Is culture a behavior, or an extra-human context?

Health · Published 7 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Anthropologists have long debated whether culture is something humans do or something they create. While animals can learn behaviors, only humans assign arbitrary meanings to sounds and objects. This unique ability—symboling—allows us to move beyond biology into a shared world of abstract rules, rituals, and collective identities.

The definition of culture has shifted significantly over the last century. In 1871, Edward Burnett Tylor defined it as a 'complex whole' including knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, and customs acquired by humans as members of society. However, by the mid-20th century, scholars like A.L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn began to argue that culture is not behavior itself—which they relegated to psychology—but rather an 'abstraction from behavior.'

To resolve this, Leslie A. White proposed a distinction based on context. When we view actions in relation to the human organism (what an individual does), it is behavior. When we view those same actions in their relationship to one another—such as how a taboo relates to a society's division of labor or technology—it becomes culture. This means that language, for instance, is only 'language' when considered as a system of lexicon and grammar rather than just the act of speaking.

Hong Kong serves as a vivid case study of this complexity in action. Its identity is a synthesis of Lingnan Cantonese heritage and British colonial influence (1841–1997). This manifests in 'Kongish,' where Cantonese is sprinkled with English loanwords, and in the coexistence of diverse Sinitic languages like Hakka, which shares almost zero mutual intelligibility with Cantonese. These linguistic layers illustrate how culture functions as a dynamic, evolving system of symboling that shapes social reality.

Ultimately, culture is defined by 'symboling'—the human capacity to assign meanings that cannot be grasped by the senses alone. Whether it is the specific architecture of a walled village or the abstract rules of a 'one country, two systems' framework, culture provides the extra-human context that allows humans to build resilient, inclusive communities.

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