Definition word culture has

Culture is the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, encompassing language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and arts.

The Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (opens in new tab) goes a step further, defining culture as shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs and understanding that are learned by socialization. Thus, culture can be seen as the growth of a group identity fostered by social patterns unique to the group. 

«Culture encompasses religion, food, what we wear, how we wear it, our language, marriage, music, what we believe is right or wrong, how we sit at the table, how we greet visitors, how we behave with loved ones and a million other things,» Cristina De Rossi, an anthropologist at Barnet and Southgate College in London (opens in new tab), told Live Science.

Many countries, such as France, Italy, Germany, the US, India, Russia and China are noted for their rich cultures, the customs, traditions, music, art and food being a continual draw for tourists. 

The word «culture» derives from a French term, which in turn derives from the Latin «colere,» which means to tend to the earth and grow, or cultivation and nurture, according to Arthur Asa Berger (opens in new tab). «It shares its etymology with a number of other words related to actively fostering growth,» De Rossi said.

Western culture

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The term «Western culture» has come to define the culture of European countries as well as those that have been heavily influenced by European immigration, such as the United States, according to Khan University (opens in new tab). Western culture has its roots in the Classical Period of the Greco-Roman era (the fourth and fifth centuries B.C.) and the rise of Christianity in the 14th century. Other drivers of Western culture include Latin, Celtic, Germanic and Hellenic ethnic and linguistic groups. 

Any number of historical events have helped shape Western culture during the past 2,500 years. The fall of Rome, often pegged to A.D. 476, cleared the way for the establishment of a series of often-warring states in Europe, according to Stanford University (opens in new tab) historian Walter Scheidel, each with their own cultures. The Black Death of the 1300s cut the population of Europe by one-third to one-half, rapidly remaking society. As a result of the plague, writes Ohio State University (opens in new tab) historian John L. Brooke, Christianity became stronger in Europe, with more focus on apocalyptic themes. Survivors in the working class gained more power, as elites were forced to pay more for scarce labor. And the disruption of trade routes between East and West set off new exploration, and ultimately, the incursion of Europeans into North and South America. 

Today, the influences of Western culture can be seen in almost every country in the world.

Eastern culture

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Eastern culture generally refers to the societal norms of countries in Far East Asia (including China, Japan, Vietnam, North Korea and South Korea) and the Indian subcontinent. Like the West, Eastern culture was heavily influenced by religion during its early development, but it was also heavily influenced by the growth and harvesting of rice, according to a research article published in the journal Rice (opens in new tab) in 2012. In general, in Eastern culture there is less of a distinction between secular society and religious philosophy than there is in the West. 

However, this umbrella covers an enormous range of traditions and histories. For example, Buddhism originated in India, but it was largely overtaken by Hinduism after the 12th century, according to

Britannica

(opens in new tab).

As a result, Hinduism became a major driver of culture in India, while Buddhism continued to exert influence in China and Japan. The preexisting cultural ideas in these areas also influenced religion. For example, according to

Jiahe Liu and Dongfang Shao

(opens in new tab), Chinese Buddhism borrowed from the philosophy of Taoism, which emphasizes compassion, frugality and humility.

Centuries of interactions — both peaceful and aggressive — in this region also led to these cultures influencing each other. Japan, for example, controlled or occupied Korea in some form between 1876 and 1945. During this time, many Koreans were pressured or forced into giving up their names for Japanese surnames, according to History.com (opens in new tab). 

Latin culture

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 The geographic region encompassing «Latin culture» is widespread. Latin America is typically defined as those parts of Central America, South America and Mexico where Spanish or Portuguese are the dominant languages. These are all places that were colonized by or influenced by Spain or Portugal starting in the 1400s. It is thought that French geographers used the term «Latin America» to differentiate between Anglo and Romance (Latin-based) languages, though some historians, such as Michael Gobat, author of «The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of Anti-Imperialism, Democracy and Race» (opens in new tab) (American Historical Review, Voll 118, Issue 5, 2013), dispute this.

Latin cultures are thus incredibly diverse, and many blend Indigenous traditions with the Spanish language and Catholicism brought by Spanish and Portuguese colonizers. Many of these cultures were also influenced by African cultures due to enslaved Africans being brought to the Americas starting in the 1600s, according to the African American Registery (opens in new tab). These influences are particularly strong in Brazil and in Caribbean nations. 

