word essay typically consists of five paragraphs and three key elements:

• The introductory paragraph.
• Three body paragraphs.
• The conclusion, or the concluding paragraph.

Here’s a simple way to distribute 300 words across the five paragraphs in your essay:

You’ll get 300 when you add up these numbers. 

Step 2. Decide on what your main and supporting points will be.

First, you must take a stand, meaning you must decide on your main point. What do you really want to say about your culture? Whatever you want to say, that becomes your thesis. 

For example, “My culture is very rich.” That is enough to get started. You’ll get a better idea of how to expand or tweak your thesis after the next step.

Next, divide your topic using the Power of Three to prove the point that your culture is rich using three supporting ideas.

The Power of Three effectively divides an essay’s main idea into its supporting points. It means your main idea is true because of the three reasons you will provide in the body. So, it is a three-part structure that helps produce your body paragraphs .

Let’s try it for an essay about Filipino culture!

For example, here are three supporting ideas explaining the richness of Filipino culture:

• The Philippines has incredible food .
• Traditional Filipino clothing reflects the country’s heritage.
• Family values in the Philippines are essential.

Great! Now we have everything we need to write an essay about Filipino culture. We’re all set for the next step!

Step 3. Write your introductory paragraph.

Here are the key components of an introductory paragraph you need to remember in writing your essay:

Our first sentence is the introduction, which should pull our reader into the world we want to portray in our essay.

And the rest of the introductory paragraph is our thesis statement. It includes our main idea and three supporting points.

Example of an introductory paragraph about culture

“Having been colonized for centuries, the Philippines boasts a vast heritage. It has a rich culture characterized by food, clothing, and family values. Filipino culture has delicious food inherited from diverse parts of the world and periods of conquest. Traditional Filipino clothing reflects the country’s history, as well. And Filipinos prize their family values probably above all else.”

Look at how the introductory paragraph goes from a general statement to specific ideas that support our main idea.

Our introductory sentence is a general statement that serves as the opening in our essay. It briefly sets the essay’s context. Next comes the thesis statement — our main idea. Finally, we have three supporting ideas for our thesis.

Step 4. Write your essay’s body paragraphs.

Again, a 300-word essay typically has three body paragraphs containing your three supporting ideas. Here’s how to structure a body paragraph:

Looking back at our word count plan, we know that our body paragraphs should have roughly 70 words each. Remember your word plan as you write.

Body Paragraph 1

“The Philippines boasts a diverse food culture. It reflects indigenous flavors and foreign influences, such as American, Spanish, Indian, and Chinese. Whether it’s a typical or special day, Filipinos love eating these various dishes with rice, a staple. For example, rice goes well with curry, noodles, and adobo. It is also common to see various foods like pizza, pancit, lumpia, paella, (Filipino-style) sweet spaghetti, cakes, and ice cream at parties.”

As you can see, the first sentence in this body paragraph is a topic sentence . It gives context to the paragraph and briefly summarizes it.

The second sentence explains why the Philippine food culture is considered diverse. 

The remaining sentences illustrate your main point (topic sentence) by providing examples, starting with rice in sentence 3.

Body Paragraph 2

“Traditional Filipino clothing reflects Philippine cultural heritage. Although Filipinos now conform to current fashion trends in their everyday lives, the traditional clothing style is often used during celebrations. The traditional fashion sense exhibits influences from indigenous tribes, Chinese immigration waves, the Spaniards, and Americans, portraying the chronology of Philippine historical events. For example, the Philippines’ national costume, the baro’t saya, is an elegant blend of Spanish and Filipino clothing styles. Even some modernized forms of clothing also display other global influences.”

Just like Body Paragraph 1, this paragraph follows the same structure outlined in the diagram. It proceeds from a general statement to more specific points :

• The topic sentence.
• An explanation.

Body Paragraph 3

“Family values are vital in the Philippines. The daily lives of most Filipinos revolve around close and extended family, making them known for their family-oriented lifestyle even when they’re overseas. It’s common for children to live with their parents after reaching legal age; some even stay after getting married or obtaining a job. Filipinos also cherish their extended families (aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins) and hanging out or celebrating significant events together.”

Once again, this paragraph follows the body paragraph structure. Now, we’re all set for the final step — the conclusion.

Step 5. Write the conclusion.

The easiest way to write a concluding paragraph for your essay on your culture is to restate your main idea and its supporting points using different words. You can even paraphrase your introduction — a time-proven method!

