What is a culture

A culture is people working together, using and developing tools and systems, to survive and thrive in an environment.

A culture arises out of the complex interactions between people, their human-designed systems and their environment. The values, desires and capabilities of the people, the effectiveness of the human-designed systems, and the qualities and challenges presented by the environment all work to shape a culture.

A culture can be thought of as a set of solutions to the problems that crop up when people try to live and work together: how do we pay for things we all use, like clean water, roads and schools? How do we feed everyone? How do we make sure people have opportunity so they don’t leave for another society? How do we protect ourselves from other societies that might want to take what we have?