Introduction: A Definition That Has Never Quite Worked
Every time I teach the discipline's founding definition of its own founding word, the same thing happens. I give the class Edward Tylor's 1871 formulation, culture as the complex whole that includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and whatever other capabilities and habits a person acquires as a member of society, and I watch the room accept it politely and then, within a week, stop using it for anything. Nobody organises an actual analysis around Tylor's list. It is recited, not applied. Anthropology has had inventories, metaphors, and polemics about culture, each capturing something real, none of them telling you why the items on the list belong together, what culture is for, or what would count as evidence against your account of it.
This paper answers a different question than most definitions attempt. The question is not "what does culture consist of" but "why does culture exist at all": why any human group, everywhere and without exception, does this thing, continuously, at real and sustained cost. The definition that follows is not the starting move. It is what falls out at the end of an argument about necessity. Stated plainly, and defended at length below: culture is the cumulative cultivation of embodiment, dwelling, and being-with, through multimateriality and multisymbolization, undertaken because interrecursive coordination beyond the reach of the body's own bonding technologies is a recurring, unavoidable metabolic stake in human life. Culture is not a possession, not a symbolic system floating free of material life, not a list of customs a society happens to have. It is an activity, cultivation in the word's original sense, aimed at a specific, recurring problem, using two identifiable kinds of means, applied to three identifiable and more basic dimensions of living.
1. What the Word Already Knew
Culture descends from Latin cultura, and the word's history is not decoration for this argument. It is data. Read carefully, the Latin term already contains something very close to the definition this paper is proposing, worked out by a language long before anyone had the theory to justify it.
The earliest sustained Latin use of cultura is agricultural, and Cato the Elder's De Agri Cultura (one of the oldest complete works of Latin prose, a farming manual from the second century BCE) is the natural place to start. Cato's cultura names a continuous discipline, not a single act: ploughing, manuring, pruning, rotation, the unending correction of a piece of ground that will revert the moment attention lapses. Cultura here is not a possession. It is a relationship, sustained, between a person and a plot of land that does not improve itself.
The decisive extension comes from Cicero, in the Tusculan Disputations, where philosophy is described as cultura animi: the cultivation of the soul. Cicero's own analogy is explicit: a field left untended reverts to bramble and weed, and an untrained mind does exactly the same. What matters is what does not change when the word crosses from soil to soul. Cultura keeps its grammar: it is always cultivation of something, cultura agri, cultura animi, never a free-standing noun naming a finished possession, and it keeps its shape in time: ongoing, unfinished, liable to lapse the moment tending stops. Nobody in Cicero's day would have said a person simply had culture, the way a modern speaker says it. They would have said a person's mind was being, or had been, or needed to be, cultivated: an activity, always attached to a living subject, never a completed state.
The root verb behind both uses, colere, makes the same point more economically than either author does. Colere means, without strain or metaphor, to till; to dwell or inhabit a place; and to tend, honour, or worship: a person, a relationship, a god. The cognate noun cultus carries the third sense forward on its own: devotion, care, worship extended toward the divine and, by natural extension, toward kin and community. Before any philosopher stretched the word deliberately, the term family already lived in three domains that map with real precision onto the three primary dimensions this paper argues culture works on: tilling and its extensions toward the shaping of a living body; dwelling, inhabiting a place; and honouring, tending a relation. Rome did not need a theory to notice that cultivating a field, inhabiting a place, and honouring a bond were kin activities. The single verb already said so.
For most of the word's subsequent history, this shape held. Through the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, culture and its vernacular descendants stayed grammatically attached to an object (the culture of the soul, the culture of the vine, the cultivation of virtue), never a bare noun naming something a people simply possessed. That changes in the eighteenth century, and it changes at the exact moment culture and nature are sharpened into two separate domains, each governed by its own account of how things work: nature explained by mechanical, causal law; culture explained by meaning, value, and a freedom from that law. Only once that division was in place could "a culture" become the kind of bounded, comparable object a discipline could inventory: the very thing Tylor would catalogue a century later.
