Culture as a concept has not been fully examined by the profession for some time. This article is a challenge to carry out this examination. It begins by discussing problems in the use of the concept and then goes on to suggest a new way of looking at culture: as a cultural pool, analogous to the gene pool (both culture and genes being forms of storing and retrieving information), from which each individual, each dyad, each group draws its particular body of culture; and as information coded twice, once in the brain and once externally, in language, stone, writing, repetitive behavior, and social institutions. It examines the implications of this view of culture for ethnography, comparative studies, and the study of evolution.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 48 citations exist upstream.