Q.How does the understanding of culture in social science differ from the everyday use of the word 'culture'?

In everyday speech, 'culture' is often narrowed down to mean refined taste -- an appreciation of classical music, dance or painting -- something that is thought to set apart 'cultured' people from the rest, and can extend even to something as small as preferring one drink over another. Social science rejects this narrow, hierarchical sense of the word. For a sociologist or anthropologist, culture is not a mark that distinguishes some individuals from others within a society; it is the entire shared way of life that every member of a group participates in, regardless of class or education, since every social organisation -- a family, a workplace, a nation -- develops a culture of its own that all its members share in some form.

This broader, social-science sense of culture is usually traced back to the British anthropologist Edward Tylor, who in 1871 defined culture as 'that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.' What stands out about this definition is how comprehensive it is: it treats ideas, beliefs, laws and customs as being just as much a part of culture as art is, and -- crucially -- it frames all of this as something acquired through membership in a group, learned rather than inherited by birth. Later anthropologists built on and complicated this idea further. Bronislaw Malinowski's definition explicitly added material artefacts and technical processes to the list, correcting an imbalance in Tylor's largely non-material emphasis. Clifford Geertz went further still, arguing that human action should be studied the way we study a text -- as something meaningful, part of the 'webs of significance' that people themselves create -- shifting the goal of cultural analysis from explaining causes to interpreting meaning.

Because this wide range of scholarly definitions can seem overwhelming, it helps to notice what they share: words like 'way', 'learn' and 'behaviour' recur across nearly all of them, even as individual definitions emphasise different things -- some treat culture as a mental orientation (a way of thinking or feeling), others as the total, lived pattern of a people's life, and still others as a mechanism that regulates behaviour through shared norms. None of these is simply the 'correct' definition displacing the others; each captures a genuine facet of what culture does. The single, essential contrast to hold onto is this: everyday usage treats culture as something that marks out an educated few, while social science treats culture as the shared, learned way of life of an entire group, encompassing everything from its beliefs and laws to its tools and customs.