For anthropologists culture has long stood for the way of life of a people，for the sum of their learned behavior patterns, attitudes, and material things. Though they subscribe to this general view, most anthropologists tend to disagree however, on what the precise substance of culture is. In practice their work often leads some of them to a fascination with a single category of events among the many which make up human life, and they tend to think of this as the essence of all culture. Others, looking for a point of stability in the flux of society, often become preoccupied with identifying a common particle or element which can be found in every aspect of culture.
From the beginning, culture has been the special province of the anthropologist, who usually gained a firsthand experience of its pervasive power in the field during the internship which follows the prescribed period of classroom training. As fledgling anthropologists moved deeper: and deeper into the life of the people they were studying they inevitably acquired the conviction that culture was real and not just something dreamed up by the theoretician. Moreover, as they slowly mastered the complexities of a given culture they were apt to feel that these complexities could be understood in no other way than by prolonged experience; and that it was almost impossible to communicate this understanding to anyone who had not lived through the same experience.
