Culture is a system of meanings and significance created historically, or, in other words, culture is a system of beliefs and customs that a group of people use in order to understand, organize, and structure their individual and collective lives. It is a way of understanding and organizing human life.

With the changes in social life at the end of the seventeenth century, the meaning and content of the term culture began to change. Culture, in the eighteenth century, began to turn into a term that expresses social values and behaviors, and thus is used in the social sphere. Consequently, the term gains the meaning of “the effective development of the human mind.” In other words, the term culture, which was previously used to mean “cultivation,” or “breeding” in relation to agricultural activities, has now turned into a universe of meanings that includes layers of meanings such as the development
of the human mind, the development process, the means of progression, and the mental state of the mind.

Culture critic Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) identified culture with “aesthetic excellence” when he defined culture as the best of what is said and thought in the world in all matters that most concern us, or the best that has been thought and known. This approach, which regards culture as equivalent to intellectual and artistic activities and ideas, considers culture to be a synonym for high culture in the duality of high culture and popular culture. Thus, cultural forms that may not be directly, but are indirectly more popular, are not considered “culture”. In this sense, culture can be used as a name for the best, the most beautiful, or the most magnificent products of a society or civilization. Classical music, art, and literature can be articulated as the examples of this group. Culture can also be used as an adjective in relation to aesthetics and intellectual sensitivity. However, the identification of culture with high culture is regarded as an elitist perspective by some approaches because it labels other cultural forms as “low culture” (or popular culture).

The definitions of culture in anthropological approach, refer to the lifestyles that produce certain meanings and values in the daily life of a social group or a society. According to this definition framing culture as a “whole way of lifestyle” of a social group, culture consists of the values that the members of a group believe, the norms they follow, and the material things they create.

Values are the thoughts or principles that are thought to be true and necessary by the majority of its members in order to sustain the existence of a society or a social group. Values are the criteria that tell us what is right, what is wrong, what is wanted and what is not wanted in determining our behavior within society. Values contain norms, but they are more general and abstract than norms.

Norms are formal / written or informal / non-written rules that are deemed necessary for the integrity and continuity of a society, and regulate the behavior of individuals. Norms point to the ideal behavior patterns expected from us as well as covering the usual behaviors in asociety. For this reason, those who do not comply with the norms face negative sanctions and are punished in various forms. These punishments range from a scowl to life imprisonment depending on the type of the action such as laughing at a funeral or killing a human being.

Anthropologists like Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) described culture as a system of shared symbols and/or meanings: “an historically transmitted pattern of meaning is embodied in symbols, 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” . When accepted as shared systems of meaning, culture involves not only art but also all symbolic phenomena. From the network of meanings that are ordinary but integrated with everyday life, such as knowing whether your shoes will be removed when you enter the house, meaning systems organized in the high level such as religion, language, art, and fashion, are included in the culture. 

The main interest of functional sociology has been culture as norms, values and a way of lifestyle rather than culture as high culture. Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), one of the founders of the functional approach, addressed some basic questions about how culture came into being in his work, Primitive Classification (1903), written with Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), his nephew and the most important student. According to them, culture only became possible when human communities began to separate and classify things in their environment. To understand the world around him, he has to develop a system that will classify what he sees. Durkheim and Mauss try to explain how societies classify phenomena separately, such as time, space, human types or animal species. According to them, the social structure makes it possible to classify because the social structure is based on the distinctions between social groups. They have emphasized the importance of moral and emotional nature of classifications. The emphasis they put on the culture-bound values is the most important attribute of the functionalist approach. Functional sociology in general, Durkheim in particular, suggests that forms of action, belief and emotion, that is culture, emerge from the organization of social structure or needs, rather than from the choice of the agent or his/her interpretation of the social world.

As a materialistic theorist, Marx has argued that financial situation and economic activities shape human consciousness. Marx noted that not only religious ideas, but also all cultural ideas are a reflection of the material production system and thus serve the interests of the dominant class.

