What Is Culture? The word "culture" has many different meanings. For example, we sometimes say that people who know about art, music, and literature are cultured. However, the word culture has a different meaning for anthropologists (people who study humankind). To an anthropologist the word culture means all the ways in which a group of people act, dress, think, and feel. People have to learn the cultural ways of their community: they are not something that the people in the group are born withInstinctive behaviour, on the other hand, is a pattern of behaviour that an animal is borr with. Spiders spinning their webs is an example of instinctive behaviour. The mother spider does not teach her babies how to spin webs. (In fact, she is not even there when they are born.) They know how to do it when they are born. This is what we mean by instinctive behaviour. As humans, we learn some of the ways of our culture by being taught by our teachers or parents. We learn more of the ways of our culture by growing up in it. We see how other people in our culture do things, and we do them the same way. We even learn how to think and feel in this way