Latin culture continues to evolve and spread. A good example is Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, a holiday dedicated to remembering the departed that is celebrated on Nov. 1 and Nov. 2. Day of the Dead dates back to before Christopher Columbus landed in North America, but was moved to its current celebration date by Spanish colonizers, who merged it with the Catholic All Saints Day. 

Mexican immigrants to the United States brought the holiday with them, and in the 1970s, artists and activities brought focus to Día de los Muertos as a way of celebrating their Chicano (Mexican-American) heritage, according to the Smithsonian American Art Museum (opens in new tab). The holiday is now well-known in the United States. 

Middle Eastern culture

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Roughly speaking, the Middle East encompasses the Arabian peninsula as well as the eastern Mediterranean. The North African countries of Libya, Egypt and Sudan are also sometimes included, according to Britannica (opens in new tab). The term  «Middle Eastern culture» is another umbrella that encompasses a huge diversity of cultural practices, religious beliefs and daily habits. The region is the birthplace of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and is home to dozens of languages, from Arabic to Hebrew to Turkish to Pashto. 

While there is significant religious diversity in the Middle East, the predominant religion by numbers is Islam, and Islam has played a large role in the cultural development of the region. Islam originated in what is today Saudi Arabia in the early seventh century. An influential moment for the culture and development of the Middle East came after the death of the religion’s founder, Muhammad, in 632, according to the Metropoliton Museum (opens in new tab). 

Some followers believed the next leader should be one of Muhammad’s friends and confidants; others believed leadership must be passed through Muhammad’s bloodline. This led to a schism between Shia Muslims, those who believed in the importance of the bloodline, and Sunni Muslims, who believed leadership should not pass through the family. Today, about 85% of Muslims are Sunni, according to the Council on Foreign Relations (opens in new tab). Their rituals and traditions vary somewhat, and divisions between the two groups often fuel conflict. 

Middle Eastern culture has also been shaped by the Ottoman Empire, which ruled a U-shaped ring around the eastern Mediterranean between the 14th and early 20th centuries, according to Britannica. Areas that were part of the Ottoman Empire are known for distinctive architecture drawn from Persian and Islamic influences.

African culture

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Africa has the longest history of human habitation of any continent: Humans originated there and began to migrate to other areas of the world around 400,000 years ago, according to the Natural History Museum (opens in new tab) in London. Tom White, who serves as the museum’s senior curator of non-insect invertebrates, and his team were able to discover this by studying Africa’s ancient lakes and the animals that lived in them. As of the time of this article, this research provides the oldest evidence for hominin species in the Arabian peninsula.

African culture varies not only between national boundaries, but within them. One of the key features of this culture is the large number of ethnic groups throughout the 54 countries on the continent. For example, Nigeria alone has more than 300 tribes, according to Culture Trip (opens in new tab). Africa has  imported and exported its culture for centuries; East African trading ports were a crucial link between East and West as early as the seventh century, according to The Field Museum (opens in new tab). This led to complex urban centers along the eastern coast, often connected by the movement of raw materials and goods from landlocked parts of the continent. 

It would be impossible to characterize all of African culture with one description. Northwest Africa has strong ties to the Middle East, while Sub-Saharan Africa shares historical, physical and social characteristics that are very different from North Africa, according to Britannica (opens in new tab) . 

Some traditional Sub-Saharan African cultures include the Maasai of Tanzania and Kenya, the Zulu of South Africa and the Batwa of Central Africa. The traditions of these cultures evolved in very different environments. The Batwa, for example, are one of a group of ethnicities that traditionally live a forager lifestyle in the rainforest. The Maasai, on the other hand, herd sheep and goats on the open range. 

What is cultural appropriation?

Oxford Reference (opens in new tab) describes cultural appropriation as: «A term used to describe the taking over of creative or artistic forms, themes, or practices by one cultural group from another.» 

An example might be a person who is not Native American wearing a Native American headdress as a fashion accessory. For example, Victoria’s Secret was heavily criticized in 2012 after putting a model in a headdress reminiscent of a Lakota war bonnet, according to USA Today (opens in new tab). These headdresses are laden with meaningful symbolism, and wearing one was a privilege earned by chieftains or warriors through acts of bravery, according to the Khan Academy (opens in new tab). The model also wore turquoise jewelry inspired by designs used by Zuni, Navajo and Hopi tribes in the desert Southwest, illustrating how cultural appropriation can lump together tribes with very different cultures and histories into one stereotyped image. 

