What Is Culture? Classical Foundations and Contemporary Revisions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper revisits the concept of culture by examining its classical theoretical foun- dations and subsequent contemporary revisions. Drawing on early anthropological and cultural studies scholarship, including the work of Tylor and Williams, it conceptu- alises culture as a dynamic, lived, and continually negotiated process rather than a fixed or homogeneous entity. The paper then explores how later theorists problematised essentialist understandings of culture, foregrounding internal diversity, dissent, and historical change. Building on postcolonial and cultural theory, the analysis highlights how globalisation, migration, and mediated cultural flows further complicate cultural formation, producing identities that are increasingly fluid, layered, and context depen- dent. By synthesising classical perspectives with later theoretical developments, the paper argues that culture must be understood as adaptive, relational, and historically situated. Such an understanding remains essential for analysing contemporary cultural life in a globalised and interconnected world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.089 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".