Let’s write the conclusion for our essay.

“Because of its history, the Philippines has a rich, diverse culture rooted in a vast heritage. Filipino cuisine is a blend of indigenous and foreign flavors. The nation’s history is reflected in its traditional clothing. And family values display a distinct Filipino trait.”

Note that this conclusion uses different words to restate the points we’ve already made, including those in the body paragraphs. 

Hope this was helpful. Now go ahead and write an essay about your culture!

Tutor Phil is an e-learning professional who helps adult learners finish their degrees by teaching them academic writing skills.

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Meaning of Culture and Its Importance Essay

Culture is a combination of human knowledge, beliefs, and norms of behavior that people adopt and then pass on to future generations. It is a critical socializing factor that regulates various spheres of human interaction – from everyday communication to the functioning of the global economy. Conventionality is a characteristic feature of everything related to culture. This is especially evident in the Internet environment when abstract rules of communication between users and symbols exist to a large extent only in this setting.

For Internet culture, it is pretty typical when the ways people interact on the Internet are reflected in their everyday lives. Suppose someone found out that there is a women’s movement against online trolling, which was discussed in this module, and the number of participants in this movement is growing significantly. In this case, it can be assumed that this person will be more likely to speak out against harassment in real life. In addition, some of the modern social movements have emerged on the Internet, such as #MeToo. Moreover, due to the Internet and social media, there is a change in the way people talk, as Garance Franke-Ruta’s article mentioned (2017). Culture does not stagnate but, on the contrary, is integrated into the Internet environment and adapts to it.

On the one hand, culture is the experience accumulated by humanity, and on the other hand, it is a method of transferring this experience. In turn, the Internet as a way of collecting and transmitting information is included in the structure of modern culture as its most crucial element. However, it is not just another way of storing experiences alongside, for example, patterns or values.

The current trend is that it also makes a significant change in the culture itself, in its content. The sources analyzed during this module indicate the existence of mutual influence between the two phenomena.

Franke-Ruta, G. (2017). Too close for comfort: How social media changed how we talk to (and about) each other in America. Yahoo News. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2022, November 7). Meaning of Culture and Its Importance. https://ivypanda.com/essays/meaning-of-culture-and-its-importance/

"Meaning of Culture and Its Importance." IvyPanda , 7 Nov. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/meaning-of-culture-and-its-importance/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Meaning of Culture and Its Importance'. 7 November.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Meaning of Culture and Its Importance." November 7, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/meaning-of-culture-and-its-importance/.

1. IvyPanda . "Meaning of Culture and Its Importance." November 7, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/meaning-of-culture-and-its-importance/.

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IvyPanda . "Meaning of Culture and Its Importance." November 7, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/meaning-of-culture-and-its-importance/.

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Essays about Culture and Identity: 9 Examples And Prompts

Writing essays about culture and identity will help you explore your understanding of it. Here are examples that will give you inspiration for your next essay.

Culture can refer to customs, traditions, beliefs, lifestyles, laws, artistic expressions, and other elements that cultivate the collective identity. Different cultures are established across nations, regions, communities, and social groups. They are passed on from generation to generation while others evolve or are abolished to give way to modern beliefs and systems.

While our cultural identity begins at home, it changes as we involve ourselves with other groups (friends, educational institutions, social media communities, political groups, etc.) Culture is a very relatable subject as every person is part of a culture or at least can identify with one. Because it spans broad coverage, there are several interesting cultural subjects to write about.

Our culture and identity are dynamic. This is why you may find it challenging to write about it. To spark your inspiration, check out our picks of the best culture essays. 

1. Sweetness and Light by Matthew Arnolds

2. how auto-tune revolutionized the sound of popular music by simon reynolds, 3. how immigration changes language by john mcwhorter, 4. the comfort zone: growing up with charlie brown by jonathan franzen, 5. culture and identity definition by sandra graham, 6. how culture and surroundings influence identity by jeanette lucas, 7. how the food we eat reflects our culture and identity by sophia stephens, 8. identity and culture: my identity, culture, and identity by april casas, 9. how america hinders the cultural identity of their own citizens by seth luna, 1. answer the question, “who am i”, 2. causes of culture shock, 3. your thoughts on dystopia and utopia, 4. gender inequality from a global perspective, 5. the most interesting things you learned from other cultures, 6. the relationship between cultural identity and clothes, 7. describe your culture, 8. what is the importance of honoring your roots , 9. how can a person adapt to a new culture, 10. what artistic works best express your country’s culture, 11. how has social media influenced human interaction, 12. how do you protect the cultures of indigenous peoples, 13. are k-pop and k-drama sensations effectively promoting korea’s culture , 14. what is the importance of cultural diversity.