More recently, in 2019, Gucci faced a similar backlash for selling an item named «the indy full turban» which caused considerable anger from the Sikh community, according to Esquire (opens in new tab). Harjinder Singh Kukreja, a Sikh restaurateur and influencer, wrote to Gucci on Twitter (opens in new tab), stating: «the Sikh Turban is not a hot new accessory for white models but an article of faith for practising Sikhs. Your models have used Turbans as ‘hats’ whereas practising Sikhs tie them neatly fold-by-fold. Using fake Sikhs/Turbans is worse than selling fake Gucci products.»

Constant change

No matter what a culture looks like, one thing is for certain: Cultures change. «Culture appears to have become key in our interconnected world, which is made up of so many ethnically diverse societies, but also riddled by conflicts associated with religion, ethnicity, ethical beliefs, and, essentially, the elements which make up culture,» De Rossi said. «But culture is no longer fixed, if it ever was. It is essentially fluid and constantly in motion.» 

This makes it difficult to define any culture in only one way. While change is inevitable, most people see value in respecting and preserving the past. The United Nations has created a group called The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (opens in new tab) (UNESCO) to identify cultural and natural heritage and to conserve and protect it. Monuments, buildings and sites are covered by the group’s protection, according to the international treaty, the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (opens in new tab). This treaty was adopted by UNESCO in 1972.

Additional reporting by Live Science Contributors Alina Bradford, Stephanie Pappas and Callum McKelvie.

Culture () is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups.^[1] Culture is often originated from or attributed to a specific region or location.

Humans acquire culture through the learning processes of enculturation and socialization, which is shown by the diversity of cultures across societies.

A cultural norm codifies acceptable conduct in society; it serves as a guideline for behavior, dress, language, and demeanor in a situation, which serves as a template for expectations in a social group.
Accepting only a monoculture in a social group can bear risks, just as a single species can wither in the face of environmental change, for lack of functional responses to the change.^[2]
Thus in military culture, valor is counted a typical behavior for an individual and duty, honor, and loyalty to the social group are counted as virtues or functional responses in the continuum of conflict. In the practice of religion, analogous attributes can be identified in a social group.

Cultural change, or repositioning, is the reconstruction of a cultural concept of a society.^[3] Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces resisting change. Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies.

Organizations like UNESCO attempt to preserve culture and cultural heritage.

Description

Culture is considered a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of phenomena that are transmitted through social learning in human societies. Cultural universals are found in all human societies. These include expressive forms like art, music, dance, ritual, religion, and technologies like tool usage, cooking, shelter, and clothing. The concept of material culture covers the physical expressions of culture, such as technology, architecture and art, whereas the immaterial aspects of culture such as principles of social organization (including practices of political organization and social institutions), mythology, philosophy, literature (both written and oral), and science comprise the intangible cultural heritage of a society.^[5]

In the humanities, one sense of culture as an attribute of the individual has been the degree to which they have cultivated a particular level of sophistication in the arts, sciences, education, or manners. The level of cultural sophistication has also sometimes been used to distinguish civilizations from less complex societies. Such hierarchical perspectives on culture are also found in class-based distinctions between a high culture of the social elite and a low culture, popular culture, or folk culture of the lower classes, distinguished by the stratified access to cultural capital. In common parlance, culture is often used to refer specifically to the symbolic markers used by ethnic groups to distinguish themselves visibly from each other such as body modification, clothing or jewelry. Mass culture refers to the mass-produced and mass mediated forms of consumer culture that emerged in the 20th century. Some schools of philosophy, such as Marxism and critical theory, have argued that culture is often used politically as a tool of the elites to manipulate the proletariat and create a false consciousness. Such perspectives are common in the discipline of cultural studies. In the wider social sciences, the theoretical perspective of cultural materialism holds that human symbolic culture arises from the material conditions of human life, as humans create the conditions for physical survival, and that the basis of culture is found in evolved biological dispositions.

When used as a count noun, a «culture» is the set of customs, traditions, and values of a society or community, such as an ethnic group or nation. Culture is the set of knowledge acquired over time. In this sense, multiculturalism values the peaceful coexistence and mutual respect between different cultures inhabiting the same planet. Sometimes «culture» is also used to describe specific practices within a subgroup of a society, a subculture (e.g. «bro culture»), or a counterculture. Within cultural anthropology, the ideology and analytical stance of cultural relativism hold that cultures cannot easily be objectively ranked or evaluated because any evaluation is necessarily situated within the value system of a given culture.

