What is Culture?

In the scientific sense “culture” does not mean unusual refinement or education, but the whole of social tradition.

The expert put it as “capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”

Culture includes all these capabilities and habits in contrast to those numerous traits acquired otherwise, namely by biological heredity.

Passing from one social group to another we at once discover differences that can not be due to anything but social convention.

An American who travels in England finds that afternoon tea is a fixed institution and that cars drive on the left side of the road; in Denmark every one is riding a bicycle; in Madrid, cafe patrons sit outdoors to sip their coffee and and are pestered by itinerant bootblacks and peddlers of lottery tickets. These are not American phenomena, but represent minor cultural differences.

If we travel to the Orient or put ourselves in imagination into ancient Greece, the disparity becomes much greater.

Every human being, however, has traits which he does not get from his society. Australian elders can teach a boy to throw a boomerang but they can not permanently alter his chocolate skin by smearing paints on it.

Skin color and other physical traits are inherited but by biological heredity.

An Australian child brought up by a white rancher tends sheep instead of throwing boomerangs at kangaroos; he may learn to write as do white children, and to drive an automobile.

But no matter how much he associates with whites the color of his skin the shape of his skull and the width of his nose remain unaffected because they can come to him only from his parents.

Thus every human being has a social and a racial (biological) inheritance. The two may be in some measure related, but they are different.
What is Culture?