What is Culture?

Cultural components

Cultures have many different rules that can be grouped by the aspects of life they affect. You can think of groups of rules as components that come together to form a complete set of cultural rules. Remember, however, that every cultural component interacts with, influences, and is influenced by every other cultural component. Some cultural components are:

Adaptation: The main purpose of culture is to promote the survival of the human group that lives within the culture. The challenges of daily life are ever changing. For a culture to thrive, it must adapt to new challenges as they arise. If a culture cannot adapt, it collapses, disappears or remakes itself.
Food: Every culture has its own rules about food. These rules define how to attain food, what foods are edible, what foods are taboo, who can and cannot eat certain foods, what the proper ways to eat are, what feasting celebrations exist and when they take place, and more. Food and the rules about food distinguish one culture from another. Humans use several different types of subsistence strategies to get the food they need to survive.
Technology: All human cultures (and some non-human cultures) use technology to make life easier. Technology includes everything from a rock used to stun an animal to the International Space Station.
Language: Language is an arbitrary system of signs (usually verbal) that facilitates communication between members of a culture. It also distinguishes members of one culture from another. Language is a biologically innate human ability. Barring any dysfunction, all humans can and do use language. Language is both verbal (spoken) and nonverbal (signed). Language is not writing. Writing is not an innate biological ability. It is a culturally imposed, arbitrary system of symbols that represents language.
Community: Community is the human group. Individuals within a community identify with one another through their shared culture. The people within a community work together for a common good (survival) following the rules their culture dictates. Community also helps to define who the people of a culture consider related ("we") and who the people consider outsiders ("they").
Enculturation: Enculturation is the transmission of culture from one generation to the next. Culture is learned from family members, peers, and other members within the community. It can take place by informal means, such as story telling at bed time, as well as through formal means, such as schools. No matter the means of the transmission, the goal of enculturation is the same. It must teach the rules of a culture to the young members of that culture.
Religion: Religion encompasses everything that is supernatural. Religion exists in every culture in a variety of forms. It provides the members of a culture a means to exert control over otherwise uncontrollable circumstances, or to explain what is otherwise unexplainable. Religion permeates the culture in which it exists, even if not every member of the culture follows it. Religion also governs many events and milestones a culture places importance on, such as ceremonies to mark passage into adulthood.
Legend: Legend can have both religious and secular origins. It places a culture in time and provides mythical and historical background for the culture. Legend explains how a culture came into being and emphasizes important past events the culture experienced. All cultures have creation myths, and in most cases these creation myths fix the people of the culture that believe them as the center of creation.
Aesthetics: Aesthetics pertain to what a culture defines as beautiful or pleasant. It encompasses such things as art and physical beauty. A culture's aesthetic values are seen in such things as pottery, clothing, stories, body adornment and mutilation, architecture, and more. Aesthetics pertaining to the body are governed by, and govern, rules pertaining to sex.
Sex and Marriage: Culture defines the rules governing reproduction. In anthropological terms, marriage is a contract for exclusive sexual rights and validates the kinship of offspring. Cultural rules define which sexual behaviors are normal and which are abhorrent. For instance, all cultures have taboos on incest, but each culture may define what constitutes incest differently. Also, not all cultures have taboos on homosexuality. Of the cultures that do have taboos, what constitutes homosexuality may vary.
Family and Kinship: Kinship rules define family and track heredity. Heredity is important not only for deciding inheritance, but also to shape politics, solidify a community and define "we" and "they." Human biological diversity is an overt expression of kinship and is often used as a tool in defining or legitimating other components of a culture.
Wealth: All cultures use wealth as a measurement of status. Wealth is anything that a culture considers valuable, from sheep or cattle, to spiritual enlightenment, to a personal jet. Each culture has its own rules on the proper ways to attain wealth, and the responsibilities wealth brings.
Politics: Politics is a general term for power and how people use power to influence both their own and other cultures. Politics affects every human interaction from family to nations. Legitimacy of this power is defined differently in every culture and can be based on any one cultural component or combination of components. For instance, one culture might legitimate power based on kinship and language while another legitimates power based on religious belief.

Even though these components are presented in discreet chunks, it's important to remember that each component doesn't exist in a vacuum. Each defines, and is defined by, the others, producing a web of rules for every culture. These rules may compliment each other or contradict each other.