Etymology

The modern term «culture» is based on a term used by the ancient Roman orator Cicero in his Tusculanae Disputationes, where he wrote of a cultivation of the soul or «cultura animi,»^[6] using an agricultural metaphor for the development of a philosophical soul, understood teleologically as the highest possible ideal for human development. Samuel Pufendorf took over this metaphor in a modern context, meaning something similar, but no longer assuming that philosophy was man’s natural perfection. His use, and that of many writers after him, «refers to all the ways in which human beings overcome their original barbarism, and through artifice, become fully human.»^[7]

In 1986, philosopher Edward S. Casey wrote, «The very word culture meant ‘place tilled’ in Middle English, and the same word goes back to Latin colere, ‘to inhabit, care for, till, worship’ and cultus, ‘A cult, especially a religious one.’ To be cultural, to have a culture, is to inhabit a place sufficiently intensely to cultivate it—to be responsible for it, to respond to it, to attend to it caringly.»^[8]

Culture described by Richard Velkley:^[7]

… originally meant the cultivation of the soul or mind, acquires most of its later modern meaning in the writings of the 18th-century German thinkers, who were on various levels developing Rousseau’s criticism of «modern liberalism and Enlightenment.» Thus a contrast between «culture» and «civilization» is usually implied in these authors, even when not expressed as such.

In the words of anthropologist E.B. Tylor, it is «that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.»^[9] Alternatively, in a contemporary variant, «Culture is defined as a social domain that emphasizes the practices, discourses and material expressions, which, over time, express the continuities and discontinuities of social meaning of a life held in common.^[10]

The Cambridge English Dictionary states that culture is «the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time.»^[11] Terror management theory posits that culture is a series of activities and worldviews that provide humans with the basis for perceiving themselves as «person[s] of worth within the world of meaning»—raising themselves above the merely physical aspects of existence, in order to deny the animal insignificance and death that Homo sapiens became aware of when they acquired a larger brain.^[12][13]

The word is used in a general sense as the evolved ability to categorize and represent experiences with symbols and to act imaginatively and creatively. This ability arose with the evolution of behavioral modernity in humans around 50,000 years ago and is often thought to be unique to humans. However, some other species have demonstrated similar, though much less complicated, abilities for social learning. It is also used to denote the complex networks of practices and accumulated knowledge and ideas that are transmitted through social interaction and exist in specific human groups, or cultures, using the plural form.^{[citation needed]}

Change

Raimon Panikkar identified 29 ways in which cultural change can be brought about, including growth, development, evolution, involution, renovation, reconception, reform, innovation, revivalism, revolution, mutation, progress, diffusion, osmosis, borrowing, eclecticism, syncretism, modernization, indigenization, and transformation.^[14] In this context, modernization could be viewed as adoption of Enlightenment era beliefs and practices, such as science, rationalism, industry, commerce, democracy, and the notion of progress. Rein Raud, building on the work of Umberto Eco, Pierre Bourdieu and Jeffrey C. Alexander, has proposed a model of cultural change based on claims and bids, which are judged by their cognitive adequacy and endorsed or not endorsed by the symbolic authority of the cultural community in question.^[15]

Cultural invention has come to mean any innovation that is new and found to be useful to a group of people and expressed in their behavior but which does not exist as a physical object. Humanity is in a global «accelerating culture change period,» driven by the expansion of international commerce, the mass media, and above all, the human population explosion, among other factors. Culture repositioning means the reconstruction of the cultural concept of a society.^[16]

Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces resisting change. These forces are related to both social structures and natural events, and are involved in the perpetuation of cultural ideas and practices within current structures, which themselves are subject to change.^[17]

Social conflict and the development of technologies can produce changes within a society by altering social dynamics and promoting new cultural models, and spurring or enabling generative action. These social shifts may accompany ideological shifts and other types of cultural change. For example, the U.S. feminist movement involved new practices that produced a shift in gender relations, altering both gender and economic structures. Environmental conditions may also enter as factors. For example, after tropical forests returned at the end of the last ice age, plants suitable for domestication were available, leading to the invention of agriculture, which in turn brought about many cultural innovations and shifts in social dynamics.^[18]

Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies, which may also produce—or inhibit—social shifts and changes in cultural practices. War or competition over resources may impact technological development or social dynamics. Additionally, cultural ideas may transfer from one society to another, through diffusion or acculturation. In diffusion, the form of something (though not necessarily its meaning) moves from one culture to another. For example, Western restaurant chains and culinary brands sparked curiosity and fascination to the Chinese as China opened its economy to international trade in the late 20th-century.^[19] «Stimulus diffusion» (the sharing of ideas) refers to an element of one culture leading to an invention or propagation in another. «Direct borrowing,» on the other hand, tends to refer to technological or tangible diffusion from one culture to another. Diffusion of innovations theory presents a research-based model of why and when individuals and cultures adopt new ideas, practices, and products.^[20]

Acculturation has different meanings. Still, in this context, it refers to the replacement of traits of one culture with another, such as what happened to certain Native American tribes and many indigenous peoples across the globe during the process of colonization. Related processes on an individual level include assimilation (adoption of a different culture by an individual) and transculturation. The transnational flow of culture has played a major role in merging different cultures and sharing thoughts, ideas, and beliefs.

