I give a mass of material from the OED below. All the OED can do of course is give us a historical record of how various people have used the word; it can't dictate how anyone does use it, or establish what the reality to which the word refers is.
A couple observations. The history provided does, I think, give some support to Michael's closing suggestion on using the word. And the use of it in the phrases "pop culture" and "popular culture" or in any context condemning (implicitly or explicitly) some particular culture tends to invoke sense 5a, which is what Michael identifies as Traditional Usage 1. -
Carrol
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> From the OED
5. a. absol. The training, development, and refinement of mind, tastes, and manners; the condition of being thus trained and refined; the intellectual side of civilization. [absol is the abbr. for "absolute(ly)]
1805 WORDSW. Prelude XIII. 197 Where grace Of culture hath been utterly unknown. 1837 EMERSON Jrnl. 24 Nov. (1910) IV. 371 It seems to me that the circumstances of man are historically somewhat better here and now than ever,that more freedom exists for Culture. 1849 J. A. FROUDE Nemesis of Faith x. 85 The end of all culture is, that we may be able to sustain ourselves in a spiritual atmosphere as the birds do in the air. 1855 J. CONINGTON Academical Study of Latin (1872) I. 212 That part of our culture which we have not worked out for ourselves, or received from contemporary nations, we owe almost wholly to Rome, and to Greece only through Rome. 1860 MOTLEY Netherl. (1868) I. ii. 47 His culture was not extensive. 1869 M. ARNOLD (title) Culture and anarchy. Ibid. ii. 49 The great men of culture are those who have had a passion..for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time. 1871 GEO. ELIOT Middlem. I. ix. 137 He wants to go abroad again..[for] the vague purpose of what he calls culture, preparation for he knows not what. 1876 M. ARNOLD Lit. & Dogma xiii, Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world. 1889 JESSOPP Coming of Friars iii. 131 Some few of the larger..monasteries..[were] centres of culture. a1893 Mod. A man of considerable culture. 1916 E. WHARTON Xingu i. 3 Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone. 1939 tr. H. Johst in C. Leiser Nazi Nuggets 83 When I hear the word 'culture' I slip back the safety-catch of my revolver. 1940 K. MANNHEIM Man & Society II. ii. 85 The crisis of culture in liberal-democratic society is due, in the first place, to the fact that the social processes, which previously favoured the development of the creative élites, now have the opposite effect. 1948 T. S. ELIOT Notes Def. Culture ii. 41 Culture is not merely the sum of several activities, but a way of life. Ibid. 42 Group culture..has never been co-extensive with class. Ibid. 43 The primary channel of transmission of culture is the family.
b. (with a and pl.) A particular form or type of intellectual development. Also, the civilization, customs, artistic achievements, etc., of a people, esp. at a certain stage of its development or history. (In many contexts, esp. in Sociology, it is not possible to separate this sense from sense 5a.)
1867 FREEMAN Norm. Conq. (1876) I. iv. 150 A language and culture which was wholly alien to them. 1871 E. B. TYLOR (title) Primitive culture. 1891 Spectator 27 June, Speaking all languages, knowing all cultures, living amongst all races. 1903 C. LUMHOLTZ Unknown Mexico I. 117 A thrifty people whose stage of culture was that of the Pueblo Indians of to-day. 1921 R. A. S. MACALISTER Text-bk. Europ. Archæol. I. iv. 99 A language associated with a superior culture has always a tendency to swamp languages that have not such an advantage. 1921 E. SAPIR Language x. 222 Historians and anthropologists find that races, languages, and cultures are not distributed in parallel fashion. 1942 BLOCH & TRAGER Outl. Ling. Analysis 5 The activities of a societythat is, of its membersconstitute its culture... Language, then, is not only an element of culture itself; it is the basis for all cultural activities. 1948 T. S. ELIOT Notes Def. Culture i. 28 The culture with which primitive Christianity came into contact..was itself a religious culture in decline. Ibid. v. 93 A careful fostering [by Russia in its satellites] of local 'culture', culture in the reduced sense of the word, as everything that is picturesque, harmless and separable from politics such as language and literature, local arts and customs. 1953 A. K. C. OTTAWAY Education & Society i. 8 A single word to express 'the whole life of a community' is a special use of the word 'culture', which has been developed by the social anthropologists. 1954 S. PIGGOTT Neolithic Cultures v. 123 Probably the word culture should be employed to define the collective and tangible outcome (pot-making, house-planning, tomb-building) of the material and spiritual traditions of a group of people. 1963 Brit. Jrnl. Sociol. XIV. 21 By 'culture' is meant the whole complex of learned behaviour, the traditions and techniques and the material possessions, the language and other symbolism, of some body of people.
Also spec. in Anthropol. and Sociol. (In some contexts the meaning shades into an attrib. use of sense 5.)
