Anthropological Definitions of Culture: From Tylor to Kluckhohn

Ask ten anthropologists to define “culture,” and you’ll likely get ten different answers. That’s not a flaw in the discipline-it’s a reflection of how vast and layered the concept really is. Culture shapes everything from the language you speak to the food on your plate to the values you hold without even questioning them. Over the past 150 years, anthropologists have tried to pin down this slippery idea, each adding a new dimension to our understanding. Let’s walk through how the definition of culture evolved, from Edward Tylor’s foundational statement in 1871 to the more layered descriptions offered by later scholars.

Tylor’s classic definition of culture 🔗

Edward Burnett Tylor, often called the father of social anthropology, gave anthropology its first formal definition of culture in his 1871 book Primitive Culture. He described it 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.”

This single sentence set the tone for a century of anthropological thought, and it holds up remarkably well even today. Three ideas stand out in it.

Culture as a complex whole: Tylor didn’t see culture as one thing-a belief system, or a set of customs, or an art form. He saw it as an interconnected bundle of everything a society knows, believes, and does, both the things you can touch and the things you can’t.

Culture as acquired, not inherited: This is a crucial distinction. You don’t inherit culture biologically the way you inherit eye colour. You learn it. A child born in Kerala and raised in Punjab from infancy would grow up speaking Punjabi, eating Punjabi food, and following Punjabi customs-not because of genetics, but because of upbringing.

Culture as a product of society: Tylor’s definition makes it clear that culture only exists because humans live in groups. A person raised in complete isolation, with no social contact, would not develop what we recognise as culture. It has to be transmitted from one person to another, generation after generation.

Tangible and intangible aspects of culture 🔗

One of the most useful ways to unpack Tylor’s “complex whole” is to split culture into what you can observe directly and what you can’t.

What you can see 🔗

Tangible aspects of culture are the visible, observable markers of a society. A woman wearing a saree signals Indian cultural roots almost instantly. Chopsticks used across China, Japan, and Korea point to a shared East Asian eating tradition, even though the three countries differ in language and history. Dress patterns, food habits, architecture, and rituals all fall into this bucket-they’re the parts of culture you could photograph.

What you can’t see, but can feel 🔗

Intangible aspects are trickier. Knowledge systems, moral codes, values, beliefs, and customs don’t have a physical form, yet they shape behaviour constantly. You can’t photograph “respect for elders” or “belief in karma,” but you can observe them in how people act-touching an elder’s feet, or avoiding certain actions out of a belief in consequences down the line.

Both dimensions work together. A wedding ceremony, for instance, has tangible elements-the clothes, the food, the decorations-and intangible ones-the values around family, commitment, and social approval that the ceremony represents. Neither half tells the full story on its own.

Herskovits and culture as the man-made environment 🔗

A few decades after Tylor, American anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits offered a more compact but equally powerful definition. He described culture as “the man-made part of the environment”-a phrase that shifts the focus from what culture includes to how it comes into being.

This framing highlights something Tylor’s definition doesn’t emphasise as directly: the relationship between humans and their natural surroundings. Every society draws on the resources around it to build its culture, and the environment often dictates what that culture looks like.

A vivid example comes from northeastern India, where bamboo is woven into almost every stage of life. Communities there use bamboo to cut the umbilical cord at birth, and bamboo poles and structures appear at funeral rites as well. In between, bamboo is used to store water, cook food, build baskets, and irrigate fields. The plant is so deeply embedded in daily life that it’s difficult to imagine the region’s material culture without it. Herskovits’ definition helps explain why: the abundance of bamboo in the local environment shaped how people built, cooked, and even marked life’s major transitions.

Material and non-material culture explained 🔗

Building on the tangible-intangible split, anthropologists often use a more formal pair of terms: material culture and non-material culture.

Material culture covers all the tangible things a society creates from its environment-tools, clothing, houses, and everyday objects. In the Arctic, for example, communities historically built igloos out of packed snow, using the one resource that was abundant and effective for insulation in that climate. In India’s forest regions, bamboo and mud houses served the same function, using locally available material suited to the terrain and weather.

