The classic definition — E. B. Tylor (1871): culture is "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." (Note: law is inside culture on this definition — remember this for Unit 3.)
Elements:
• Material culture — tools, houses, roads, temples, phones.
• Non-material culture — beliefs, values, norms, language, knowledge, law.
Characteristics: culture is learned (not instinct), shared, transmitted (socialisation — Unit 4), cumulative, integrated (parts hang together), symbolic, and dynamic (it changes — Unit 5).
Key concepts (short-question bank):
• Ethnocentrism — judging other cultures by one's own standards (the high-caste prejudice against "matwali" drinking customs is a Nepali case).
• Cultural relativism — understanding each culture in its own terms (a professional ethic for both anthropologists and judges).
• Xenocentrism — the opposite vice: preferring the foreign (the status chase for imported goods and foreign degrees).
• Cultural lag — W. F. Ogburn: material culture changes faster than non-material culture; norms and law fall behind technology (Nepali example: cheap smartphones and social media arrived years before any serious regulation or family norms adapted — cyber-harassment, misinformation).
• Sanskritization — M. N. Srinivas: lower groups emulate upper-caste customs to raise ritual status (historically pervasive in the hills); its post-1990 mirror is ethnic assertion — groups de-Sanskritising, reviving languages and shamanic traditions as a matter of identity and rights.