1901 Contemp. Rev. Mar. 455 The ancient 'culture-heroine'. 1903 Daily Chron. 11 June 3/1 The hero-tales and culture-legends of the prehistoric period of the Hebrews. 1907 A. C. HADDON in N. W. Thomas Anthropol. Ess. 183 The death dances were introduced into the Western Islands by two culture heroes from New Guinea. 1921 E. SAPIR Language x. 223 That a group of languages need not in the least correspond to a racial group or a culture area is easily demonstrated. 1922 D. H. LAWRENCE Fantasia of Unconscious xi. 203 The woman is now the responsible party, the law-giver, the culture-bearer. 1931 H. J. ROSE tr. W. Schmidt's Orig. & Growth Relig. V. xiv. 221 Leo Frobenius, a pupil of Ratzel, enlarged..the doctrine of 'culture-circles' (or 'spheres', Kulturkreise). 1933 Downside Rev. LI. 185 Russia is a culture-complex in itself, and Russia's problem is not ours. 1936 Mind XLV. 294 In the modern world, with its ever-increasing facilities for culture-contacts, a world-culture is in process of formation. 1945 Mind LIV. 78 The culture-hero has a vague complex status, part man, part demi-god. 1948 T. S. ELIOT Notes Def. Culture iv. 70 Since..the scattering of Jews amongst peoples holding the Christian Faith, it may have been unfortunate..that the culture-contact between them has had to be within those neutral zones of culture in which religion could be ignored. 1949 M. MEAD in M. Fortes Social Structure 27 Teacher, physician, nurse..each in turn represents some different form of culture conflict. 1951 R. FIRTH Elem. Social Organiz. iii. 81 Terms such as 'culture-contact'..were introduced to express the way in which new patterns of behaviour or types of relationship were acquired and incorporated into a primitive system. Ibid. 109 He is culture-bound in his desires as well as his activities. 1953 Proc. Prehist. Soc. XIX. 41 (title) The prehistoric culture-sequence in the Maltese Archipelago. 1957 Burlington Mag. Nov. 246/2 A theory of culture-circles whereby societies are classified as hunting, food-gathering, harvesting and horticultural. 1960 Listener 18 Aug. 244/1 The people of the host country appear to lack the normal conventions of social behaviour or to have a different and apparently illogical system... Most Europeans in Africa withdraw into their own community, and quickly equate their own way of doing things with their own superior material culture... This reaction..has been called 'culture shock'. 1962 D. HARDEN Phoenicians i. 24 To pick out what is Egyptian and Mesopotamian among finds and culture-traits in Phoenicia is not nearly so hard. Ibid. ii. 25 Their position on the land-route between the two great culture-areas of antiquity laid them open to constant political domination and cultural influences from each. 1969 Listener 30 Jan. 155/2 There was a curious naivety..in the frank description of how destructive, physically and socially, the culture-contacts with these remote peoples could be.
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These usages are perhaps derivative (my guess) from an earlier figurative usage (sense 4 in OED), which was presumably derivative from the agricultural or laboratory uses of the word.
4. fig. The cultivating or development (of the mind, faculties, manners, etc.); improvement or refinement by education and training.
c1510 MORE Picus Wks. 14 To the culture and profit of theyr myndes. a1633 S. LENNARD tr. Charron's Wisd. (1658) 174 Necessary for the culture of good manners. 1651 HOBBES Leviath. II. xxxi. 189 The education of Children [is called] a Culture of their mindes. 1752 JOHNSON Rambler No. 189 12 She..neglected the culture of [her] understanding. 1848 MACAULAY Hist. Eng. II. 55 The precise point to which intellectual culture can be carried. 1865 DALE Jew. Temp. xiv. (1877) 155 The Jewish system was intended for the culture of the religious life of the Jews.
Michael Dawson -PSU wrote:
>
> >No one I believe has responded to my
> > query as to what are the various senses in which we use the word,
> > "culture," and hence what are the (abstractable) features of human
> > experience we are focusing on in a given thread.
> >
> > Carrol
>
> OK, here's my response:
>
> There are three main uses, one scientific and the others merely traditional:
>
> Scientific definition: the learned and shared memes (symbols, behavioral
> habits, and norms for creating physical objects) shared among a particular
> population.
>
> Traditional definition #1: the arts and letters (origin: upper-class
> snobbery, see Raymond Williams, _Keywords_)
>
> Traditional definition #2: what ordinary people do out side the spheres of
> paid labor and politics (origin: late 20th-century subconscious adaptation
> of traditional definition #1 in attempt to describe and analyze off-the-job
> life, in response to rise of TV and movies as dominant leisure-time
> activities)
>
> There are problems, of ascending scale, with each definition:
>
> Scientific: the concept is highly abstract and tautologous; it lacks
> explanatory power; we want to know what gave rise to particular cultures,
> not just that they exist (this latter was news to Europeans up until pretty
> recently).
>
> Trad #1: obviously unscientific definition, useless for social
> science/rational description of human societies
>
> Trad #2: same flaw as Trad #1; confuses issues; the worst of both worlds --
> the vagueness/tautologousness of the scientific definition, plus the
> imprecision of Trad #1; virtually every time you see "culture" in modern
> social science (perhaps excluding anthropology), it really means
> "off-the-job practices"; by definition, economic life and politics are part
> and parcel of culture, if you define that term scientifically.
>
> My nomination for the single most harmful concept in modern social
> science/social criticism = "consumer culture," which is a biased insult
> ("consumer") attached to a non-scientific muddle.
>
> Herr Goebbels was correct about what to do when you hear the word culture, I
> MHO. Social science and left politics would both be much improved if the
> word "culture" was dropped entirely.