Culture is the jam in the sandwich of anthropology. It is all-pervasive. It is used to distinguish humans from apes ("everything that man does that the monkeys do not" (Lord Ragland)) and to characterize evolutionarily derived behaviors in both living apes and humans. It is often both the explanation of what it is that has made human evolution different and what it is that it is necessary to explain. ... It exists in the heads of humans and is manifested in the products of actions. ... [C]ulture is seen by some as the equivalent of the gene, and hence a particulate unit (the meme) that can be added together in endless permutations and combinations, while to others it is as a large and indivisible whole that it takes on its significance.
In other words, culture is everything to anthropology, and it could be argued that in the process it has also become nothing.