What got lost in that split is exactly what the Roman usage had never separated in the first place. Land is natural; a field is a natural thing under ongoing tending. A mind is a natural endowment; cultura animi is that same endowment under ongoing tending. There is no cultura without a natural, embodied, dwelling, related subject to apply it to, and no such subject, on the Roman terms, that was not already open to tending as a condition of its own flourishing. The Enlightenment split turned tending-of-something into possession-of-something, and it needed a "nature" left fully outside culture's reach to have anything for culture to be opposed to. There was never a world of nature and a separate world of culture standing over against it. There was only ever embodiment, dwelling, and being-with, under more or less active and more or less successful tending. Recovering cultura's older sense (an activity, always attached, never finished, equally at home in land, body, mind, and relation) points more precisely at what this paper means by cultivation than the modern noun ever has. The rest of this paper makes that argument directly, without further reliance on the word's own history to carry it.
2. Why Cultivation Became Necessary
Evolutionary and anthropological accounts of human distinctiveness have mostly asked some version of "how much cognition does a species have," treating intelligence as a portable capacity different lineages possess in different amounts. That is the wrong question. What matters is not how much cognition a lineage has but which recursive coordinations have become metabolically indispensable to it: which specific problems of coordinating with a body, a place, and other living beings a lineage cannot fail at without failing to survive and reproduce.
Coordination comes in three distinguishable situations. There is coordination with a nonrecursive world, such as terrain, weather, gravity, which does not itself model or respond to being modelled, and which is therefore learnable in the ordinary sense: a good model of a river converges on the river's behaviour and stays converged. There is selfrecursive coordination, an organism managing its own states, skills, and trajectory through that nonrecursive world. And there is interrecursive coordination: engaging another living being as another recursive centre, whose next move cannot be read off the world the way a river's current can, because that move depends on a process running inside the other, itself often oriented toward what it expects from you.
Every kind of coordination, of any of these three kinds, admits its own graded range of engagement. A settled, low-cost, largely automatic ease, call it L1, can be interrupted by a brief, quickly resolved adjustment, L2, or escalate into sustained, effortful difficulty, L3, and every kind of coordination tends, once a difficulty has actually been resolved, to settle back toward L1. Interrecursive coordination is genuinely rewarding and cheap when it settles at its own L1, the ease of a relationship built on enough shared history that active, uncertain modelling of the other is no longer required, and sharply, increasingly costly whenever it cannot settle: whenever a relationship must be conducted, again and again, without the shared embodied history that ordinarily lets coordination relax.
The body has its own technologies for producing that ease. Shared touch, shared laughter, shared rhythm, shared ritual all let two or more people settle into interrecursive L1 through nothing more than repeated, synchronised, embodied time together. But every one of these technologies requires co-presence between the specific individuals whose relationship is being settled, and that requirement cannot be stretched to reach three categories of interrecursive coordination that any society larger than a small, stable band cannot avoid: the stranger, with whom no shared history exists; the absent party, not currently co-present; and the temporally displaced party, already dead or not yet born, to whom present obligations must nonetheless somehow bind.
Human social life is subject to more interrecursive uncertainty, of a more escalated kind, than the body's own bonding mechanisms can resolve. Something beyond the body has to do further work, continuously, or coordination fails: trade collapses without a way to trust strangers, law dissolves without a way to bind the absent, inheritance and obligation become impossible without a way to bind the dead and the unborn. What does this work is always a pairing of two things: a durable material form, and a shared symbolic recognition of what that form means and commits its users to. A material intervention without shared symbolic recognition stabilises nothing durably meaningful: a wall is only ever a pile of stone until a shared understanding of what it is for gives it its point. A symbolic classification without material persistence evaporates as soon as the people who made it stop actively remembering it: an unwitnessed promise is no better than a private wish. The two together, sustained across generations and applied to the shaping of a body, the securing of a place, and the settling of relations among people who cannot rely on shared embodied history alone, is what this paper means by cultivation, and what it argues the word culture has always been reaching for.
3. The Formal Definition, and What It Reveals
Stated with the machinery now in place: culture is the cumulative cultivation of embodiment, dwelling, and being-with, through multimateriality and multisymbolization.
