In 1952, two leading American anthropologists, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, took stock of the idea of culture in its “technical anthropological sense.” By then, the so-called culture concept, long the master concept of American anthropology, had become a key notion in American thought, comparable in both “explanatory importance” and “generality of application” to “categories such as gravity in physics, disease in medicine, [and] evolution in biology.” Not only had the culture concept become pervasive in the social sciences, it was also quickly becoming part of the vocabulary of educated Americans. Yet the proliferation of formal definitions of culture had so muddled the concept's meaning that Kroeber and Kluckhohn felt the need for conceptual clarification. To this end, they canvassed some 164 definitions, factored out the common elements, and arrived at what they hoped would prove to be a consensual definition of culture: “culture,” they wrote, “consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts.” Kroeber and Kluckhohn located the “essential core” of culture in “traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values.”

To Kroeber and Kluckhohn, the wide currency that the culture concept had gained by the early 1950s seemed all the more remarkable considering how recently the concept had been formulated.