Culture

In his seminal work The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), Geertz outlined culture as “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.”^[7]

“a collective act of interpretation, the stories we tell one another about ourselves in an attempt to make ongoing sense of why we do what we do.”

In attempting to lay out the various meanings attached to the word “culture,” Clifford Geertz refers to the important anthropological work, Clyde Kluckhohn’s Mirror for Man, in which the following meanings are suggested:

1. “the total way of life of a people”
2. “the social legacy the individual acquires from his group”
3. “a way of thinking, feeling, and believing”
4. “an abstraction from behavior”
5. a theory on the part of the anthropologist about the way in which a group of people in fact behave
6. a “storehouse of pooled learning”
7. “a set of standardized orientations to recurrent problems”
8. “learned behavior”
9. a mechanism for the normative regulation of behavior
10. “a set of techniques for adjusting both to the external environment and to other men”
11. “a precipitate of history”
12. a behavioral map, sieve, or matrix

https://condor.depaul.edu/dweinste/popcult/geertz.html