Definitions...
As I have
been at pains to point-out, the concept of "culture", while at first sight
relatively simple to define, is actually a very difficult concept to
pin-down (in sociological jargon it's called a "slippery concept",
precisely because it is frequently escapes our ability to neatly categorise it).
This type of observation normally produces feelings of despair in students new to Sociology, mainly because they believe that if something as apparently straightforward, simple and understandable as the concept of culture is so difficult to define, there must be other ideas lurking "out there" that will be impossible to get to grips with later in the course.
While this may have some element of truth (the social world is filled with "difficult concepts"), the fact we find it so difficult to define culture can be used as part of the teaching and learning process. Rather than throw our hands up in despair at the impossibility of ever understanding anything, we need to recognise a far more important lesson, namely that when we are looking at the social world it is not a simple place in which to live.
We may, through our everyday actions, try to pretend life is relatively straightforward, simple and mundane, but to accept this is to overlook the rich complexity of human behaviour. Even the most mundane of actions - getting up in the morning, going to school, recognising friends, avoiding strangers and so forth - are actually very complex social processes, especially when we start to study them in some detail.
Thus, our inability to nail culture down alerts us to the fact that this might be a concept that has many different dimensions; that is, although we may be able to broadly-define the concept or far more interest to us might be the idea that it actually consists of a multitude of possible definitions and interpretations, each of which reflects a different aspect of the thing we call "culture". If we approach the concept in this way it becomes easier to understand and study.
Keeping this in mind, we can begin by looking at a number of definitions of "culture" which share the same basic focus, namely the production of a general overview to the concept.