Embodiment, dwelling, and being-with are the three primary dimensions of a living human's situation: the body's own condition, its relation to place, and its coordination with others. These are not cultural in the sense this paper is defining; they are what culture works on. A body can be malnourished or well fed, healthy or sick, disciplined into a skill or left untrained; a dwelling can be exposed or sheltered, fertile or barren, safe or besieged; a field of others can be trusted or feared, bound by obligation or left in dangerous uncertainty. None of these conditions improves itself automatically.
Multimateriality and multisymbolization, durable material form and shared symbolic recognition, are the two means by which that work gets done, and, at any scale beyond the smallest and most intimate, the only means capable of doing it. Cultivation, finally, is not a metaphor here but the operative verb of the definition. To cultivate is to work, continuously and without final completion, on conditions that would otherwise remain untended, exactly as a field left uncultivated does not improve on its own. Culture, on this definition, is not a thing a society has. It is something a society is continually doing, to itself, because the alternative is the accumulating cost of interrecursive coordination left to fend for itself.
Two things follow directly. First, cultivation is never purely symbolic and never purely material: either half alone reproduces the same failure, since symbols without material anchoring dissolve while materials without symbolic recognition inertly persist but stabilise nothing. Second, cultivation is directed, not undirected: it is not simply whatever a group of people happens to do, but specifically the part of what they do that improves, or attempts to improve, the survivability and coordination of embodiment, dwelling, and being-with under interrecursive pressure.
One sentence compresses everything argued so far: culture is the only scalable method available for improving embodiment, dwelling, and being-with. The primary mediations cannot improve themselves, and each, taken alone and left to embodied means only, can be improved only within narrow biological and practical limits: better nutrition, better practice, better proximity, bounded by what a body and a lifetime can do unaided. The only means that can improve any of the three past that ceiling are multimateriality and multisymbolization, working together, which is why so much of what any society spends its collective effort on answers one of only three questions. Why build walls? Embodiment. Why invent writing? Being-with, extended across distance and time. Why found cities? Dwelling. Why invent money? Being-with, extended to strangers. Why raise temples? Being-with and dwelling together. Why practise medicine? Embodiment. Why dig irrigation canals? Dwelling. Why build roads? Dwelling, and the being-with that travels along it. Why establish courts? Being-with. Why educate the young? Embodiment and being-with at once. Asked this way, the list stops looking like Tylor's miscellaneous inventory of customs and starts looking like what it is: a small number of answers to a small number of questions, endlessly recombined.
The clearest single image of the mechanism is a place rather than an argument. The old town of Dubrovnik occupies one of the most commercially valuable and most exposed harbour positions on the Adriatic coast, a dwelling that is a tremendous asset and a standing danger in the same breath. Its walls, built and rebuilt across centuries, are not there to protect walls. They are stone raised and maintained by collective effort, and what they cultivate is not the stone itself but the bodies sheltering behind it and the collective life those bodies can only sustain in that particular, dangerously attractive place because the walls make it survivable. Take the walls away and nothing about the harbour's commercial value changes (the merchants, the trade routes, the water remain exactly as they were), but the embodiment and being-with that depend on defensible dwelling collapse instantly. A wall is never about the wall. It is about what the wall lets a body and a community go on being, in a place that would otherwise not permit it.
4. What This Corrects in the Disciplinary Genealogy
Tylor's 1871 definition is not wrong so much as pre-theoretical. It lists knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, and custom as the contents of culture without explaining why these particular items travel together. Read against the account above, the list stops looking arbitrary: law and custom cultivate being-with; belief and morals, in their material and institutional forms, cultivate being-with and, often, dwelling; art cultivates embodiment through discipline, adornment, and skilled bodily practice, and cultivates being-with through shared symbolic reference. Tylor noticed that these things cluster. He had no account of why, which is why the definition could be recited but never applied: an inventory gives you a checklist, not a theory.