Non-material culture, on the other hand, includes ideas, knowledge, values, beliefs, and norms. These don’t have a physical form, but they show up constantly in behaviour-how people greet each other, what they consider polite or rude, what they believe happens after death.

What makes this pairing especially interesting is how the two influence each other. Take the shift from traditional mud houses to modern concrete ones in many Indian villages. That’s a change in material culture. But it’s driven by non-material culture-changing ideas about status, durability, modernity, and comfort. People don’t just build differently because materials changed; they build differently because their values and aspirations changed first. Material and non-material culture are constantly feeding into one another, which is part of why culture as a whole is so hard to pin down with a single definition.

Malinowski’s instrumental view of culture 🔗

Bronisław Malinowski approached culture from a completely different angle-not what it contains, but what it does. He called culture an “instrumental apparatus” that helps humans cope with the concrete problems they face while satisfying their needs.

In Malinowski’s view, every element of culture exists because it serves a function. Basic biological needs-food, shelter, safety, reproduction-come first. But meeting these needs in an organised, social way creates derived needs: economic systems to distribute food, legal systems to maintain order, educational systems to pass on skills. Religion, art, language, and social institutions all emerge, in his framework, as responses to these layered human requirements.

This is quite different from Tylor’s descriptive approach. Tylor asked “what is culture made of?” Malinowski asked “why does culture exist at all?” His answer: culture is a tool. It’s the mechanism through which humans, as biological organisms living in groups, manage to survive and function. A marriage isn’t just a tradition-it’s an institution that emerged to organise reproduction, resource-sharing, and childcare. A legal system isn’t just a set of rules-it’s a mechanism for maintaining social order so that groups can function without constant conflict.

Kluckhohn and Kelly’s descriptive concept 🔗

Clyde Kluckhohn, working with William Kelly, offered one of the most detailed descriptions of culture in anthropological literature. They described it as “the accumulated treasury of human creation: books, paintings, buildings, and the like; the knowledge of ways of adjusting to our surroundings, both human and physical; language, customs, and systems of etiquette, ethics, religion and morals” built up over generations.

This definition reads almost like an inventory-it tries to list out everything culture might contain, from the physical (buildings, paintings) to the behavioural (etiquette, customs) to the philosophical (ethics, religion). It treats culture as an accumulated inheritance, something each generation adds to and passes forward, rather than something invented fresh each time.

Kluckhohn later refined this idea further, describing culture as consisting of patterned ways of thinking, feeling, and reacting, acquired and transmitted mainly through symbols. He emphasised that the essential core of culture lies in traditional ideas and the values attached to them. This is a subtle but important addition: culture isn’t just a random collection of customs and objects. It has structure and pattern. And it moves from person to person primarily through symbols-language being the most obvious example, but also gestures, rituals, and shared meanings attached to objects and events.

Why so many definitions? 🔗

Looking at these definitions side by side, a pattern emerges. Tylor gave anthropology its starting point-a broad, inclusive definition of culture as learned, social, and complex. Herskovits sharpened the focus on the human-environment relationship. Malinowski shifted attention to function-what culture does for people. And Kluckhohn and Kelly returned to description, but with more precision, highlighting pattern, symbol, and inherited value.

None of these definitions cancels out the others. Instead, each highlights a different facet of the same phenomenon, much like how material and non-material culture work together rather than in isolation. Together, they give us a fuller picture: culture is learned, it’s shaped by environment, it serves human needs, and it’s transmitted through symbols and patterns across generations.

What do you think? When you look at your own daily habits-the food you eat, the language you switch between, the customs you follow without thinking-which of these definitions feels closest to how culture actually works in your life? And can you think of an object around you that carries both material and non-material meaning at once?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Primitive-Culture-by-Tylor
2. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/culture-cogsci/
3. https://scroll.in/magazine/867273/baskets-boats-and-bridges-the-many-forms-that-versatile-bamboo-can-take
4. https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences-and-law/sociology-and-social-reform/sociology-general-terms-and-concepts/material-culture
5. https://anthropology.ua.edu/theory/functionalism/
6. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/65426/1/Unit-5.pdf