The Interplay of Society and Culture in Anthropology

No human group has ever been found living without some shared way of eating, dressing, worshipping, or organising family life. That shared way of doing things is culture, and the group that carries it forward is society. The two seem inseparable, yet anthropologists spend entire careers untangling exactly how they connect. Understanding this connection is one of the first steps to understanding why humans behave the way they do, wherever they live.

Culture as a system of knowledge 🔗

One of the most widely used definitions of culture in anthropology comes from M.J. Herskovits, who described it as the portion of our surroundings that human beings themselves have built. Unlike the physical environment of rivers, forests, and weather, culture is the layer of tools, beliefs, rules, and practices that people add on top of nature. This framing is still taught in introductory anthropology courses alongside E.B. Tylor’s equally famous definition of culture as the entire set of knowledge, belief, art, morals, and habits a person picks up simply by being part of a society.

Culture is knowledge, not instinct 🔗

Unlike instincts, which are hardwired, culture has to be built and stored collectively. Every generation contributes small pieces of knowledge, whether that is a farming technique, a religious ritual, or a way of resolving disputes, and this knowledge accumulates over centuries. Scholars such as Kluckhohn and Kelly have described culture as a set of historically created designs for living that guide behaviour without dictating it rigidly, while others like Kroeber pointed out that culture also includes the tools, techniques, and values that make everyday life possible. None of this knowledge is coded into human biology. It has to be learned.

Why humans need a cultural system at all 🔗

Most animals get by on instinct and a small amount of individual learning. Humans, by contrast, are born almost entirely unequipped to survive on their own; a newborn cannot feed itself, build shelter, or avoid danger without guidance. What compensates for this biological helplessness is culture, a stockpile of accumulated knowledge that each person can draw on without having to rediscover it from scratch. A farmer does not need to reinvent irrigation, and a new parent does not need to reinvent child-rearing practices, because both inherit centuries of accumulated trial and error in the form of cultural knowledge. This is what anthropologists mean when they call culture high in information: it stores far more collective experience than any single individual could gather in one lifetime.

Enculturation: passing knowledge across generations 🔗

The learning process through which a person absorbs the culture of their society is called enculturation. It begins in early childhood, largely within the family, and continues through schooling, religious institutions, peer groups, and community life. A child raised in Kerala and a child raised in Punjab both go through the same broad process of enculturation, but they end up internalising very different languages, food habits, and social expectations because the content of what is transmitted differs by region and community. Anthropologists trace the term back to Melville Herskovits himself, who used it to describe how an established culture shapes an individual’s values, norms, and behaviour until that person finds an accepted place within it.

What makes enculturation interesting is that it is rarely a one-way download. Children absorb existing norms, but they also question, adapt, and occasionally reject parts of what they are taught. This is why every generation ends up modifying the culture it inherits, even while broadly continuing it. Over decades, these small modifications add up to visible cultural change, whether in marriage practices, dietary habits, or attitudes toward work and gender roles, as documented in discussions of cultural transmission across generations.

The relationship between individual, society and culture 🔗

Culture on its own is inert. A body of customs, beliefs, and accumulated knowledge does nothing by itself; it needs someone to act on it. This is where the individual comes in. Anthropological teaching material frames the relationship precisely this way: culture supplies the information, and the individual supplies the energy. Once a person has internalised the norms of their culture through enculturation, they begin to behave according to it, and it is this behaviour that gives culture its visible, living form. Social life, in this sense, is what happens when the stored knowledge of culture meets the day-to-day actions of real people, as explained in material developed for social and cultural anthropology courses.

Why this distinction matters 🔗

Separating information from energy helps explain a puzzle that often confuses newcomers to anthropology: if everyone in a society shares roughly the same culture, why does behaviour still vary so much from person to person? The answer is that culture provides a range of acceptable options rather than a single fixed script. A wedding ceremony in Rajasthan follows broad cultural norms around rituals, families, and timing, but the exact way each family conducts it, negotiates it, or personalises it depends on the individuals involved. Culture sets the boundaries; individuals fill in the details through their own choices and circumstances.