The sharpest way to state the difference is a single distinction. Tylor identifies products. This paper identifies production. A list of knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, and custom is a list of outputs: the accumulated residue of activity, catalogued after the fact, the way a harvest is a list of what a season's cultivation happened to yield. It cannot tell you why the harvest took the shape it did, what work produced it, or what would happen if that work stopped. The actual object of study was never the harvest. It was the cultivating activity that produced it, and once production rather than product becomes the unit of analysis, Tylor's list becomes what it actually is: a fairly good, if unsystematic, inventory of culture's outputs at one historical moment, valuable as data, inadequate as theory.
Clifford Geertz's semiotic turn corrected one of Tylor's weaknesses and introduced another. Treating symbols as public rather than private, meaning found in shared, observable systems of significance rather than inside individual heads, was an advance over any purely mentalistic reading of Tylor's list. But Geertz's account never answers the prior question: why would anyone bother spinning webs of significance at all? On a purely semiotic account, meaning-making can look self-justifying, an end in itself, humanity's distinguishing occupation because that is simply what humans do. Symbols are spun, and spun extravagantly, because they are one of exactly two available technologies (the other being durable material form) for cultivating conditions of life that would otherwise degrade under interrecursive pressure. Webs of significance are not free-floating. They are one half of a pairing whose other half is stone, ledger, wall, and record, and neither half alone is culture.
The materialist tradition running from Marx through Leslie White's account of cultural evolution as increasing energy capture to Marvin Harris's cultural materialism made the opposite correction and inherited the opposite limitation: it explained why culture exists, grounding it in material conditions, but characteristically treated the symbolic dimension as secondary, derivative, superstructural. Neither multimateriality nor multisymbolization can, on its own, accomplish cultivation, so asking which is "really" primary is asking a malformed question. Marshall Sahlins's argument against Harris turned on cases, the American refusal to eat horse or dog meat despite its practical nutritional adequacy, where symbolic classification appeared to override straightforward material utility. Harris's rejoinder insisted that even apparently symbolic taboos could be traced, with sufficient patience, to underlying material conditions. Both were arguing from within half of a single mechanism and mistaking their half for the whole. Sahlins is right that symbolic classification of edible and inedible flesh cannot be derived from nutritional facts alone: multisymbolization has its own combinatorial logic. Harris is right that the classification does not float free of material life either: it is durably encoded in what is raised, slaughtered, sold, and served. Neither side needed to win. The dispute assumed a single answer was available to "which comes first," when neither ever operates without the other, and cultivation is the name for their joint, inseparable operation.
5. Ingold, and the Debt This Paper Owes Him Directly
Tim Ingold's work already rejects the model this paper has been rejecting: culture as a body of representations, passed down by social learning from one generation to the next, and imposed on otherwise passive individuals and materials the way a template is transcribed onto raw stock. Against this, Ingold argues for a dwelling perspective, in which the forms humans build, whether in the imagination or on the ground, arise within the ongoing current of practical, embodied engagement with a specific environment, not by translating a pre-existing mental design onto formless matter. What gets called cultural variation is, on his account, variation in skill, and skills are not transmitted ready-made at all but learned anew, in each generation, under the guidance of an already accomplished practitioner: an "education of attention" rather than a transfer of content.
The overlap is close enough to name plainly. Ingold's insistence that culture is not a possessed body of content but an ongoing, practical, embedded activity is the same move made here in treating culture as cultivation rather than inventory. His rejection of the "building perspective," in which form is imposed on inert material from a prior mental template, is closely related to the insistence here that multimateriality and multisymbolization must operate together rather than one dictating to the other.
Three differences remain. First, Ingold's project has moved toward scepticism about "culture" as a coherent, bounded object of study at all: his mature work speaks increasingly of skill, taskscape, and dwelling, treating the question "what is culture" as one better dissolved than answered. This paper keeps the term and gives it internal architecture: three primary mediations, two cultivating mediations, and a mechanism, interrecursive coordination beyond the reach of embodied bonding, that explains why cultivation is necessary. That architecture is what lets the definition be applied analytically to a specific case, which a purely dissolving move cannot do, however correct its underlying instincts.
