Defining Culture: The Challenges Involved
Culture is a complex and fuzzy phenomenon, and it is difficult to encompass its richness and intricacies in a single definition. Early attempts at defining it were too broad to be operationalize easily. Capturing the breadth of the concept while at the same time narrowing it so that it is useful—in the words of Clifford Geertz (1973), making it a “more powerful concept”— has been a major focus of anthropological theorizing for decades. The various narrower definitions have taken different direc- tions, and theorists have not reached agreement on any one definition.