not, but with the real, near and meaningful future, that of your lifetime, and your children's lifetime, insofar as you are able to influence it. The mere fact that you are discussing this topic ensures that some sort of Maori culture will persist. We must ask ourselves what it comprises, how it may be fashioned, for whom it may function, what trends within it may be encouraged, and how? Four useful ways of thinking about culture Of all the slippery words in common use few can be as variable in meaning as this word ‘culture’. One anthropological survey lists 160 definitions and there is endless confusion in discussions, public and private, professional and lay, because people either do not define their concepts, or are inconsistent in their usage. Part of the trouble is that people say they will define culture one way, and then go on to use the term thus, and so, and variously otherwise, without signalling (or even being aware of) shifts in meaning. Their mistake is to limit the term to a greater degree than they require for their purpose. To avoid this, I suggest that we think of culture in four ways, and try to be clear when we are using any one of the four. Furthermore, in your discussions you should call sharply to question any person who does not tell you clearly which concept he is referring to in any statement he makes. These four do not exhaust the possibilities of meaning in the word culture. Nor do they refer to phenomena found independently in behaviour, that is, they overlap in theory and in practice. It is useful, however, to try to keep them separate in your thinking. I Culture as a way of life Culture in this sense refers to the stamp of stylistic distinctiveness on every action within the way of life of a group. Work, play, song, dance, speech, gesture, life, even death, all are patterned in a way which is uniquely the way of that group. Culture in this sense is not something optional or occasional. The person can no more divest himself of his culture than he can of his skin, not because culture is genetically determined (though the capacity for it no doubt is), but because amongst all ways of life it exclusively has authority and rightness for him. In this sense there are not only the cultures of national groups but some others as well. For example, it may be appropriate to speak of a scientific culture or an academic culture since these occupations bind people within common patterns which they possess. On the other hand, it is probably wrong to speak of the culture of the poor, urban culture or rural culture unless somehow the people involved select this pattern, prefer it, and think of it as natural and right for them and are committed by their membership in the culture. II Culture as a set of traditions, customs, or practices, perpetuated and/or cherished by a group This is one of the oldest definitions of culture within modern anthropology. It defines the culture of anthoropologists (many if not most), or Roman Catholics, or boy scouts, or any other group which ritualises events in a particular way, less limited than the first definition, it is still very wide. However, the focus of attention is not now any and every act, merely some. In this sense there is a Jewish culture in New Zealand, a Greek Orthodox culture, and many others. III Culture as a creative process Perhaps the most common definition of culture is that which stresses literary, artistic, dramatic or otherwise creative activity. You will never hear an anthropologist say of someone, “He is very cultured”, not because anthropologists don't know any poets, artists, etc., but because, under one or the other of the two definitions above, they define everyone as having a culture of one sort or another. But the popular usage does not merely represent an idle value judgement. Anthropologists have themselves stressed the importance of creativity and point to the fate of cultures that fail to change. Odd though it may seem, the Darwinian ‘adapt or perish’ focuses attention on the tremendous importance in cultural survival of playing with ideas, with words, with techniques, with imaginative models of “as if” and “as might be”. Freud considered that such cultural pursuits as art and drama expressed personal wishes which could not be acceptably expressed within the other rituals, customs and practices of a way of life. Culture in this sense is a means by which a person extends his expression beyond merely a personal discharge of tension into a pattern of shared creative expression having style and form and ritualised patterning but permitting a wide range of adaption to new circumstances and events, real or imaginary. IV Culture as a personal sense of difference I have occasionally met people who say, “Of course, I'm Maori you know”, but otherwise have neither Maori knowledge nor characteristics. Their Maoriness comprises nothing more than their knowledge of an incident in their greatgrandfather's sex life—their awareness of a genetic link with someone of Maori descent. Such people represent the last step in the cultural scale; but for their awareness they would cease to have any link with the cultural group with whom, they perhaps erroneously feel, their genes impel them to keep some residual association. But culture as a personal sense of difference can mean something much more than this. At the other end of the scale awareness can become a vigorous protestation of equality, or where this is frustrated, a militant nationalism. Awareness of membership in, or identification with, some group slants the person's judgement in such a way that that particular group becomes the locus of an emotional link. The person identifies with its status and membership characteristics and seeks to make its fate his fate. The group becomes his culture in terms, not of what he is, but of what he wants