Early modern discourses

German Romanticism

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) formulated an individualist definition of «enlightenment» similar to the concept of bildung: «Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.»^[21] He argued that this immaturity comes not from a lack of understanding, but from a lack of courage to think independently. Against this intellectual cowardice, Kant urged: «Sapere Aude» («Dare to be wise!»). In reaction to Kant, German scholars such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) argued that human creativity, which necessarily takes unpredictable and highly diverse forms, is as important as human rationality. Moreover, Herder proposed a collective form of Bildung: «For Herder, Bildung was the totality of experiences that provide a coherent identity, and sense of common destiny, to a people.»^[22]

In 1795, the Prussian linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) called for an anthropology that would synthesize Kant’s and Herder’s interests. During the Romantic era, scholars in Germany, especially those concerned with nationalist movements—such as the nationalist struggle to create a «Germany» out of diverse principalities, and the nationalist struggles by ethnic minorities against the Austro-Hungarian Empire—developed a more inclusive notion of culture as «worldview» (Weltanschauung).^[23] According to this school of thought, each ethnic group has a distinct worldview that is incommensurable with the worldviews of other groups. Although more inclusive than earlier views, this approach to culture still allowed for distinctions between «civilized» and «primitive» or «tribal» cultures.

In 1860, Adolf Bastian (1826–1905) argued for «the psychic unity of mankind.»^[24] He proposed that a scientific comparison of all human societies would reveal that distinct worldviews consisted of the same basic elements. According to Bastian, all human societies share a set of «elementary ideas» (Elementargedanken); different cultures, or different «folk ideas» (Völkergedanken), are local modifications of the elementary ideas.^[25] This view paved the way for the modern understanding of culture. Franz Boas (1858–1942) was trained in this tradition, and he brought it with him when he left Germany for the United States.^[26]

English Romanticism

In the 19th century, humanists such as English poet and essayist Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) used the word «culture» to refer to an ideal of individual human refinement, of «the best that has been thought and said in the world.»^[27] This concept of culture is also comparable to the German concept of bildung: «…culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.»^[27]

In practice, culture referred to an elite ideal and was associated with such activities as art, classical music, and haute cuisine.^[28] As these forms were associated with urban life, «culture» was identified with «civilization» (from Latin: civitas, lit. ‘city’). Another facet of the Romantic movement was an interest in folklore, which led to identifying a «culture» among non-elites. This distinction is often characterized as that between high culture, namely that of the ruling social group, and low culture. In other words, the idea of «culture» that developed in Europe during the 18th and early 19th centuries reflected inequalities within European societies.^[29]

Matthew Arnold contrasted «culture» with anarchy; other Europeans, following philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, contrasted «culture» with «the state of nature.» According to Hobbes and Rousseau, the Native Americans who were being conquered by Europeans from the 16th centuries on were living in a state of nature; this opposition was expressed through the contrast between «civilized» and «uncivilized.»^[30] According to this way of thinking, one could classify some countries and nations as more civilized than others and some people as more cultured than others. This contrast led to Herbert Spencer’s theory of Social Darwinism and Lewis Henry Morgan’s theory of cultural evolution. Just as some critics have argued that the distinction between high and low cultures is an expression of the conflict between European elites and non-elites, other critics have argued that the distinction between civilized and uncivilized people is an expression of the conflict between European colonial powers and their colonial subjects.

Other 19th-century critics, following Rousseau, have accepted this differentiation between higher and lower culture, but have seen the refinement and sophistication of high culture as corrupting and unnatural developments that obscure and distort people’s essential nature. These critics considered folk music (as produced by «the folk,» i.e., rural, illiterate, peasants) to honestly express a natural way of life, while classical music seemed superficial and decadent. Equally, this view often portrayed indigenous peoples as «noble savages» living authentic and unblemished lives, uncomplicated and uncorrupted by the highly stratified capitalist systems of the West.