The three-way link 🔗

This creates a triangular relationship between the individual, the collection of individuals that forms society, and the culture they share. None of the three can be fully understood in isolation. An individual only becomes recognisably human, in the social sense, by growing up within a society and absorbing its culture. A society only exists because a group of individuals share and act on a common culture. And culture only survives because individuals within a society keep practising, teaching, and adjusting it. Remove any one part of this triangle, and the other two stop making sense.

Consider a festival like Durga Puja or Onam. The culture supplies the myths, the rituals, and the calendar of when things should happen. Society supplies the pandal committees, the neighbourhood groups, and the extended families who organise and attend it. And individuals supply the actual labour of decorating, cooking, praying, and celebrating each year. Take away the individuals’ energy and the festival becomes nothing more than a description in a book. Take away the shared culture and there would be no common occasion for people to organise around in the first place.

This is also why anthropologists are cautious about treating culture as something that simply happens to people. Individuals are not passive recipients of a cultural script; they actively interpret, negotiate, and sometimes resist what they inherit. A person who questions an arranged marriage, or a young professional who blends traditional dress with Western clothing, is still working within a cultural framework, just reshaping it through individual action.

The symbiotic nature of society and culture 🔗

Society and culture are often described as two sides of the same coin, and the comparison holds up well under scrutiny. Society refers to the network of organised relationships between people, such as families, kinship groups, and institutions. Culture refers to the shared meanings, customs, and practices that those relationships carry and express. Anthropologist Ralph Linton captured this neatly by describing society as an organised group of individuals and culture as the organised set of learned responses that characterises a particular society. Put simply, society is the group of people, and culture is the pattern of behaviour that emerges from them living together.

You cannot fully separate the two 🔗

It is tempting to treat society and culture as separate objects of study, but in practice they cannot be pulled apart cleanly. A society without any shared culture would just be a random crowd of strangers, with no common language, no agreed rules, and no basis for cooperation. Equally, culture without a society to carry it would have no way to exist at all; beliefs and customs only survive because a group of people keeps practising and transmitting them. This is why the anthropologist S.F. Nadel distinguished the two not as separate things but as the same social reality viewed from different angles, one described in terms of relationships and groupings, and the other in terms of action and behaviour patterns.

Why anthropologists study both together 🔗

This interdependence is precisely why socio-cultural anthropology exists as a combined field rather than two separate disciplines. Studying social structure alone, such as family systems, caste networks, or political organisation, tells you how people are arranged in relation to one another, but not why they behave the way they do within those arrangements. Studying culture alone, such as beliefs, rituals, or values, tells you what people consider meaningful, but not how those meanings are organised and reproduced through real relationships. Only by studying both together can anthropologists build a complete picture of how human groups function, adapt, and change over time.

This is also a practical, not just theoretical, distinction. Fieldworkers studying a village typically map both dimensions at once: the social structure of kinship, caste, or occupational groups, and the cultural layer of beliefs, festivals, and everyday practices that give those groups meaning. A study that only counted household types without asking why families organise themselves that way, or one that only recorded beliefs without asking how those beliefs connect to actual family and community life, would each capture just half of the picture. Treating society and culture as one interconnected system, rather than two separate checklists, is what allows a holistic understanding of how a community actually works.

This combined lens becomes especially useful when looking at rapid social change. Migration, urbanisation, and digital technology are reshaping social structures across India at a fast pace, from joint families shifting toward nuclear households to new forms of community forming online. Each of these structural shifts carries cultural consequences, changing how festivals are celebrated, how marriages are arranged, and how younger generations relate to older traditions. Tracking only the social changes, or only the cultural ones, would miss half the story.

What do you think? 🔗

What do you think? Think about a tradition your family still follows today. Was it passed down to you mostly unchanged, or did each generation adjust it a little? And can you think of a social change around you, such as more people living in nuclear families or working remotely, that is quietly reshaping a cultural practice you grew up with?

References

1. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/93942/1/Unit-1.pdf
2. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/17124/1/Unit-2.pdf
3. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/antp02/chapter/enculturation-acculturation-and-transculturation/
4. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/culturalanthropology/chapter/enculturation/
5. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/65940/2/BLOCK%202.pdf
6. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/66016/1/Unit8.pdf