“… [A]nd when every man may say what he likes, our aspirations ought to be satisfied. But the aspirations of culture, which is the study of perfection, are not satisfied, unless what men say, when they may say what they like, is worth saying,—has good in it, and more good than bad.”

Arnolds compels a re-examination of values at a time when England is leading global industrialization and beginning to believe that greatness is founded on material progress. 

The author elaborates why culture, the strive for a standard of perfection, is not merely driven by scientific passions and, more so, by materialistic affluence. As he esteems religion as “that voice of the deepest human experience” to harmonize men in establishing that ideal society, Arnolds stresses that culture is the effort to “make reason and the will of God prevail” while humanizing gained knowledge to be society’s source of “sweetness and light.”

“Few innovations in sound production have been simultaneously so reviled and so revolutionary. Epoch-defining or epoch-defacing, Auto-Tune is indisputably the sound of the 21st century so far.”

Reynolds shows how Auto-Tune has shaped a pop music genre that has cut across cultures. The article maps out the music landscape Auto-Tune created and examines its impact on the culture of song productions and the modern taste for music. While the author debunks accusations that Auto-Tune destroyed the “natural” process of creating music, he also points out that the technology earned its reverence with big thanks to society’s current custom of using technology to hide blemishes and other imperfections.

Looking for more? Check out these essays about culture shock .

“… [T]he heavy immigration that countries like Italy are experiencing will almost certainly birth new kinds of Italian that are rich with slang, somewhat less elaborate than the standard, and… widely considered signs of linguistic deterioration, heralding a future where the “original” standard language no longer exists.”

American linguist McWhorter pacifies fears over the death of “standard” languages amid the wave of immigration to Europe. On the contrary, language is a vital expression of a culture, and for some, preserving is tantamount to upholding a cultural standard. 

However, instead of seeing the rise of new “multiethnolects” such as the Black English in America and Kiezdeutsch in Germany as threats to language and culture, McWhorter sees them as a new way to communicate and better understand the social groups that forayed these new languages.

“I wonder why “cartoonish” remains such a pejorative. It took me half my life to achieve seeing my parents as cartoons. And to become more perfectly a cartoon myself: what a victory that would be.”

This essay begins with a huge fight between Franzen’s brother and father to show how the cultural generation gap sweeping the 60s has hit closer to home. This generation gap, where young adults were rejecting the elders’ old ways in pursuit of a new and better culture, will also be the reason why his family ends up drifting apart. Throughout the essay, Franzen treads this difficult phase in his youth while narrating fondly how Peanuts, a pop culture icon at the time, was his source of escape. 

“…Culture is… your background… and Identity is formed where you belong to… Leopold Sedar Senghor and Shirley Geok-Lin Lim both talks about how culture and identity can impact… society…”

In this essay, Graham uses “To New York” by Senghor and “Learning To Love America” by Lim as two pieces of literature that effectively describe the role of culture and identity to traveling individuals. 

The author refers to Sengho’s reminder that people can adapt but must not forget their culture even if they go to a different place or country. On the other hand, Lim discusses immigrants’ struggle to have double identities.

“Culture is something that surrounds all of us and progress to shape our lives every day… Identity is illustrated as the state of mind in which someone or something distinguishes their own character traits that lead to determining who they really are, what they represent.”

Lucas is keen on giving examples of how his culture and surroundings influence an individual’s identity. She refers to Kothari’s “If you are what you eat, then what am I?” which discusses Kothari’s search for her identity depending on what food she eats. Food defines a person’s culture and identity, so Kothari believes that eating food from different countries will change his identity.

Lucas also refers to “Down These Mean Streets” by Piri Thomas, which argues how different cultural and environmental factors affect us. Because of what we encounter, there is a possibility that we will become someone who we are not. 

“What we grow is who we are. What we buy is who we are. What we eat is who we are.”

Stephens’ essay teaches its readers that the food we grow and eat defines us as a person. She explains that growing a crop and harvesting it takes a lot of effort, dedication, and patience, which mirrors our identity. 