Second, Ingold's dwelling perspective is built around the human-environment relation: skill, perception, materials, landscape, a body's practical engagement with its surroundings. It is not built around the problem of other minds: coordinating with strangers, absent parties, and the dead and unborn, none of whom embodied skill and environmental attunement alone can reach. This lets the present account derive money, law, and formal institutions not as departures from an authentic, skill-based dwelling, but as the same cultivating activity extended by necessity into a domain embodied skill cannot reach on its own.
Third, the account of recursivity given above, that coordination of every kind admits its own graded range, from settled ease through to sustained difficulty, with a standing tendency to return to ease once a difficulty resolves, gives cultivation a cost structure Ingold's phenomenologically rich but ungraded description does not supply. This produces a specific prediction about what happens when cultivation fails: not simply "things get worse," but a precise, forcible re-escalation of exactly the coordination a given cultivating structure had previously settled, such as the collapse of a currency's warranted value and the loss of an informal architecture's incidental sociability, describable as the same mechanism operating at different scales.
This paper's central move, culture as an ongoing activity rather than a possessed content, restates something Ingold had already argued on independent phenomenological grounds. What is added here is a different derivation of the same conviction, arrived at through interrecursive coordination and its cost rather than through phenomenology and ecological psychology, and a willingness, where Ingold's own instincts run the other way, to keep the word "culture" and give it working parts rather than retire it in favour of skill, taskscape, and dwelling alone.
6. Architecture as Fossilised Interrecursivity
A building is fossilised interrecursivity: recursive coordination that would otherwise have to be performed, effortfully and repeatedly, by living attention, delegated instead to durable matter so that it no longer has to be. The Dubrovnik walls delegate the recursive work of continuous, vigilant threat-assessment (is an attacker coming, from where, how soon) to stone that performs that vigilance passively, permanently, without needing anyone to keep watching. Seen clearly in one case, this reorganises how an entire category of human artefact should be read.
A road delegates the work of navigation and encounter to a durable surface: it fixes, in advance and for everyone, where people are likely to be and how they are likely to move, converting what would otherwise be an open, case-by-case negotiation of terrain and other travellers into a settled, low-cost expectation. A bridge does the same for a river crossing, cultivating dwelling by removing a recurring negotiation with an obstacle from the domain of active, risky judgement. A temple or shrine cultivates being-with by fixing, materially and permanently, a location around which collective attention and obligation can reliably converge, without requiring that convergence to be renegotiated on each occasion. A market square does comparable work for economic coordination among strangers, giving interrecursive exchange a stable location rather than requiring it be arranged anew each time. A house cultivates embodiment and being-with together, giving a body's most vulnerable hours, sleep, illness, intimacy, a defensible, weatherproof, and specifically its own location. A hospital cultivates embodiment directly, concentrating durable infrastructure and specialised practice at one location so the recursive work of healing does not have to be reinvented at each bedside. A university cultivates being-with across generations, giving the transmission of skill and knowledge a fixed, durable site rather than requiring it to depend entirely on which teachers happen to be alive and locatable at a given moment.
A building is never simply matter shaped for convenience. It is matter shaped specifically to absorb an otherwise recurring, effortful act of coordination, so that the coordination no longer has to be performed by anyone in particular, on any particular occasion. A wall, a road, a bridge, a temple, a market, a house, a hospital, a university are not amenities sitting alongside culture, waiting to be listed as one more item in a Tylorian inventory of material culture. They are culture, in the most literal and durable sense this definition allows: cultivation that has succeeded so thoroughly, and been maintained so consistently, that it has stopped looking like an activity at all and has come to look like part of the landscape. That is the fate every successful, long-sustained act of cultivation eventually meets, and why architecture is so easy to overlook as culture even though it may be culture's most visible and durable form.
7. Enculturation as Recursive Fluidity
What Ingold calls the "education of attention" (skill learned anew by each generation rather than transmitted ready-made) has a mechanism once the graded range of coordination described above is applied to the acquisition of a culture by a child growing up inside it.
