For Williams, culture is the interrelationship threaded through all social practices

Evidence

If this first emphasis takes up and reworks the connotation of the term “culture” with the domain of “ideas,” the second emphasis is more deliberately anthropological, and emphasizes that aspect of “culture” which refers to social practices . It is from this second emphasis that the somewhat simplified definition—“culture is a whole way of life”—has been rather too neatly abstracted. Williams did relate this aspect of the concept to the more “documentary”—that is, descriptive, even ethnographic—usage of the term. But the earlier definition seems to me the more central one, into which “way of life” is integrated. The important point in the argument rests on the active and indissoluble relationships between elements or social practices normally separated out. It is in this context that the “theory of culture” is defined as “the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life.” “Culture” is not a practice; nor is it simply the descriptive sum of the “mores and folkways” of societies—as it tended to become in certain kinds of anthropology. It is threaded through all social practices, and is the sum of their interrelationship. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 185

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader project on how cultural theorist Stuart Hall reads Raymond Williams, grounding the definition of culture as relational rather than behavioral.
• DEFINE: Distinguishes the relational ‘theory of culture’ from the simplified ‘whole way of life’ and from descriptive anthropological uses.