"Civilization and culture both refer to the overall way of life of a people, and a civilization is a culture writ large. They both involve the "values, norms, institutions, and modes of thinking to which successive generations in a given society here attached primary importance." A civilization is, for Braudel, "a space," a "cultural area," "a collection of cultural characteristics and phenomena." Wallerstein defines it as a "particular concatenation of worldview, customs, structures, and culture (both material culture and high culture) which forms some kind of historical whole and which coexists (if not always simultaneously) with other varieties of this phenomenon." A civilization, is, according to Dawson, the product of "a particular original process of cultural creativity which is the work of a particular people," while for Durkheim and Mauss, it is "a kind of moral milieu encompassing a certain number of nations, each national culture being only a particular form of the whole." To Spengler a civilization is "the inevitable destiny of the Culture … the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable … a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming." Culture is the common theme in virtually every definition of civilization."

"Social capital, the crucible of trust and critical to the health of an economy, rests on cultural roots. At first glance, it seems quite paradoxical that culture should be related to economic efficiency, since culture is totally arational in its substance and in the way it is transmitted. As the subject of scholarly study, it can seem elusive. Economists, believing themselves to be the most hardheaded of social scientists, generally dislike dealing with the concept of culture: it is not susceptible to simple definition and hence cannot serve as the basis for a clear model of human behavior, as in the case of humans as 'rational utility maximizers.' In one commonly used anthropology textbook, the author provides no fewer than 11 definitions of culture."

Another author surveyed 160 definitions of culture that were in use by anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and others. Cultural anthropologists insist that there are virtually no aspects of culture that are common to all human societies. Cultural factors are therefore incapable of being systematized into universal laws, they can only be interpreted only through what Clifford Geertz calls 'thick description,' an ethnographic technique that takes account of the variety and complexity of each individual culture. In the view of many economists, culture becomes a grab bag or residual category used to explain whatever cannot be accounted for by general theories of human behavior. Culture, however, can have its own deep adaptive rationality, even if this is not evident at first glance. But first I must define how I will use the concept of culture.

"Cultural anthropologists and sociologists distinguish between culture and what they term social structures. Culture in this sense is restricted to meanings, symbols, values, and ideas and encompass phenomena like religion and ideology. Geertz's own definition of culture is 'an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.' Social structure, by contrast, concerns concrete social organizations such as the family, clan, legal system, or nation. In this sense, Confucian doctrines about the relationship between fathers and sons belong to culture; the actual patrilinear Chinese family is social structure."...

"The definition I will use draws on both culture and social structure, strictly defined, and comes closer to the popularly understood meaning of culture: culture is inherited ethical habit. An ethical habit can consist of an idea or value, such as the view that pork is unclean or that cows are sacred, or it can consist of an actual social relationship, such as the tendency of the eldest son in traditional Japanese society to inherit the whole of his father's estate..."

"The most important habits that make up cultures have little to do with how one eats one's food or combs one's hair but with the ethical codes by which societies regulate behavior—what the philosopher Nietzsche called a people's 'language of good and evil.' Despite their variety, all cultures seek to constrain the raw selfishness of human nature in some fashion through the establishment of unwritten moral rules. Although it is possible to affirm an ethical code as a matter of carefully considered rational choice, comparing one's own ethical code against available alternatives, the vast majority of the world's people do not do so. Rather, they are educated to follow their society's moral rules by simple habituation-in family life, from their friends and neighbors, or in school."