the entertainment of others goes back centuries and the American tradition of professional musicians playing for dances and parties is decades old, they were not doing it the way people who play for peasant parties in Greece or Mexico do, playing songs their grandparents played, perhaps on the same instruments. No, they were playing songs no more than twenty or thirty years old, songs their grandfathers never knew; in fact, few of their grandfathers had been musicians in whatever countries they came from, and, by becoming musicians themselves, these men were doing something untraditional in their families (and usually something not desired by their families either). They, of course, had learned to do many of the things they were doing from others who were slightly older, as I had learned many of the tricks of being a weekend musician when I was fifteen from people as old as seventeen or eighteen, who had in turn learned them from still older people. But, still, they did not know how to do what they were doing because it was traditional.
Many other people would insist that, if we are to call something culture, it must be part of a larger system, in which the various parts not only cohere in the sense of being noncontradictory, but, more than that, harmonize in the sense of being different versions of the same underlying themes. Such people would not use the term “culture” to describe the patterns of cooperation of the weekend musicians unless those patterns were also reflected in the music they played, the clothing they wore, the way they spent their leisure time, and so on. But none of that was true because they were not just musicians, and much of what they did reflected understandings they had acquired by participating in other social arenas in which the musicians’ culture was irrelevant and vice versa. Nor, in any event, did they play what they might have played if they had been free to express their cultural understandings, for what they played was largely what they were paid to play (polkas on Friday, mambos on Saturday).
And many people would insist that my example is misleading to begin with, for the kinds of coherence that constitute “real” culture occur only at the level of the whole society. But if we connect culture to activities people carry on with one another, then we have to ask what all the members of a whole society do, or what they all do together, that requires them to share these general understandings. There are such things, but I think they tend to be rather banal and not at the level usually meant in discussions of general cultural themes. Thus, we all use the money of our society and know how many of the smaller units make one of the larger ones. Less trivially, we probably share understandings about how to behave in public, the things Edward T. Hall and Erving Goffman have written about—how close to stand to someone when we talk or how much space someone is entitled to in a public place, for example. But, even if for the sake of the argument we imagine that some substantial body of such materials exists, as it might in a relatively undifferentiated or rural society, that would not help us understand how the weekend musicians did their trick, and we would need some other term for what they were able to do and the web of shared understandings they used to do it.
Other people have other requirements for what can be called culture, all of which can be subjected to similar criticisms. Some think that culture, to be “really” culture, must be built in some deep way into the personalities of the people who carry it; others require that culture consist of “basic values,” whatever might be meant by that. In neither case would the activities of the Saturday night musicians qualify as culture, however, if those definitional requirements were observed.
Normally, of course, we can define terms any way we want, but in the case of culture, several things seem to limit our freedom. The two most important are the quasi ownership of the term by anthropologists and the ambiguity of the word with respect to the problem of “high culture,” to which I will return later. Anthropologists, and most other people, regard culture as anthropology’s key concept and assume that the discipline is therefore entitled to make the definition. But anthropologists do not agree on a definition of culture; indeed, they differ spectacularly among themselves, as a famous compendium by Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn demonstrates. That did not dissuade Kroeber and Talcott Parsons from signing a jurisdictional agreement (like those by which the building trades decide how much of the work carpenters can do and where electricians must take over) giving “culture” to anthropology and “society” to sociology. But the social sciences, unlike the building trades, have not respected the deal their leaders made.
Which of these additional criteria, if any, should be incorporated into the definition of culture I have already given? Do we need any of them? Do we lose anything by using the most minimal definition of culture, as the shared understandings that people use to coordinate their activities? I think not. We have an inclusive term which describes not only the Saturday night musicians and the way they accomplish their feat of coordination, but all the other combinations of attributes that turn up in real life, raising questions about when they go together and when they do not.
Much depends on what kind of archetypal case you want the definition to cover, since a small Stone Age tribe living at the headwaters of the Amazon, which has never been in contact with European civilization, is obviously quite different from such typical products of twentieth-century urban America as the weekend musicians. The kinds of collective action required in the two situations differ enormously and, consequently, the kinds of shared understandings participants can rely on vary concomitantly. Many anthropologists have a kind of temperamental preference for the simplicity, order, and predictability of less complicated societies, in which everyone knows what everyone else is supposed to do, and in which there is a “design for living.” If you share that preference, then you can turn culture into an honorific term by denying it to those social arrangements which do not “deserve” it, thereby making a disguised moral judgment about those ways of life. But that leaves a good part of modern life, not just the Saturday night musicians, out of the culture sphere altogether.
How does culture—shared understanding—help people to act collectively? People have ideas about how a certain kind of activity might be carried on. They believe others share these ideas and will act on them if they understand the situation in the same way. They believe further that the people they are interacting with believe that they share these ideas too, so everyone thinks that everyone else has the same idea about how to do things. Given such circumstances, if everyone does what seems appropriate, action will be sufficiently coordinated for practical purposes. Whatever was under way will get done—the meal served, the child dealt with, the job finished, all well enough so that life can proceed.
The cultural process, then, consists of people doing something in line with their understanding of what one might best do under the given circumstances. Others, recognizing what was done as appropriate, will then consult their notions of what might be done and do something that seems right to them, to which others in return will respond similarly, and so on. If everyone has the same general ideas in mind, and does something congruent with that image or collection of ideas, then what people do will fit together. If we all know the melody and harmony of “Exactly Like You,” and improvise accordingly, whatever comes out will sound reasonable to the players and listeners, and a group of perfect strangers will sound like they know what they are doing.
Consider another common situation. A man and woman meet and find each other interesting. At some stage of their relationship, they may consider any of a variety of ways of organizing their joint activities. Early on, one or the other might propose that they “have a date.” Later, one or the other might, subtly or forthrightly, suggest that they spend the night together. Still later, they might try “living together.” Finally, they might decide to “get married.” They might skip some of these stages and they might not follow that progression, which in contemporary America is a progression of increasingly formal commitment. In other societies and at other times, of course, the stages and the relationships would differ. But, whatever their variety, insofar as there are names for those relationships and stages, and insofar as most or all of the people in a society know those names and have an idea of what they imply as far as continuing patterns of joint activity are concerned, then the man and woman involved will be able to organize what they do by referring to those guideposts. When one or the other suggests one of these possibilities, the partner will know, more or less, what is being suggested without requiring
