Culture is a product of tradition
Culture does not result from tradition but from the activity of sharing, exploiting, utilising and dividing some area of the earth and its resources. Successful cultures are those that adjust these activities in response to changing physical, social and economic constraints of their enviroment. To achieve this societies societies do draw on traditions but also draw on their needs and aspirations. Tools, skills . laws, forms of communication and enterainment are usually more about meeting today's needs rather than clinging to traditions. Thus, if an Inuit ("Eskimo") culture adopts a snowmobile rather than a dogsled for transport, it does not mean that the culture is disappearing, but that is dynamic and evolving.

Culture is enviromentally determined
Certainly the earth's varied enviroment's influence culture (available resources, distance to the sea, climate) but culture is not enviromentally determined. People choose a variety of adaptions within enviromental constraints. This is strongly affected by non-material dynamics such as religion, world view, a sense of identity and forms of humour that can persist despite a changing enviroment. The Shuar Nation, First Peoples of and premier rainforest agriculturists until the 1960s, witnessedthe detruction of their rainforest homeland for cattle ranching. Undeterred the Shuar became premier cattle ranchers and also consultants to other indigenous people facing catastrophic enviromental change.

Culture is an anachronism and will disappear with modernisation
Since culture; unlike earth and water, is socially constructed it is sometimes dismissed as an abstaction that is not "real". This can lead policy makers to; underestimate the geopolitical force inherent in culture; to impose new cultural "realities" that meet with violent resistance; and to overlook the obvious phsical manifestations of culture. To exemplify the first point, by the 1980s many social scientists were so convinced that Western technology, ideology, globalisation, and nation-building had reduced cultural identification to an anachronism that they failed to predict the break-up major states (eg the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslavia, the secession of Eritrea) or general wave of post-Cold War nationalism. The second point is illustrated by the general global failure of nation-building exercises in Africa and elsewhere in the aftermath of decolonisation (eg Sudan's failure to Islamicise the South has led to Africa's longest ongoing war). Third, distinct ways of doing things lead to distinctive housing types, cuisine, smells, languages, sounds and sights that manifest in a cultural landscape. Thus, one culture can be distinguished from another by using our senses, not just our theories.

Culture isequivalent to ethinicity and race
The biggest myth about culture is that it is equivalent to ethnicity and race. Ethnicity refers to physical ancestry and is so narrow in scope that it omits many cultural actors and conflates the variety of over lapping geographical scales that produce them. A cuture may or may not include ethnicity as an identifier but culture itself is much broader (eg natios, tribes, regional cultures) and includes many interactions across space. One could be Ndebele, Nguni, Zimbabwean, South African, and African all at once and interact across all these scale in the construs\ction of identity. Race is not tantamount to culture for four reasons:

there are only five "races" and thousands of self-identifying cultures; "race" as a classification is a social construct rather than a "fact" since DNA analysis can only identify a spectrum of genetic traits which differ more between individuals than between races; culture, unlike race, is not dependent upon an exernal system of classifiction but is a form of self-identification about which we must carefully enquire; and one may be adopted into a culture, regardless of "race", if one is accepted by that society and choose to share a certain way of life.

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