Nature of Culture

A.L. Kroeber, an influential American anthropologist, dedicated his work to understanding the nature of culture and its processes. His seminal work, The Nature of Culture (1952), collected his essays on cultural theory, kinship, and social psychology. Kroeber, along with Clyde Kluckhohn, analyzed numerous definitions of culture, ultimately proposing that culture is an abstraction derived from behavior. This perspective suggests that while behavior is what individuals do, culture encompasses the patterns and relationships between these actions, considered in an extra-human context. Kroeber's extensive contributions significantly shaped the development of academic anthropology in the United States.12