ABSTRACT
All cultural phenomena are invariably related to certain other cultural phenomena to which they are similar and which precede or succeed them or occur near them contemporaneously; and their fullest understanding can be attained only through cognizance of these relations. This chapter focuses on the present construction of culture as a category and discusses its complexity and some unfortunate forms of reasoning to which it leads, before moving on to what might be done about it. A minimum of reflection suggests that the trouble must spring from a weakness in the present construction of our whole category of culture, as well as from the diversity of tasks for which we employ it. Generalizations about a category are valid only in regard to those features that members of the category have in common. The mode-of-acquisition clause recurs in later anthropological definitions in the specification of culture as “learned behavior” or even “ideas transmitted through symbols.”
