in media res

So, we (those of us on the media and cultural studies MA) are about five months in now, and I have a question: what is culture, anyway?

I appreciate that this question is probably unanswerable – probably best unanswered, even – but I was wondering if anyone else could find a succinct definition for what they take ‘culture’ to mean?

My current favourite comes from Clifford Geertz (1973):

“The concept of culture I espouse… is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of a law but an interpretative one in search of meaning.”