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 (Tylor, 1871)

The sum total of knowledge, attitudes, and habitual behavior patterns shared and transmitted by members of a particular society (Linton, 1940)

[All the] historically created designs for living, explicit and implicit, rational, irrational, and nonrational, which exist at any given time as potential guides for the behavior of man (Kluckhohn & Kelly, 1945)

The mass of learned and transmitted motor reactions, habits, techniques, ideas, and values—and the behavior they induce (Kroeber, 1948)

The man-made part of the environment (Herskovits, 1955)

Patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts (Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952)

Culture is all those means whose forms are not under genetic control which serve to adjust individual and groups within their ecological communities (Binford, 1968, p. 323)

Culture is a set of shared ideals, values, and standards of behavior; it is the common denominator that makes the actions of individuals intelligible to the group. Because they share a common culture, people can predict each other’s actions in a given circumstance and react accordingly. A set of rules or standards shared by members of a society that when acted upon by the members, produce behavior that falls within a range the members consider proper and acceptable. (Haviland, 1975)

We may define culture as the totality of the learned and shared patterns of belief and behavior of a human group. (Aceves & King, 1978)

Learned behavior copied from another (Steadman, 1982)

We will restrict the term culture to an ideational system. Cultures in this sense comprise systems of shared ideas, systems of concepts and rules and meanings that underlie and are expressed in the ways that humans live. Culture, so defined, refers to what humans learn, not what they do and make. As Goodenough (1961, p. 522) expressed it, this knowledge provides "standards for deciding what is,…for deciding what can be,…for deciding how one feels about it,…for deciding what to do about it,…and for deciding how to go about doing it." (Kessing & Strathern 1998, p. 16)

There is agreement that culture is learned from others while growing up in a particular society or group; is widely shared by the members of that society or group; and so profoundly affects the thoughts, actions, and feelings of people in that group that anthropologists commonly say that "individuals are a product of their culture. (Bailey & Peoples, 1999)

"CULTURE: (1) the set of capacities which distinguishes Homo sapiens as a species and which is fundamental to its mode of adaptation. (2) The learned, cumulative product of all social life. (3) The distinctive patterns of thought, action, and values that characterize the members of a society or social group (4) A series of mutually incompatible concepts, developing after the Second World War:

(a) in social anthropology, the arrangements of belief and custom through which social relations are expressed;
(b) in materialist studies, the patterned knowledge, techniques, and behavior through which humans adapt to the natural world;
(c) in ethnoscience, a set of standards for behavior considered authoritative within a society;
(d) in symbolic studies, a system of meanings through which social life is interpreted.
Robert Winthrop (1991) Dictionary of Concepts in Cultural Anthropology. NY: Greenwood Press. p. 50

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Culture is "an ideal of human perfection...increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy."
Matthew Arnold (1869: 64) Culture and Anarchy

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"Culture may be defined as the totality of the mental and physical reactions and activities that characterize the behavior of the individuals composing a social group collectively and individually in relation to their natural environment, to other groups, to members of the group itself and of each individual to himself. It also includes the products of these activities and their role in the life of the groups. The mere enumeration of these various aspects of life, however, does not constitute culture. It is more, for its elements are not independent, they have a structure."
Franz Boas (1963--orig. 1938) The Mind of Primitive Man. New York: Macmillan. p. 149.

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"Culture is a class of things and events, dependent upon symboling, considered in an extrasomatic context."
Leslie White (1959) "The Concept of Culture" American Anthropologist 61(2)

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"Culture consists of the more or less organized system of learned, prescribed understandings complexly shared by a group of people."
Marc J. Swartz:

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"Culture is all those means whose forms are not under direct genetic control..which serve to adjust individuals and groups within their ecological communities"
Lewis Binford

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"The culture concept comes down to behavior patterns associated with particular groups of peoples, that is to "customs" or to a people's way of life."
Marvin Harris

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"A society's culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members. Culture is not a material phenomenon; it does not consist of things, people, behavior, or emotions. It is rather an organization of these things. It is the form of things that people have in mind, their models for perceiving, relating , and otherwise interpreting them...
Culture....consists of standards for deciding what is...for deciding what can be, ...for deciding what one feels about it,...for deciding what to do about it, and...for deciding how to go about doing it. "
Ward Goodenough