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Symbolic culture is unique to Homo sapiens. Anthropologists often draw a contrast between "culture" (which many animals possess) and the distinctively human realm of "symbolic culture". They may also contrast "symbolic culture" with "material culture".

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Many animals have culture. Only humans, however, possess symbolic culture. Imagine trying to teach a chimpanzee the difference between 'water' and 'holy water'. As it tried dipping its finger into the two bowls of liquid, the ape would discern no difference whatsoever. Only humans can set up 'symbolic cultural' distinctions of this kind.

To an anthropologist, the term 'culture' refers to those patterns of behaviour that are passed on from generation to generation by imitation or learning. For example, a population of wild-living chimpanzees can be said to possess 'culture' in the sense that its locally distinctive techniques for making and using tools (for example termite sticks or special hammers to crack nuts) will be passed on not genetically but through observation and learning. 'Symbolic culture' includes this idea but also includes much more. The term refers to the fact that humans inhabit a world whose features are socially and in a sense 'arbitrarily' constructed. Monetary values are a good example. Totems, underworlds, football scores and word-meanings provide further illustrations. It is objectively true that a ten dollar bill is worth ten times as much as a one dollar bill. Yet this objective truth is entirely dependent on communal faith. If public confidence in the currency were to collapse, the 'objective' truths of the currency system would collapse at the same time.

In the light of this familiar example, we can say that symbolic culture is a realm of objective facts with the paradoxical property of being entirely dependent on a subjective factor - faith. What applies to monetary values applies even more widely in other domains of symbolic culture, such as religion. To believers in a religious system, its facts are objectively true. Yet without communal faith in such truths, they would in fact evaporate like currency values in a crisis. For example, if no-one believed in witchcraft, the supernatural powers of witches would no longer exist. Animals do not inhabit hallucinatory realms of this kind - they inhabit only physical and biological reality. In other words, animals possess 'culture' but not 'symbolic culture'.