The Concept of Culture

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My happiness in the publication of one more of my studies by The Indian Institute of World Culture, Bangalore, is enhanced by the distinguished historian of Civilisation and Culture, Professor Arnold Toynbee, contributing an illuminating Foreword to it. I desire to express my gratitude to Professor Toynbee for his Foreword.
The subject of this study has been one very much after my heart but because of the limitations of a lecture in the form of which it had to be presented, all my material could not be included here. The wide coverage that I wanted to give could be seen in the extensive Bibliography that I have appended to the publication. In this connection, I must thank the several Libraries in Madras, Bangalore and Delhi for the facilities they extended to me to consult the large number of old and new books on the subject, all of which could not be had at one place.
Before this lecture was taken up for printing, I had been on an academic visit to the United States and had an opportunity to discuss it at a meeting arranged by my friend, Professor Milton Singer, Professor of Anthropology, University of Chicago, Chicago, with members of his Department.
It is a matter of deep regret that between the date of the lecture and its publication, two of my esteemed friends of the Indian Institute of World Culture, Mr. Jacques Dedeyn and Miss Ethel Beswick, passed away. I have greatful recollections of the ever helpful Miss Beswick, who during my stay in England in 1953-54 invited me more than once to lecture at the London Branch of The Indian Institute of World Culture.

I am happy to have been asked to write a preface for Dr. Raghavan's Founder's Day Address on "The Concept of Culture'. His subject is at the centre of my own interests, and I have a high regard for the Indian Institute of World Culture. My wife and I had the pleasure of visiting the Institute in 1957 and meeting the Founder, Sri Wadia, and Madame Wadia. Dr. Raghavan opens his Address by paying a tribute to the Founder's memory. He has expressed my own feelings and those of very many other people.
The word 'culture' has at least three meanings. Its widest meaning is the social heritage which, in human society, is transmitted from generation to generation through education in the broadest sense of the term. Mankind shares with other kinds of living creature the capacity to reproduce itself physically, and a physical heritage carries a built-in instinctual heritage with it. However, the role of instincts in human life is subordinate to the role of culture, and culture seems to be something specifically and distinctively human.
As Dr. Raghavan points out, culture, in this widest meaning of the word, includes all human activities that do not spring from instincts, and our instinctual activities-for instance, the impulse to satisfy the cravings of hunger and of sexual desire-are governed and modified by our manners and customs, which are manifestations of our culture. In so far as a human being's instincts escape from cultural control, he becomes something less than human.