We use the term culture to refer to all the ideas and assumptions about the nature of things and people that we learn when we become members of social groups. It can be defined as “socially acquired knowledge.” This is the kind of knowledge that, like our first language, we initially acquire without conscious awareness. We develop awareness of our knowledge, and hence of our cul0ture, only after having developed language. The particular language we learn through the process of cultural transmission provides us, at least initially, with a ready-made system of categorizing the world around us and our experience of it.

With the words we acquire, we learn to recognize the types of category distinctions that are relevant in our social world. Very young children may not initially think of “dog” and “horse” as different types of entities and refer to both as bow-wow. As they develop a more elaborated conceptual system along with English as their first language, they learn to categorize distinct types of creatures as a dog or a horse. In native cultures of the Pacific, there were no horses and, not surprisingly, there were no words for them. In order to use words such as dog or horse, rain or snow, father or uncle, week or weekend, we must have a conceptual system that includes these people, things and ideas as distinct and identifiable categories.