What is Culture? Culture, in anthropology(人类学), the patterns of behavior. and thinking that people living in social groups learn, create, and share. Culture distinguishes one human group from others. It also distinguishes humans from other animals. A people's culture includes their beliefs, rules of behavior, language, rituals, art, technology, styles of dress, ways of producing and cooking food, religion, and political and economic systems. Culture is the most important concept in anthropology (the study of all aspects of human life, past and present). Anthropologists commonly use the term culture to refer to a society or group in which many or all people live and think in the same ways. Likewise, any group of people who share a common culture—and in particular, common rules of behavior. and a basic form. of social organization—constitutes a society. Thus, the terms culture and society are somewhat interchangeable. However, while many animals live in societies, such as herds of elk (麋鹿) or packs of wild dogs, only humans have culture. Characteristics of culture People have culture primarily because they can communicate with and understand symbols. Symbols allow people to develop complex thoughts and to exchange these thoughts with others. Language and other forms of symbolic communication, such as art, enable people to create, explain, and record new ideas and information. A symbol has either an indirect connection or no connection at all with the object, idea, feeling, or behavior. to which it refers. For instance, most people in the United States find some meaning in the combination of the colors red, white, and blue. But those colors themselves have nothing to do with, for instance, the land that people call the United States, the concept of patriotism, or the U.S. national anthem (), 7he Star Spangled Banner. People have the capacity at birth to construct, understand, and communicate through symbols, primarily by using language. Research has shown, for example, that infants have a basic structure of language—a sort of universal grammar—built into their minds. Infants are thus predisposed(有……倾向) to learn the languages spoken by the people around them. Language provides a means to store, process, and communicate amounts of information that vastly exceed the capabilities of nonhuman animals. For instance, chimpanzees (黑猩猩), the closest genetic relatives of humans, use h few dozen calls and a variety of gestures to communicate in the wild. People have taught some chimps (黑猩猩) to communicate using American Sign Language and picture-bused languages, and some have developed vocabularies of a few hundred words. But an unabridged (完整的) English dictionary might contain more than half-a-million vocabulary entries. Chimpanzees have also not clearly demonstrated the ability to use grammar, which is crucial for communicating complex thoughts. In addition, the human vocal tract, unlike that of chimpanzees and other animals, can create and articulate a wide enough variety of sounds to create millions of distinct words. In fact, each human language uses only a fraction of the sounds humans can make. The human brain also contains areas dedicated to the production and interpretation of speech, which other animals lack. Thus, humans are predisposed in many ways to use symbolic communication. People are not born with culture they have to learn it. For instance, people must learn to speak and understand a language and to abide by the rules of a society. In many societies, all people mast learn to produce and prepare food and to construct shelters. In other societies, people must learn a skill to earn money, which they then use to provide for themselves. In all human societies, children learn culture from adults. Anthropologists call this process enculturation, or cultural transmission. Encultu