A child's first encounters with the cultivated structures around her (a kinship term she must learn to use correctly, a ritual whose steps she has not yet internalised, a set of manners she does not yet feel in her body) are effortful in the same sense as a novice's first contract or a stranger's first encounter with an unfamiliar legal system. They demand sustained, explicit attention: watching an elder's hands closely to copy a technique, deliberately rehearsing the correct term of address, consciously monitoring whether a gesture of respect has been performed correctly. This is L2, sometimes L3, engagement with structures that, for the accomplished adults around her, have long since settled into unreflective L1 ease. The education of attention is the process of guiding a novice's engagement with cultivated structures from effortful, explicit difficulty down toward the automatic, absorbed ease that competent adult participation in a shared way of life actually consists in. Competent cultural membership is not the possession of a body of correctly transmitted representations. It is the achieved settling, across years of guided practice, of what was once laborious into what has become unreflective.
This also explains why cultivated structures are so often experienced, by those still learning them, as difficult, embarrassing, or painful in a way mere information-transfer would not predict. A teenager mortified by a faux pas at a formal occasion, an adult immigrant labouring visibly over an unfamiliar etiquette, a novice practitioner fumbling through a rite whose steps everyone else performs without thinking: these are not failures of memory. They are the lived experience of interrecursive coordination that has not yet settled: every one of these moments involves being watched, assessed, and implicitly modelled by others whose own engagement has long since reached L1, which is precisely the condition that makes unresolved interrecursive coordination costly and taxing until it resolves. Enculturation is the sometimes protracted, sometimes uncomfortable settling of a whole layered field of interrecursive relationships, with kin, elders, a whole community of practice, down toward the ease competent membership eventually provides.
8. What the Redefinition Lets You Do
A definition earns its keep by changing what an analyst can ask of a case, not merely by sounding more elegant than its predecessors. Section 6 has already shown this for architecture. This section works through what else the redefinition makes newly askable.
Institutions as cultivation of being-with, specifically. Money, contract, and office are structures that pair durable material form with collective symbolic recognition to manufacture reliance on a category of interrecursive coordination that behaves, for the agent relying on it, as though it had already been settled by embodied trust, without requiring that trust to be built individually, relationship by relationship, from nothing. This is not a special case sitting alongside culture. It is one of culture's most legible instances, restricted to the cultivation of being-with specifically, and its breakdown is not vague social decline but a precise, forcible return of an entire population's coordination from settled ease back to costly, individuated, anxious effort: cultivation failing, in real time, at scale.
A case observed directly. I watched this happen in my own institution. A university department moved from a building whose corridors incidentally generated familiarity among colleagues, through years of accumulated, unplanned proximity, to a building whose floor plan afforded almost none of it. It would undersell the case to present it as one more example among several. What it demonstrates is that cultivation is not a phenomenon confined to deep history (walls raised centuries ago, kinship systems inherited from time out of mind) but a continuous, present-tense activity, observable in real time, in an ordinary institution, over the span of a single career. The old building's corridors were doing genuine cultivation work, cultivating being-with among colleagues, for free, as an incidental effect of shared circulation, without anyone designing them to do so and without anyone, plausibly, having called it culture at the time. When the informal mechanism was withdrawn, the coordination it had been cultivating did not simply disappear; it had to be re-cultivated through more deliberate, more visible, more expensive means: scheduled meetings, committees, written procedure, each a further, smaller instance of the same underlying activity. A single, specific, dateable act of de-cultivation, followed by a single, specific, dateable act of re-cultivation, both observed directly rather than inferred from the archaeological or historical record.
Cumulative history rather than a static inventory. Stabilising one layer of interrecursive uncertainty characteristically increases the interrecursive capability of rivals who gain access to the same multimaterial and multisymbolic technologies, producing an escalating dynamic rather than a stable equilibrium. Culture, on this account, is never a finished inventory of a society's practices, available to be listed the way Tylor's definition invites. It is a cumulative, historically open-ended process, because every act of cultivation changes the field in which the next act of cultivation becomes necessary. An inventory has no account of why cultures change, only of what a culture, frozen at a moment, happens to contain; a cultivation-based account predicts change as the ordinary condition, and stasis as the thing that would need explaining.
