From The American Sociological Review 23(1958), 582-3

THE CONCEPTS OF CULTURE AND OF SOCIAL SYSTEM

A. L. Kroeber and Talcott Parsons
There seems to have been a good deal of confusion among anthropologists and
sociologists about the concepts of culture and society ( or, social system). A lack
of consensus - between and within disciplines has made for semantic
confusion as to what data are subsumed under these terms; but, more important,
the lack has impeded theoretical advance as to their interrelation,
There are still some anthropologists and sociologists who do not even consider
the distinction necessary on the ground that all phenomena of human behavior
are sociocultural, with both societal and cultural aspects at the same time. Bu
even where they recognize the distinction, which can be said now to be a
commonplace, they tend to assume determinative primacy for the set of
phenomena in which they are more interested. Sociologists tend to see all cultural
systems as a sort of outgrowth or spontaneous development, derivative from
social systems. Anthropologists are more given to being holistic and therefore
often begin with total systems of culture and then proceed to subsume social
structure as merely a part of culture. ("Social anthropology" perhaps represents a
secession within anthropology that inclines to prefer the sociological
assumption.)
Our objective in the present joint statement is to point out, so far as
methodological primacy is concerned, that, either [sic should be "each"
TW] of these assumptions is a preferential a priori and cannot be validated in
today's state of knowledge. Separating cultural from societal aspects is not a
classifying of concrete and empirically discrete sets of phenomena. They are
distinct systems in that they abstract or select two analytically distinct sets of
components from the same concrete phenomena. Statements made about
relationships within a cultural pattern are thus of a different order from those
within a system of societal relationships. Neither can be directly reduced to terms
of the other; that is to say, the order of relationships within one is independent
from that in the other. Careful attention to this independence greatly increases the
power of analytical precision. In sum, we feel that the analytical discrimination
should be consistently maintained without prejudice to the question of which is
more "important," "correct," or "fundamental," if indeed such questions turn out
to be meaningful at all.

It is possible to trace historically two successive analytical distinctions that have

increased this analytical precision. It might be suggested that the first
differentiation was a division of subject-matter broadly along the lines of the
heredity-environment distinction. In English-speaking countries, at least, the
most important reference point is the biologically oriented thinking of the
generation following the publication of Darwin's Origin of the Species. Here the
social scientists were concerned with defining a sphere of investigation that could
not be treated as simply biological in the then current meaning of that concept.
Tylor's concept of culture and Spencer's of the social as superorganic were
important attempts to formulate such a sphere. Thus the organism was assigned
to the biological sciences and culture-society (as yet more or less
undifferentiated) assigned to the sociocultural sciences.
In the formative period of both disciplines, then, culture and society were used
with relatively little difference of meaning in most works of major influence. In
the anthropological tradition, Tylor and Boas used culture to designate that aspect
of total human social behavior (including its symbolic and meaningful products)
that was independent of the genetic constitutions and biological characteristics of
organisms. The ideas of continuity, creation, accumulation, and transmission of
culture independent of biological heredity were the key ones. On the sociological
[p. 583] side, Comte and Spencer, and Weber and Durkheim spoke of society as
meaning essentially the same thing that Tylor meant by culture.
For a considerable period this condensed concept of culture-and-society was
maintained, with differentiation between anthropology and sociology being
carried out not conceptually but operationally. Anthropologists tended to confine
their studies to nonliterate societies and sociologists concerned themselves with
literate ones (especially their own.) It did not seem necessary to go much further.
Now we believe that knowledge and interests have become sufficiently
differentiated so that further distinctions need to be made and stabilized in the
routine usage of the relevant professional groups. Such a need has been
foreshadowed in the practice of many anthropologists in speaking of social
organization as one major segment or branch of culture, and of some sociologists
in discriminating such categories as values, ideologies, science, and art from
social structure.
In this way a second analytical distinction has taken (or is taking) shape. We
suggest that it is useful to define the concept culture for most usages more
narrowly than has been generally the case in the American anthropological
tradition, restricting its reference to transmitted and created content and patterns
of values, ideas, and other symbolic-meaningful systems as factors in the shaping
of human behavior and the artifacts produced through behavior. On the other

hand, we suggest that the term society or more generally, social system be
used to designate the specifically relational system of interaction among
individuals and collectivities. To speak of a "member of a culture" should be
understood as an ellipsis meaning a "member of the society of culture Y." One
indication of the independence of the two is the existence of highly organized
insect societies with at best a minimal rudimentary component of culture in our
present narrower sense.
Parenthetically we may note that a similar analytical distinction has begun to
emerge with reference to the older concept of the organism, on the other side of
the division outlined above, by which the social sciences came to be
differentiated from the biological. Where the term organism was once used to
designate both biological and psychological aspects, it has recently come to be
increasingly important to discriminate a specifically psychological component
from the merely biological. Thus the term personality is being widely used as an
appropriate or favored term expressive of the distinction.
To speak, then, of the analytical independence between culture and social system
is, of course, not to say that the two systems are not related, or that various
approaches to the analysis of the relationship may not be used. It is often
profitable to hold constant either cultural or societal aspects of the same concrete
phenomena while addressing attention to the other. Provided that the analytical
distinction between them is maintained, it is therefore idle to quarrel over the
rightness of either approach. Important work has been prosecuted under both of
them. It will undoubtedly be most profitable to develop both lines of thinking and
to judge them by how much each increases understanding. Secondly, however,
building on the more precise knowledge thus gained, we may in time expect to
learn in which area each type of conceptualization is the more applicable and
productive. By some such procedure, we should improve our position for
increasing understanding of the relations between the two, so that we will not
have to hold either constant when it is more fruitful not to do so.
We therefore propose a truce to quarreling over whether culture is best
understood from the perspective of society or society from that of culture. As in
the famous case of heredity "versus" environment, it is no longer a question of
how important each is, but of how each works and how they are interwoven with
each other. The traditional perspectives of anthropology and sociology should
merge into a temporary condominium leading to a differentiated but ultimately
collaborative attack on problems in intermediate areas with which both are
concerned.