Another metaphor she used is planting rice: it takes skills and knowledge to make it grow. Cooking rice is more accessible than cultivating it – you can quickly cook rice by boiling it in water. This reflects people rich in culture and tradition but who lives simpler life. 

“Every single one has their own unique identity and culture. Culture plays a big role in shaping your identity. Culture is what made me the person I am today and determines who or what I choose to associate myself with.”

Casas starts her piece by questioning who she is. In trying to learn and define who she is, she writes down and describes herself and her personality throughout the essay. Finally, she concludes that her culture is a big part of her identity, and she must understand it to understand herself.

“When it comes to these stereotypes we place on each other, a lot of the time, we succumb to the stereotypes given to us. And our cultural identity is shaped by these expectations and labels others give us. That is why negative stereotypes sometimes become true for a whole group or community.”

In this essay, Luna talks about how negative stereotyping in the United States led to moral distortion. For example, Americans are assumed to be ignorant of other countries’ cultures, making it difficult to understand other people’s cultures and lifestyles. 

She believes that stereotyping can significantly affect an individual or group’s identity. She suggests Americans should improve their intellectual competence by being sensitive to other people’s cultures.

14 Prompts on Essays about Culture and Identity

You can discuss many things on the subject of culture and identity. To give you a starting point, here are some prompts to help you write an exciting essay about culture. 

If you are interested in learning more, check out our essay writing tips and our round-up of the best essay checkers .

Understanding your personality is vital since continuous interaction with others can affect your personality. Write about your culture and identity; what is your personality? How do you define yourself? Everyone is unique, so by writing an essay about who you are, you’ll be able to understand why you act a certain way and connect with readers who have the same values. 

Here’s a guide on writing a descriptive essay to effectively relay your experience to your readers.

Sometimes, people need to get out of their comfort zone and interact with other individuals with different cultures, beliefs, or traditions. This is to broaden one’s perspective about the world. Aside from discussing what you’ve learned in that journey, you can also focus on the bits that shocked you. 

You can talk about a tradition or value that you found so bizarre because it differs from your culture. Then add how you processed it and finally adapted to it.

Dystopia and Utopia are both imagined worlds. Dystopia is a world where people live in the worst or most unfavorable conditions, while Utopia is the opposite. 

You can write an essay about what you think a Dystopian or Utopian world may look like, how these societies will affect their citizens, etc. Then, consider what personality citizens of each world may have to depend on the two worlds’ cultures.

Today, more and more people are fighting for others to accept or at least respect the LGBTQ+ community. However, countries, territories, and religions still question their rights.

In your essay, you can talk about why these institutions react the way they do and how culture dictates someone’s identity in the wrong way. Before creating your own, feel free to read other essays and articles to learn more about the global gender inequality issue. 

The world has diverse cultures, traditions, and values. When you travel to a new place, learning and writing about your firsthand experiences with unique cultures and rituals will always be an interesting read.

In this prompt, you’ll research other cultures and how they shaped their group’s identity. Then, write about the most exciting aspects you’ve learned, why you found them fascinating, and how they differ from your culture.

Those proud of their culture will wear clothes inspired by them. Some wear the same clothes even if they aren’t from the same culture. The debate over cultural appropriation and culture appreciation is still a hot topic. 

In this essay, you may start with the traditions of your community or observances your family celebrates and gathers for. Then, elaborate on their origins and describe how your community or family is preserving these practices. 

Learning about your roots, ancestors, and family cultures can help strengthen your understanding of your identity and foster respect for other cultures. Explore this topic and offer examples of what others have learned. Has the journey always been a positive experience? Delve into this question for an engaging and interesting essay.

When a person moves country, it can be challenging to adapt to a new culture. If there are new people at work or school, you can interview them and ask how they are coping with their new environment. How different is this from what they have been used to, and what unique traditions do they find interesting?

Focus on an art piece that is a source of pride and identity to your country’s culture, much like the Tinikling of the Philippines or the Matryoshka dolls of Russia. Explore its origins and evolution up to its current manifestation and highlight efforts that are striving to protect and promote these artistic works.

The older generation did not have computers in their teen years. Ask about how they dated in their younger years and how they made friends. Contrast how the younger generation is building their social networks today. Write what culture of socialization works better for you and explain why.

Take in-depth navigation of existing policies that protect indigenous peoples. Are they sufficient to serve these communities needs, and are they being implemented effectively? There is also the challenge of balancing the protection of these traditions against the need to protect the environment, as some indigenous practices add to the carbon footprint. How is your government dealing with this challenge?