In 1870 the anthropologist Edward Tylor (1832–1917) applied these ideas of higher versus lower culture to propose a theory of the evolution of religion. According to this theory, religion evolves from more polytheistic to more monotheistic forms.^[31] In the process, he redefined culture as a diverse set of activities characteristic of all human societies. This view paved the way for the modern understanding of religion.

Anthropology

Although anthropologists worldwide refer to Tylor’s definition of culture,^[32] in the 20th century «culture» emerged as the central and unifying concept of American anthropology, where it most commonly refers to the universal human capacity to classify and encode human experiences symbolically, and to communicate symbolically encoded experiences socially.^[33] American anthropology is organized into four fields, each of which plays an important role in research on culture: biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and in the United States and Canada, archaeology.^{[34][35][36][37]} The term Kulturbrille, or «culture glasses,» coined by German American anthropologist Franz Boas, refers to the «lenses» through which a person sees their own culture. Martin Lindstrom asserts that Kulturbrille, which allow a person to make sense of the culture they inhabit, «can blind us to things outsiders pick up immediately.»^[38]

Sociology

The sociology of culture concerns culture as manifested in society. For sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918), culture referred to «the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history.»^[39] As such, culture in the sociological field can be defined as the ways of thinking, the ways of acting, and the material objects that together shape a people’s way of life. Culture can be either of two types, non-material culture or material culture.^[5] Non-material culture refers to the non-physical ideas that individuals have about their culture, including values, belief systems, rules, norms, morals, language, organizations, and institutions, while material culture is the physical evidence of a culture in the objects and architecture they make or have made. The term tends to be relevant only in archeological and anthropological studies, but it specifically means all material evidence which can be attributed to culture, past or present.

Cultural sociology first emerged in Weimar Germany (1918–1933), where sociologists such as Alfred Weber used the term Kultursoziologie (‘cultural sociology’). Cultural sociology was then reinvented in the English-speaking world as a product of the cultural turn of the 1960s, which ushered in structuralist and postmodern approaches to social science. This type of cultural sociology may be loosely regarded as an approach incorporating cultural analysis and critical theory. Cultural sociologists tend to reject scientific methods, instead hermeneutically focusing on words, artifacts and symbols.^[40] Culture has since become an important concept across many branches of sociology, including resolutely scientific fields like social stratification and social network analysis. As a result, there has been a recent influx of quantitative sociologists to the field. Thus, there is now a growing group of sociologists of culture who are, confusingly, not cultural sociologists. These scholars reject the abstracted postmodern aspects of cultural sociology, and instead, look for a theoretical backing in the more scientific vein of social psychology and cognitive science.^[41]

Early researchers and development of cultural sociology

The sociology of culture grew from the intersection between sociology (as shaped by early theorists like Marx,^[42] Durkheim, and Weber) with the growing discipline of anthropology, wherein researchers pioneered ethnographic strategies for describing and analyzing a variety of cultures around the world. Part of the legacy of the early development of the field lingers in the methods (much of cultural, sociological research is qualitative), in the theories (a variety of critical approaches to sociology are central to current research communities), and in the substantive focus of the field. For instance, relationships between popular culture, political control, and social class were early and lasting concerns in the field.

Cultural studies

In the United Kingdom, sociologists and other scholars influenced by Marxism such as Stuart Hall (1932–2014) and Raymond Williams (1921–1988) developed cultural studies. Following nineteenth-century Romantics, they identified culture with consumption goods and leisure activities (such as art, music, film, food, sports, and clothing). They saw patterns of consumption and leisure as determined by relations of production, which led them to focus on class relations and the organization of production.^[43][44]

In the United Kingdom, cultural studies focuses largely on the study of popular culture; that is, on the social meanings of mass-produced consumer and leisure goods. Richard Hoggart coined the term in 1964 when he founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies or CCCS.^[45] It has since become strongly associated with Stuart Hall,^[46] who succeeded Hoggart as Director.^[47] Cultural studies in this sense, then, can be viewed as a limited concentration scoped on the intricacies of consumerism, which belongs to a wider culture sometimes referred to as Western civilization or globalism.

