Regardless of occupation, age, gender, or economic status, maritime culture penetrates their worldview. Whether knowledge takes on a physical form, such as a boat, or a nonmaterial expression, such as a story, it represents a legacy of ideas and values. The cultural knowledge that members of a group use to deal with everyday life includes the structure and rules of language, beliefs about nature and the supernatural, and methods for procuring food. Cultural knowledge also encompasses the range of ideas that define beauty and how aesthetic values shape the built environment, from architecture to boat types. The inhabitants of any community share a core of cultural knowledge, but every individual's experience contributes to the community's heritage.
Culture is dynamic and as such is constantly adjusting to a variety of forces.
One powerful force is the natural environment, and it can determine such things as the kinds of available food, materials from which clothing, tools, and shelters can be fashioned, and the cycle of human activities necessary for survival. Environmental conditions frequently result in particular cultural adaptations. Consequently, we may observe similar patterns of behavior among groups who live in either mountainous or coastal regions, or among groups who live in coastal regions, even though those groups may be separated by time and space. Specialists from a variety of fields take culture as the subject of their investigations. These specialists, including anthropologists, archaeologists, cultural geographers, folklorists, historians, historic preservationists, and sociologists, each lend to the study perspectives on culture and methodologies for the collection and analysis of data that are characteristic of a particular discipline.