Defining Culture: Tylor to Practice Theory

The "complex whole" including knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, and custom acquired by humans as members of society — culture as an inventory of traits.

Radical: culture is acquired (not biologically inherited) and forms a complex whole. Unacceptable: he ranked cultures on a single ladder from savagery to civilization.

The 19th-century idea that all societies progress through one fixed sequence (savagery → barbarism → civilization), with Victorian England at the top; it turned culture into a ranking device.

The view that there are cultures, plural, each the product of its own particular history, borrowings, and accidents — no single evolutionary sequence.

They are three independent variables, not one package: people of different ancestries can share a culture, and related languages need not mean shared culture.

Each culture is a coherent configuration, a "personality writ large," selecting a few possibilities from the great arc of human potential — criticized for over-integrating culture.

A system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms — "webs of significance" that humans themselves have spun.

Geertz's method: not recording behavior but interpreting what it means within local public codes of meaning.

An identical eyelid contraction may be a twitch, a wink, a parody of a wink, or a rehearsed parody; only the involuntary twitch is not culture — meaning requires local codes.

His cultures appear too tidy, consensual, and timeless — ignoring who authors meanings, who benefits, and where power and conflict enter.