How do anthropologist define culture and how is culture different from other forms of animal behavior?

Answer 1

Hi Rosana!

I'd be happy to answer this question for you. Culture is a famously slippery term. Even in the anthropological community, its definition and meaning is in constant contention and transformation. The way that cultural anthropology is often understood today has its heritage in the theoretical work done by Clifford Geertz and the turn to so-called "interpretive anthropology".

Geertz defined culture as "a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which [people] communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life." Borrowing a phrase from Max Weber, Geertz sums this up by suggesting that people are "animal[s] suspended in webs of significance that [they themselves have] spun." Geertz goes on to add that he "take[s] culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning"

This is all to say that culture is something of a complex system of symbols. Symbols whose meanings are at once fluid and defined. We may share a common cultural value because we agree on the symbolic meaning of it. This diverges importantly from animal behavior as animals are not typically found to express these kinds of complex symbolic exchanges and interactions. It is important to note, however, that one can find exceptions to this rule. Apes, for example, have at times been observed to treat their dead with some measure of symbolic behavior. If we are to stick with our current definition, this would suggest they are exhibiting a form of culture.