: the science of culture
specifically
: a methodology especially associated with the American anthropologist Leslie A. White that treats culture as a self-contained self-determined process and regards cultural traits (as technologies, ideologies, and institutions) as the products of antecedent and concomitant cultural elements and as developing independently of other data (as climatic environment, human physical type, or human wishes and purposes)
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Merriam-Webster unabridged
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