From the 1970s onward, Stuart Hall’s pioneering work, along with that of his colleagues Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Tony Jefferson, and Angela McRobbie, created an international intellectual movement. As the field developed, it began to combine political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, museum studies, and art history to study cultural phenomena or cultural texts. In this field researchers often concentrate on how particular phenomena relate to matters of ideology, nationality, ethnicity, social class, and/or gender.^[48] Cultural studies is concerned with the meaning and practices of everyday life. These practices comprise the ways people do particular things (such as watching television or eating out) in a given culture. It also studies the meanings and uses people attribute to various objects and practices. Specifically, culture involves those meanings and practices held independently of reason. Watching television to view a public perspective on a historical event should not be thought of as culture unless referring to the medium of television itself, which may have been selected culturally; however, schoolchildren watching television after school with their friends to «fit in» certainly qualifies since there is no grounded reason for one’s participation in this practice.

In the context of cultural studies, a text includes not only written language, but also films, photographs, fashion or hairstyles: the texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture.^[49] Similarly, the discipline widens the concept of culture. Culture, for a cultural-studies researcher, not only includes traditional high culture (the culture of ruling social groups)^[50] and popular culture, but also everyday meanings and practices. The last two, in fact, have become the main focus of cultural studies. A further and recent approach is comparative cultural studies, based on the disciplines of comparative literature and cultural studies.^[51]

Scholars in the United Kingdom and the United States developed somewhat different versions of cultural studies after the late 1970s. The British version of cultural studies had originated in the 1950s and 1960s, mainly under the influence of Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams, and later that of Stuart Hall and others at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. This included overtly political, left-wing views, and criticisms of popular culture as «capitalist» mass culture; it absorbed some of the ideas of the Frankfurt School critique of the «culture industry» (i.e. mass culture). This emerges in the writings of early British cultural-studies scholars and their influences: see the work of (for example) Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, and Paul Gilroy.

In the United States, Lindlof and Taylor write, «cultural studies [were] grounded in a pragmatic, liberal-pluralist tradition.»^[52] The American version of cultural studies initially concerned itself more with understanding the subjective and appropriative side of audience reactions to, and uses of, mass culture; for example, American cultural-studies advocates wrote about the liberatory aspects of fandom.^{[citation needed]} The distinction between American and British strands, however, has faded.^{[citation needed]} Some researchers, especially in early British cultural studies, apply a Marxist model to the field. This strain of thinking has some influence from the Frankfurt School, but especially from the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and others. The main focus of an orthodox Marxist approach concentrates on the production of meaning. This model assumes a mass production of culture and identifies power as residing with those producing cultural artifacts. In a Marxist view, the mode and relations of production form the economic base of society, which constantly interacts and influences superstructures, such as culture.^[53] Other approaches to cultural studies, such as feminist cultural studies and later American developments of the field, distance themselves from this view. They criticize the Marxist assumption of a single, dominant meaning, shared by all, for any cultural product. The non-Marxist approaches suggest that different ways of consuming cultural artifacts affect the meaning of the product. This view comes through in the book Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (by Paul du Gay et al.),^[54] which seeks to challenge the notion that those who produce commodities control the meanings that people attribute to them. Feminist cultural analyst, theorist, and art historian Griselda Pollock contributed to cultural studies from viewpoints of art history and psychoanalysis. The writer Julia Kristeva is among influential voices at the turn of the century, contributing to cultural studies from the field of art and psychoanalytical French feminism.^[55]

Petrakis and Kostis (2013) divide cultural background variables into two main groups:^[56]

1. The first group covers the variables that represent the «efficiency orientation» of the societies: performance orientation, future orientation, assertiveness, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance.
2. The second covers the variables that represent the «social orientation» of societies, i.e., the attitudes and lifestyles of their members. These variables include gender egalitarianism, institutional collectivism, in-group collectivism, and human orientation.

In 2016, a new approach to culture was suggested by Rein Raud,^[15] who defines culture as the sum of resources available to human beings for making sense of their world and proposes a two-tiered approach, combining the study of texts (all reified meanings in circulation) and cultural practices (all repeatable actions that involve the production, dissemination or transmission of purposes), thus making it possible to re-link anthropological and sociological study of culture with the tradition of textual theory.

Psychology

Starting in the 1990s,^[57]: 31 psychological research on culture influence began to grow and challenge the universality assumed in general psychology.^{[58]: 158–168 [59]} Culture psychologists began to try to explore the relationship between emotions and culture, and answer whether the human mind is independent from culture. For example, people from collectivistic cultures, such as the Japanese, suppress their positive emotions more than their American counterparts.^[60] Culture may affect the way that people experience and express emotions. On the other hand, some researchers try to look for differences between people’s personalities across cultures.^[61][62] As different cultures dictate distinctive norms, culture shock is also studied to understand how people react when they are confronted with other cultures. Cognitive tools may not be accessible or they may function differently cross culture.^[57]: 19 For example, people who are raised in a culture with an abacus are trained with distinctive reasoning style.^[63] Cultural lenses may also make people view the same outcome of events differently. Westerners are more motivated by their successes than their failures, while East Asians are better motivated by the avoidance of failure.^[64] Culture is important for psychologists to consider when understanding the human mental operation.

