Introduction

To most of us, culture means something like a society's traditions, its values, norms and beliefs. Culture also refers to artistic activity, its products and the historical heritage of a society. In addition, most of us would agree that culture is linked to the collective identity of communities and, as such, refers to differences between societies.

What ties all these meanings together? What is culture exactly? It is when we start thinking about these questions that things start to get blurry. In spite of the attention that has been paid to culture in social sciences over the centuries, we are still no closer to an unambiguous, widely accepted definition of the term. Conceptualizations of culture vary across disciplines, between schools and simply between authors. In their authoritative review of the culture concept, Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1963) had already counted more than 170 different definitions of culture in the literature. Another half a century of social sciences later that number has increased only further. Although we all seem to have vague ideas of what culture is about, it seems to be very difficult to agree on its exact definition.

This lack of a clear-cut, unambiguous definition is a rich source of misunderstandings in debates. The fact that most of us have a notion of what culture is in the back of our minds only adds to this.