"Culture" like "Race" is a social construct; both are often misused!

"Race" is not a genetic concept. When you look at the genetic makeup of individuals, the dissimilarities with groups generally seen as "races" are large, and the dissimilarities between "racial groups" are small.

I recall looking through old church records in Mexico and finding new born children classified as "blancos", "indios" and "negros" not to mention "mestizos", "mulatos" and "zambos". In the United States there was an exhaustive classification including "quadroons" and "octrunes". All of these had social meaning but little relation to the actual genetic makeup of the individuals.

We all know how often such racial designations were used as the basis of discrimination. injustice and hatred.

According to Wikipedia, "the word "culture" is most commonly used in three basic senses:

• excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also known as high culture
• an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning
• the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group."

It is clear that, in the first sense, the word "culture" too has been used as the basis of discrimination, injustice and dislike if not hatred. Thus "a cultured person" had a taste for symphonic music, classical art. and fine literature while "an uncultured person" might have a taste for folk music, crafts and stories from the oral tradition. Upper socio-economic classes believed their taste to be the standard of excellence and looked down upon those of other socio-economic classes who did not share it. Someone from a third culture might find elements from each preference list to be excellent.

I am more interested in the alternative, "anthropological" definition of culture represented in the second and third bullets above. It has been suggested that the basic unit of culture is the "meme" -- a single idea, symbol or practice which is transmitted from one person to another "through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena." "The British scientist Richard Dawkins introduced the word "meme" in The Selfish Gene (1976) as a basis for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena."

In this sense of the word, we often talk about a group of people as if they shared a common culture, tossing off terms such as "Andean culture", "Navajo culture" and "Japanese culture". Of course it would be a significant error to assume that all the people in the Andes share all the same cultural memes, that all the people who are socially defined as Navajo share all the same cultural memes. nor that all the people of Japan or who trace their ancestry back to Japan share all the same cultural memes.

It is sometimes convenient to use racial designations, as to look at diabetes in Native Americans or religious orientation of U.S. Hispanics, and so it is sometimes convenient to consider a cultural group as the set of people who share a broad set of cultural memes. That does not mean that such designations represent any deeper truth.

As in the case of genetics, I would suggest that the variation in meme sets within cultural groups may be large, and the variation between such groups small. Thus, I often find more in common with highly educated government officials in developing countries than those officials have with the poor people who "share their culture".

I also suggest that cultural designations were used as the basis of discrimination. injustice and hatred. Think about the way that the "Hispanic" populations of Latin America have sometimes treated the indigenous populations, or the way that Anglos in the United States have treated various ethnic minorities and have characterized their cultures!