It seems that Michael Parenti has summarized many of our main points regarding culture and the culture concept in his new book "The Culture Struggle". In an interview on ZNet, he says:
(...) it has long occurred to me that what we call "culture" is not just a set of practices, mores, and beliefs, the "innocent accretion of past solutions," as an anthropologist once said. Much of culture is certainly that, but culture is also a politically charged component of the social order, mediated through institutions and groups that have quite privileged vested interests.
(...)
I draw from cultures from around the world in the hope of demonstrating how beliefs and practices are subjected to manipulation by dominant interests, and how cultures are instruments of social power.
>> read the whole interview
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Thomas Hylland Eriksen: Confessions of a useful idiot, or Why culture should be brought back in
I believe Parenti shows that it is also in the nature of established academic disciplines like sociology psychology and anthropology to split the subject of class into discrete lexicons that tend to obscure class as the raw causative structure that shapes form as we otherwise know it. Cities personalities and cultures are first of all replications of class structure.