ABSTRACT
In chapter 2 we articulated seven themes for defining culture. Each of these themes was further specified by subthemes. This new approach to defining and, therefore, describing culture provides a language for talking about culture that, in many ways, stands on its own. However, it should be clear to even the casual reader that each theme has its own strengths and weaknesses, and that these may by evaluated in comparison with each other. Furthermore, in discussing these themes while drafting chapter 2, we found ourselves struggling with the overlapping and interpenetrating relationships between and among themes. Even as we attempted to present exemplars of one definition, elements of another definition often were present. This led us, at times, to group them (e.g., structural-functional definitions) and, in our minds, articulate relationships between and among the themes. These groupings (and regroupings) emerged each time we tried to explain a theme as belonging to a pure and differentiated set.
Accordingly, we decided that a second level of analysis was needed, one that models the relationships between and among these definitions. In this chapter we present an analysis of each theme, then suggest some models to describe their interrelationships.