If culture is cumulative cultivation rather than a set of possessed contents, an excavated site is not best described as a collection of objects a past culture happened to produce and leave behind. It is a cross-section through an ongoing act of cultivation, frozen at the moment its cultivators stopped maintaining it, which suggests archaeology recovers not culture's outputs so much as a snapshot of ongoing cultivation, mid-activity. Working out what this changes about archaeological method is a task for another occasion.
Kinship terminology, without writing, currency, or formal office. A kinship system (the set of terms by which a person addresses and refers to specific categories of relative, together with the obligations, restrictions, and expectations attached to each term) is a clean instance of multisymbolic cultivation of being-with achieved with no writing and no currency whatsoever. The terminology classifies people into categories that carry real behavioural consequence, converting what would otherwise be an unbounded, case-by-case field of interrecursive uncertainty into a small, learnable, shared set of categories everyone in the relevant community recognises in common. The material component is thinner than in the case of a ledger or a wall, but it is not absent: it consists in the durable, repeated, publicly witnessed performance of the terms themselves, such as spoken address and the visible patterns of deference, gift, and avoidance that accompany a given kin category, patterns durable enough to be checked against communal memory and corrected when violated. A kinship system is culture doing exactly what this paper claims culture always does: cultivating being-with, through a classificatory symbolic system and its durable, materially performed enactment, with no need for anything resembling a state.
9. Objections and Limits
9.1 Isn't this just a relabelling of the materialist/idealist synthesis already achieved by practice theory?
Pierre Bourdieu's account of habitus and practice, and Anthony Giddens's structuration theory, both already dissolve a version of the material/symbolic and structure/agency oppositions this paper has been working to dissolve, with a sophistication this shorter treatment has not attempted to match. What this paper adds is not a new dissolution but a specific mechanism for why the dissolution is necessary (interrecursive coordination exceeding what embodied bonding can settle) and a specific account of what the resulting cultivation costs and what its failure looks like. Practice theory shows structure and practice constituting each other continuously; the present account tries to explain why that continuous constitution is metabolically compulsory rather than simply how it works once underway.
9.2 Doesn't "mediation" reintroduce exactly the representational, culture-as-lens picture Ingold spent a career dismantling?
Ingold's target was a specific picture: culture as a system of representations, sitting between an organism and an already-given world, colouring or filtering perception of that world before the organism ever gets to it. If "mediation" meant that, an intervening symbolic layer standing between a person and a reality that exists independently of it, the objection would land hard. It does not mean that here. Embodiment, dwelling, and being-with are not a raw, pre-cultural given that multimateriality and multisymbolization subsequently filter or represent. They are constituted, in an ongoing and active sense, by every mediation simultaneously: there is no more a bare dwelling prior to cultivation than there is a bare, uncultivated body. Mediation, in this vocabulary, names constitutive participation in an ongoing process, not an intervening representational layer standing between a subject and an independently existing object. This is closer to Ingold's own anti-representationalism than the objection initially suggests, though "mediation" remains a riskier word to use in this territory than it might first appear.
9.3 Does the definition survive contact with small-scale, non-literate, non-monetised societies?
The claim that cultivation always requires some form of durable persistence paired with some form of collective symbolic recognition does not require writing, currency, or formal bureaucratic office; the kinship-terminology case above shows comparable work being done without inscription, through embodied ritual performance and public, witnessed utterance, at real but specifiable cost to how far and how reliably the resulting settlement can scale. The stronger claim, that the illustrations used in this paper lean disproportionately on state-level, literate, monetised cases, remains true, and is worth conceding. Initiation ritual as cultivation of embodiment specifically, and gift exchange as a hybrid cultivating being-with across distance without currency in the narrow sense, would extend the case across the ethnographic record. The mechanism does not appear to fail for these cases; that further work has simply not been done here.
