Civilization scholarship defines cultural identity hierarchically against what separates humans from other species.

Evidence

Hayward Alker has accurately pointed out that in my Foreign Affairs article I “definitionally disallowed” the idea of a world civilization by defining civilization as “the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species.” This is, of course, the way the term has been used by most civilization scholars. In this chapter, however, I relax that definition to allow the possibility of peoples throughout the world identifying with a distinct global culture which supplements or supplants civilizations in the Western, Islamic, or Sinic sense. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 1353

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines civilization as the standard highest-tier cultural grouping just short of species-level human identity, then relaxes that definition.