Culture has always generated controversy for its innate ability to elude any exact meaning. What is culture? Anthropologists have strived to explain and define culture, but as always conflicting ideas arose. An anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, and philosopher, Matthew Arnold, tried to give meaning to culture. With little more than a century between the two thinkers, each person held different definitions of culture.
             Clifford Geertz has identified culture as "the total way of life of a people." According to Geertz, culture is inherited, attained and taught from a people like a "storehouse of pooled learning." As an anthropologist, Geertz sought not to prove what culture was, but to explain what culture is. The best source to find culture, as Geertz associated, would be from people who have learned and lived through their culture.
             Matthew Arnold's view of culture is focused heavily on the ideal that culture was "contact with the best which has been thought and said in the world." Moreover, Arnold assigned characteristics to culture. Accordingly, culture was the creation of "beauty", "intelligence", and "perfection" in which only the best could be labeled such. One whom mastered a language such a Greek was certainly not cultured to the opinions of Arnold. On the other hand, someone of beauty and perfection was cultured in Arnold's eyes.
             In seeing into both Geertz's and Arnold's opinions of culture, we can clearly draw a line between the thinkers. While Arnold focused culture to be a specific thing that only few attained, Geertz claimed that culture can be found in each and every person. More importantly, the two explained culture to be completely different. Geertz saw culture as the way people lived, while Arnold saw culture as a compilation of beauty, intelligence, and perfection. With a century spanning the two, the drift from "Arnoldian conce...