Culture has something to do with personal refinement in one sense.

Culture has also been

identified with the “enjoyment of the things the world has agreed are beautiful; interest in the
knowledge that mankind has found valuable; comprehension of the principles that the race
has accepted as true” by A .Lawrence Lowell, a former president of Harvard University.
However, the sociological meaning of the word is quite different. Culture is defined as the
complex whole that consists of all the ways we think and do and everything we have as
members of society in the sociological sense. To break down this definition we begin with
clarifying that culture itself is not behaviour. Culture can be thought of as the grooves or
channels in which human behaviour proceeds. Natural unlearned behaviour such as knee-jerk
reflex are purely physiological and not cultural. Clapping our hands to welcome someone or
hugging each other are cultural. Emphasis upon learning is fundamental. Culture is
transmitted only through learning. There is no biological or instinctual endowment that
teaches us to drink from a glass, clip our nails brush our teeth or many other actions we
undertake without thinking on the daily. All of these simple things, and many like these are
all part of culture. And these are learned through social interaction. It can also be said that,
culture depends upon social interaction. This can be verified by making note of individuals
who are deprived of society at an early age and by society we mean, of the companionship of
other people, do not acquire culture. A case of this kind has also been observed and described
by Kingsley Davis
In order to be learned, it is obvious that culture also has to be taught. Just as the learning is
unconscious imitation, so is the teaching of the same unconscious instruction. If a generation
fails to transmit a part of its culture to its successors that aspect of culture will simply
disappear. In this sense of culture, it can be conceived to be a kind of a stream flowing down
from one generation to the next.
Culture in its sociological sense is also something that is shared, not something that is to be
kept in the possession of an individual. This can be understood well by looking at it this way
that, if new inventions and new ideas are brought into being by individuals but if these new
ideas that people constantly have never find public expression, they might as well have never
been devised in the first place. Therefore, culture is shared. It is something that is always
adopted, used, believed, possessed and practiced by more than one person. Another attribute
of culture is that culture always aids the process of adjustment of individuals to their
environment. Culture is also termed as superorganic, from one point of view i.e. it has a
certain degree of independence from inorganic and organic factors. The word superorganic
fixes the attention upon the social meaning of physical objects and physiological acts and
emphasises upon the fact that this meaning may be relatively independent of physical and
biological characteristics and attributes. In conclusion, while it is impossible to capture the
essence of everything culture as a concept entails it is apparent culture is of paramount
significance in human life.