9.4 Is this falsifiable?
The definition itself is not the kind of claim that gets falsified; definitions are proposed for their utility, not tested against data directly. What is testable is the mechanism's downstream predictions: cultivation should be observably more intensive and elaborate precisely where interrecursive uncertainty is highest and least resolvable by embodied bonding; the withdrawal of a cultivating mechanism, whether a currency's credibility or a corridor's incidental sociability, should produce a specific, forcible escalation back toward costly, individuated coordination rather than an undifferentiated decline; and societies facing comparable interrecursive pressures without comparable multimaterial-multisymbolic resources should show comparably degraded coordination. A further, sharper prediction: societies or institutions that lose their multimaterial anchor while retaining their symbolic one, or vice versa, should show distinguishable forms of failure rather than a single undifferentiated decline. A currency stripped of material scarcity but retaining nominal symbolic status behaves differently from a material store of value, such as stored grain or bullion, that has lost the shared symbolic recognition needed to make it exchangeable on demand. That the two failure modes are not interchangeable, and are not treated as interchangeable by the people living through them, is what the paired mechanism predicts and a single-factor account of institutional failure has no particular reason to expect.
9.5 Doesn't "cultivation" carry a quietly normative, improvement-implying connotation that not all cultural activity deserves?
Cultivation, as used here, is a technical description of a mechanism (the pairing of material persistence with symbolic recognition to alter the conditions of embodiment, dwelling, or being-with) and carries no built-in guarantee that the alteration serves the interests of everyone subject to it, or anyone at all beyond whoever controls the apparatus. A propaganda system, a discriminatory legal code, and a coercive initiation rite are, on this account, unambiguously instances of cultivation in the full technical sense: they pair durable material and institutional form with collectively recognised symbolic classification to reorganise being-with, often with great effectiveness. The definition does not supply, and should not be read as supplying, any assurance that the reorganisation is benign. A definition of culture that built goodness into its own terms would be doing moral work under cover of conceptual work, and would make it harder to name and analyse cultivation's darker instances precisely where naming them matters most.
10. Conclusion
Culture has resisted a working definition for a century and a half not because anthropologists have lacked insight into what it involves, but because the discipline has repeatedly been offered accounts of what culture contains, beliefs, symbols, practices, material objects, without a mechanism explaining what the contents are for, or why they cluster the way they do. Tylor identified culture's products without an account of the production behind them. Geertz's semiotic web explains the contents' shared public character without explaining why anyone would be moved to weave it. The materialist tradition explains why culture exists without adequately accounting for the symbolic half of what it does. Tim Ingold's dwelling perspective correctly abandons the transmission model and insists on culture as ongoing, embodied, practical activity, but stops short of the mechanism, tied to the problem of coordinating with other minds under conditions embodied bonding cannot reach, that lets the word "culture" be kept and given working parts rather than dissolved into skill and taskscape alone.
The definition offered here, culture as the cumulative cultivation of embodiment, dwelling, and being-with, through multimateriality and multisymbolization, driven by interrecursive coordination that exceeds what the body's own bonding technologies can settle, explains Tylor's list retrospectively, as products rather than as the thing itself. It supplies Geertz's missing motive. It reunites what the materialist tradition split. It extends Ingold's own insight into a domain (money, law, formal institution, the durable structures that reach strangers, absences, and the dead) his programme was never built to explain.
One distinction is worth drawing before this paper closes. Culture, on this account, is the activity: the ongoing, never-finished work of cultivating embodiment, dwelling, and being-with through multimateriality and multisymbolization, undertaken because interrecursive coordination demands it. Civilization is not the activity but its historical accumulation: the durable residue of cultivation successfully sustained, layered, and compounded across generations, at a scale no single act of cultivation could achieve alone. Keeping this distinction sharp matters, because collapsing it is what has made culture so hard to define in the first place: a definition aimed at culture-as-activity starts to look like Tylor's inventory the moment the activity and its historical residue are not kept apart. What that distinction means for how civilizations rise, sustain themselves, and eventually fail to sustain their own accumulated cultivation is a separate argument.
Small-scale and non-literate cases still need fuller treatment; the line between mediation as constitutive participation and mediation as representational filtering needs continued, careful attention rather than a single settled paragraph; and the definition's moral neutrality needs restating every time the framework is used, so that a precise account of how cultivation works is never mistaken for an endorsement of what any particular act of cultivation does. Cultivation, on this account, is not always a kindness. It is, however the crop turns out, the one thing every human society has never been able to stop doing; and why it cannot stop doing it, rather than merely what the doing consists of, has been this paper's real subject throughout.