Culture is a set of patterns of behaviour within a group and the symbolic structures that give meaning to those patterns. It includes the ideas, values and beliefs of the group as well as the way that members behave, whether overtly or unconsciously. A large number of cultural traits can be recognised, such as language, architecture, dress, foods and arts. Culture also includes the norms of social behaviour, which are largely determined by age, gender and status, and it can include values such as loyalty and honour.
A person enters the world as a “cultureless” human being, but his behaviour is powerfully influenced by his culture. It can hold his sex drive in check and encourage premarital chastity or even a voluntary vow of celibacy. It can cause him to die of hunger, even though food is available, because the culture dictates that certain foods are unclean. It can lead him to worship idols, or he may be driven to disembowel himself to remove a stain of dishonour from his body.
Several theories of culture have been advanced, most of them with some degree of empirical support. Kroeber and Kluckhohn were among the first to argue that cultural behaviour is a product of the environment and thus a phenomenon that can be studied in its own right. This led to the development of anthropology, which treats culture as an object for study.
The evolution of cultures has been compared with the evolution of living organisms, and it is possible to find evidence for both processes in archaeological sites. For example, amber from the Baltic is found in burial mounds near the Mediterranean; early coins from the Middle East are discovered in cave paintings in aboriginal northern Europe; and macaw feathers from Central America show up in Native American artifacts in northwestern United States.
There is a growing understanding that cultures vary in the extent to which they promote emancipative values, or those that support equality, freedom and autonomy for their members. Some cultures are more emancipative than others, which makes it possible to define cultural competence as a continuum, from the most negative end of the range (e.g. attitudes and policies that result in the destruction of a culture, such as cultural genocide), through to the positive end (e.g. agencies that hold a culture in high esteem and are capable of conducting research to develop therapeutic approaches that are culturally competent). The latter is the goal of the cultural competency movement. Several studies have attempted to measure cultural competence using a variety of instruments, including questionnaires and structured interviews. Most of these involve direct sample-level measurement, but some, such as the GLOBE project of House et al. (2004), have analyzed the linkage between national culture and organizational culture, using data from managers in electronics and food processing industries. Such indirect measures are likely to be valid and reliable, as long as they have been carefully controlled for the effects of individual-level variables.