What is culture?

Culture is the current holistic consciousness of a cohesive group of beings. It changes as cirstances, and opportunity demand. Culture guides the behavior of group members, and the group may chose to enforce behavior so directed by sanctions against the individual or group which fails to comply. We tend to think of culture in human terms, but any social species will have to develop a culture in order to survive. Humans are rather unique, in that they have developed several non-survival cultures over time, but those tend to be only local aberrations, which promptly disappear.