A large population is now riding the Hallyu or the Korean pop culture, with many falling in love with the artists and Korea’s food, language, and traditional events. Research how certain Korean films, TV series, or music have effectively attracted fans to experience Korea’s culture. Write about what countries can learn from Korea in promoting their own cultures.

Environments that embrace cultural diversity are productive and innovative. To start your essay, assess how diverse your workplace or school is. Then, write your personal experiences where working with co-workers or classmates from different cultures led to new and innovative ideas and projects. Combine this with the personal experiences of your boss or the principal to see how your environment benefits from hosting a melting pot of cultures.

If you aim for your article to effectively change readers’ perspectives and align with your opinion, read our guide to achieving persuasive writing . 

Aisling is an Irish journalist and content creator with a BA in Journalism & New Media. She has bylines in OK! Magazine, Metro, The Inquistr, and the Irish Examiner. She loves to read horror and YA. Find Aisling on LinkedIn .

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Essay on culture: definition, components and types.

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After reading this article you will learn about Culture:- 1. Definition of Culture 2. Components of Culture 3. Characteristics 4. Types.

Essay # Definition of Culture :

Culture is defined by various personalities in a number of ways:

According to E.B. Taylor, “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”.

MacIver defines, “Culture is the expression of own nature in our modes of living and of thinking in our everyday intercourse in art, in literature, in religion, in recreation and enjoyments”.

According to Bierstadt, “Culture is that complex whole that consists of everything we think, do and have as members of society.”

Ellwood defines, “Culture includes on the one hand the whole of man’s material civilization tools, weapons, system of industry, and on the other„ all the non-material or spiritual civilization such as language, literature.,-art, religion, morality, law and government.”

Thus, culture includes all forms of human behaviour which epitomizes his life. It represents material and non-material aspects of life.

Essay # Components or Elements of Culture :

A culture has various elements or components. They are:

1. Behaviour patterns of group such as mores, folkways, customs, traditions, laws, morals, stereotypes, taboos, legends, fashion, myth etc.

2. Literature including prose, poetry, drama, story, etc.

Art includes music, dance, sculpture, paintings, architecture, photography etc.

4. Religion includes worship, observance of rituals, sacrifice, prayers etc.

6. Educational and recreational institutions like library, museum, school, cinema, theatre, cultural clubs.

7. Socio-economic and political institutions.

8. Commerce, industries and transport.

Essay # Characteristics of Culture :

1. Culture is the sum total of acquired traits which man acquires by socialization process. Thus, culture comprises good behaviour patterns of people in the society.

2. Culture is transmitted from generation to generation. Each generation is free to modify the cultural heritage and then transmits it to the next generation.

3. Culture is a social heritage of man. It represents group’s expectations. Man cannot create it bereft of group’s influence. Therefore, it has not its individual connotation.

4. A culture which does not meet the recurring needs and demands of mankind is obsolete and outmoded. As such, a culture is good if it gratifies the social and ethical needs of man.

5. Culture is not static but dynamic. It receives good things from other cultures. Thus, there is a cultural synthesis or integration. As a result, culture gets refined and influences the life styles of individuals. It is subject to change and grow. So, culture is adaptative in nature. Culture changes as civilization changes.

6. Culture has the quality of becoming integrated. Various parts of culture are integrated with each other. It welcomes new element to be incorporated in it.

7. Culture is the manifestation of individual’s mind in different environments and circumstances. Man is interwoven with cultural mainstreams and becomes part and parcel of it.

8. Culture is idealistic as it stands for ideals, norms and patterns of behaviour.

9. Culture is diffused among various groups. As a result, there is seen how one group accepts another’s culture in their styles of living.

10. Culture is modified and renewed in the light of new experiences.

Essay # Types of Culture :

According to Ellwood, culture is of two types viz. material and non-material culture. The former includes all sorts of man- made objects and things that have been evolved over ages for man’s well-being and comforts such as clothes, utensils, homes, roads, ornaments, T.V., radio, machines, gadgets and various means of transport and communication.

Non-material culture includes all those ideals, attitudes and values which modify the behaviour of an individual— language, literature, art, music, religion, customs, tradition, morality, law, poetry. Famous sociologist Ogburn also finds out two types of culture—material and non-material culture—one progresses and other recedes. So, there persists a wide gap between the two types of culture.

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