Culture in stratified societies acts as a kind of dominant ideology. As an important part of society’s superstructure, culture is determined by the infrastructure, that is, the economic base. In other words, the dominant capitalist class, which owns the means of production, uses economic power to shape the culture of the society. Thus, culture reflects the interests of the capitalist class, reproduces its views, and serves to legitimize their authority. Culture is simply the expression of a distorted view of the world created by the dominant class and reveals a distorted sense of reality.

Adorno and Horkheimer analyze the place of post-industrial modernization in the 20th century, and the cultural transformation they witnessed as a result of cultural industries. According to the theorists, culture produced by cultural industries does not develop spontaneously, and it is a standardized and commodified culture aiming at reaching the widest masses. The consumers of this culture, which is far from being natural, and is quite artificial, are modern individuals who are the most loyal consumers of cultural industries. This situation, which can be defined as the simplification of the culture, is also called mass culture. Mass culture is a culture that belongs mainly to industrial capitalism, and is largely produced by mass media. It targets both more consumption and profit, as well as reproduction of capitalist values.

According to Adorno and Horkheimer, cultural products reduced to mass culture through the culture industry are standardized and distributed with rational techniques, and the buying motivation of the individuals is triggered through advertisement industry and they are constantly directed towards consumption. In short, the concept of “culture industry” refers to rationally organized-bureaucratic structures that considerably control and supervise modern culture, such as television networks. The structuring of cultural production in advanced capitalism has created a problem of uniformity that strikes everything.

The Frankfurt school suggests that in the twentieth century the modern mass culture was the key tool of ideological domination of capitalism. The term of mass culture refers to the culture created by the culture industry, which invades the market with (cultural) products aiming at superficial pleasure and entertainment, and consumed simply without questioning by passive consumers who lack passion for criticism. In other words, this cultural structure that re-produces and legitimizes the capitalist system is referred to as mass culture, affirmative culture or culture industry.

The Birmingham School, which has an emphasis on cultural autonomy, is in the opinion that the culture is shaped primarily by dominant powers/power relations. Adopting an expanded concept of culture, the Birmingham School has rejected the distinction between high culture and low culture, and has made a significant break from an approach that would create any cultural stratification. Thus, the school has defined popular culture as a legitimate field. While having a similar perspective with people on “culture as a whole way of life,” the definition of culture as homogeneous integrity was rejected. British Cultural Studies conceptualized culture as a dynamic and constantly renewing process, not as a fixed, static, frozen and closed system.

The concept of cultural reproduction and habitus is produced by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002), one of the most important theoreticians of the 20th century. Although Bourdieu’s work is really difficult to categorize and summarize, one of Bourdieu’s main concerns is the relationship between culture and power. In other words, Bourdieu is most concerned with how stratified social systems of hierarchy and domination reproduce and maintain intergenerationally without powerful resistance. Specifically, Bourdieu extends Erwing Goffman’s focus on the practicalities of the everyday world, by devising a new concept- habitus, which means “cultural know-how” in short. Bourdieu (1984), in his famous study, Distinction, uses a statistical data set to identify social groupings which differ from each other in terms of their distinctive life style- that is, their habitus: they have same taste in food and clothes, they like the same kind of music, they share the same leisure activities and hobbies.

The concept ‘cultural reproduction’ expresses the process of transferring the culture of the dominant class from generation to generation through the education system. Thus, education is a very important institution in the reproduction of social inequalities. In a more general sense, it is a concept that sheds light on how communities continue to exist and remain stable over long periods of time. Cultural reproduction, therefore, is closely related to the process by which individuals internalize their social cultures, or to the role that institutions of socialization play in this stability. As this is mainly the stability of political structures within society, cultural reproduction can be seen as a process in which political structures are legitimized and gain in authority.

