What exactly does culture mean? Is it something material you can touch? Or is it something immaterial, such as values and beliefs? Or is it our customs and traditions, our festivals and celebrations? While anthropologists have vacillated between material and nonmaterial definitions of culture, today most would agree with a more inclusive definition of culture: the thoughts, behaviors, languages, customs, the things we produce and the methods we use to produce them. It is this, the human ability to create and transmit culture, that differentiates us as humans from the rest of the animal world.

The essential feature of culture, that it is learned and transmitted from one generation to the next, rests on the human capacity to think symbolically. Language, perhaps the most important feature, is a symbolic form of communication. The word table, for example, is nothing other than a symbol for the actual thing, a table. Language is a form of communication. Without language, culture could not be transmitted, people could not learn from one another across generations, and there would be no cultural continuity.

Simply because culture is transmitted through symbols whose meanings remain more or less constant doesn't mean that cultures are static and don't change. On the contrary, cultures are never truly static. Which of us does not remember a grandparent comparing life today with the one s/he grew up in? The changes that took place between his/her lifetime and ours represent subtle cultural shifts in values, the things we use, and the way we use language.

What causes cultural change? Outside influences, through a process known as cultural diffusion, may stimulate cultural change. An example of this is commercial or cross-cultural contacts like the Silk Road, which brought silk to the West and Buddhism into China. Inventions and technological developments from within a