'Society' and 'Culture'

In a brief piece on NPR this morning, discussing the hacker community Anonymous, the journalist being interviewed, Quin Norton, repeatedly confused the terms 'culture' and 'society'. The text is not available online yet, just the audio, so I cannot easily review the exact words, quote them, or comment on them specifically.

When considering matters of culture, it is important to maintain a distinction between the individual people comprising some group -- a society or community -- and the shared values, practices, etc. of that group. Cultures do not exist apart from individuals comprising a group, and all such societies have a culture, but they are not synonymous. I don't wish to get ahead of myself, but for example, we do not evangelize cultures, we evangelize people or groups of people. Can a person 'engage' a culture? Probably not, depending on what one means by the term.

How should we define 'culture'? A good working definition would include the following elements:

• First, elements of culture exist in common. No common, no culture. Cultures do not exist outside of a context of people living in community.
• Second, individuals are parts of many different communities, which each have their own culture, their own set of things they have in common. Inevitably, there is much overlap between what two different communities have in common when the members of those communities overlap. E.g. the culture of a local church will come to reflect the cultures of the individual families that make up that community.

Lastly, what are those things that people in community have in common? More to come.