This term belongs to William Ogburn (1886-1959). Ogburn wanted to draw attention to the incompatibility that arises in the process of change in the reciprocal relationship of the material and spiritual cultures in a social system. According to him, there forms a gap when the changes in material culture are followed with a certain delay by spiritual culture (law, custom, tradition, social mentality, etc.). Especially the changes in the technology dimension of material culture enable the cultural lag to be seen strikingly. It is also an example of cultural lag when people who did not own mobile phones until recently talk on the phone in a way that annoys people in their surroundings after receiving a mobile phone.

Cultures cannot be seen in a homogeneous and monolithic form because they contain many forms of behavior and belief that differ or clash within themselves. Members of a culture can be influenced by different interpretations within their own culture, or by the beliefs and customs of other cultures. There is not just one single essence of culture. There are different traditions and different ways of thinking. No culture can isolate itself from conflicts and change. Conflicts between different classes, genders, cultural communities and generations are, more or less, present in all cultures. For this reason, culture should be viewed not only as a passive heritage, but as an active process of creating meaning. No matter how old and rooted, culture is not a fixed structure that never changes.

While a culture shapes the consciousness forms of its members, its members can also influence the culture itself. At this point, attention should be paid to these two extreme views. First, people are not fully shaped by their culture. The assumption that the culture is not open to internal and external influences, is a consistent and unchangeable whole, and that individuals are passive and not critical, lead to the danger of cultural determinism. Second is the belief that culture is insignificant and ineffective; and the individuals are transcendent beings that are never affected by the culture in which they are involved. People can critically approach the cultures they are in and they can go out of it in different ways, but whether they are aware of it or not, they are largely shaped by their cultures. For this reason, there is also a danger of being thrown into a position that neglects the influence of culture and its power while avoiding cultural determinism.

There is a “danger” in cultural relativism similar to the one in ethnocentrism. The argument that every culture is meaningful and important in itself is not disturbing without any doubt. So, are all cultures equally valuable? Can all cultures be not evaluated or judged from the outside? Should all cultures be respected equally? For example, if a culture does not respect the right to life of people inside or outside of it, should it be regarded as “valuable in itself ” and respected? Only these questions should have already shown us that while ethnocentrism takes us to one edge, cultural relativism takes us to the other one. All cultures can be valuable, but receiving equal respect can only be possible to the extent that they respect individual rights and freedom, especially the right to life. If a culture says, “The honor of a woman comes before everything else and the woman is killed to clean her honor,” it would be very problematic and inhuman to consider this culture equally valuable as others and to avoid criticizing and judging the culture (or the custom).

With the concept of the invention of tradition or invented tradition, Hobsbawm emphasizes that “the origins of some of the traditions that seem or claim to be old are based on a very close past,” and that “sometimes these traditions are invented.” Many of the traditions that we assume to emerge in the ancient times are actually the traditions that have been “invented” relatively recently. When these traditions are invented, they are definitely linked to a certain historical past and it is aimed to establish a continuity with the past. However, this continuity is largely artificial and fictional. A number of practices that hold societies together and are called “traditions” are not really that old. They were “invented” with the function of strengthening and reinforcing national identity, especially in the process of nation state formation.

Grobalization is a combination of the words ‘growth’ and ‘globalization.’ Grobalization implies the imperialistic goals, desires, and needs of big businesses or companies (e.g. McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, Disney and Hollywood) or even entire nations to settle in diverse areas of the world so that their supremacy and impact can grow. Ritzer uses the term ‘grobaliation’ — rather than globaliation — because it explicitly refers to the ‘growth imperatives of organiations and nations to expand globally and to impose themselves on the local’. “In other words, grobalisation is both a specific and a radical form of globalisation. Grobalisation demonstrates that global capitalism can reign. Globalisation is more general and refers, succinctly, to global interconnectedness or the global diffusion of practices. In and of itself, globalisation is not monolithic. It is not a homogenising force that coerces local cultures to embrace its norms, practices, and values”