Culture is a notoriously difficult term to define. In 1952, the American anthropologists, Kroeber and
Kluckhohn, critically reviewed concepts and definitions of culture, and compiled a list of 164
different definitions. Apte (1994: 2001), writing in the ten-volume Encyclopedia of Language and
Linguistics, summarized the problem as follows: ‘Despite a century of efforts to define culture
adequately, there was in the early 1990s no agreement among anthropologists regarding its nature.’