The word "culture" is commonly heard in several different contexts. Many people think of popular things such as the latest songs or the new trends: what I and many others call pop culture. Culture is also used when discussing the people and behavior of people in a different country. When I traveled to Korea, I often found myself comparing and contrasting Korean and American culture, but I did not stop to ask myself what culture itself really meant. It seems that defining culture is a problem many have tried to solve, with little consensus as to the answer.
I am inclined to believe that culture should be defined as the way people behave. Many people might object to this, saying that people are deceptive in their actions, whether intentionally or unintentionally, but I believe that is all the more interesting. In fact, I believe that someone who lies about their intentions or is deceptive about something is disclosing more about themselves than someone who is being honest – to someone who knows they are being deceptive, that is.
Many definitions of culture seem to include what I would consider a rather one-sided view of the world, either by including only the positive or only the negative aspects of human behavior. In my opinion, culture should not be a subset of behavior. Any subset of mankind’s whole behavior is inevitably defined in terms of what one culture’s morals say about another culture’s morals. Culture should be able to be defined in a way such that its definition does not change, regardless of from whose perspective it is defined (bias will, of course, always be a concern, but not nearly as great of a concern as cultural ethics would be).
For that reason, only a universally defined, non-restricted definition of culture based on human behavior as a whole can properly represent culture at an academic level. Defining culture based on only a certain side of the moral spectrum causes the definition to shift based on the moral values held in different areas of the world, and as such does not provide a reliable definition. After all, what is a definition worth if it can change?