Protection of culture

There are a number of international agreements and national laws relating to the protection of culture and cultural heritage. UNESCO and its partner organizations such as Blue Shield International coordinate international protection and local implementation.^[65][66]
Basically, the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and the UNESCO Convention for the Protection of Cultural Diversity deal with the protection of culture. Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights deals with cultural heritage in two ways: it gives people the right to participate in cultural life on the one hand and the right to the protection of their contributions to cultural life on the other.^[67]

The protection of culture and cultural goods is increasingly taking up a large area nationally and internationally. Under international law, the UN and UNESCO try to set up and enforce rules for this. The aim is not to protect a person’s property, but rather to preserve the cultural heritage of humanity, especially in the event of war and armed conflict. According to Karl von Habsburg, President of Blue Shield International, the destruction of cultural assets is also part of psychological warfare. The target of the attack is the identity of the opponent, which is why symbolic cultural assets become a main target. It is also intended to affect the particularly sensitive cultural memory, the growing cultural diversity and the economic basis (such as tourism) of a state, region or municipality.^[68][69][70]

Another important issue today is the impact of tourism on the various forms of culture. On the one hand, this can be physical impact on individual objects or the destruction caused by increasing environmental pollution and, on the other hand, socio-cultural effects on society.^[71][72][73]

See also

• Animal culture
• Anthropology
• Cultural area
• Cultural studies
• Cultural tourism
• Culture 21 – United Nations plan of action
• Honour § Cultures of honour and cultures of law
• Outline of culture
• Recombinant culture
• Semiotics of culture

References

Further reading

Books

• Barker, C. (2004). The Sage dictionary of cultural studies. Sage.
• Terrence Deacon (1997). The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York and London: W.W. Norton. ISBN 9780393038385.
• Ralph L. Holloway Jr. (1969). «Culture: A Human domain». Current Anthropology. 10 (4): 395–412. doi:10.1086/201036. S2CID 144502900.
• Dell Hymes (1969). Reinventing Anthropology.
• James, Paul; Szeman, Imre (2010). Globalization and Culture, Vol. 3: Global-Local Consumption. London: Sage Publications.
• Michael Tomasello (1999). «The Human Adaptation for Culture». Annual Review of Anthropology. 28: 509–29. doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.28.1.509.
• Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1941). «The relation of habitual thought and behavior to language». Language, Culture, and Personality: Essays in Honor of Edward Sapir.
• Walter Taylor (1948). A Study of Archeology. Memoir 69, American Anthropological Association. Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
• «Adolf Bastian», Encyclopædia Britannica Online, January 27, 2009
• Ankerl, Guy (2000) [2000]. Global communication without universal civilization, vol.1: Coexisting contemporary civilizations: Arabo-Muslim, Bharati, Chinese, and Western. INU societal research. Geneva: INU Press. ISBN 978-2-88155-004-1.
• Arnold, Matthew. 1869. Culture and Anarchy. Archived November 18, 2017, at the Wayback Machine New York: Macmillan. Third edition, 1882, available online. Retrieved: 2006-06-28.
• Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Press. ISBN 978-0-252-06445-6.
• Barzilai, Gad. 2003. Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities University of Michigan Press. ISBN 0-472-11315-1
• Benedict, Ruth (1934). Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
• Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-29164-4
• Michael C. Carhart, The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany, Cambridge, Harvard University press, 2007.
• Cohen, Anthony P. 1985. The Symbolic Construction of Community. Routledge: New York,
• Dawkins, R. 1982. The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene. Paperback ed., 1999. Oxford Paperbacks. ISBN 978-0-19-288051-2
• Findley & Rothney. Twentieth-Century World (Houghton Mifflin, 1986)
• Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York. ISBN 978-0-465-09719-7.
• Geertz, Clifford (1957). «Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example». American Anthropologist. 59: 32–54. doi:10.1525/aa.1957.59.1.02a00040.
• Goodall, J. 1986. The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-11649-8
• Hoult, T.F., ed. 1969. Dictionary of Modern Sociology. Totowa, New Jersey, United States: Littlefield, Adams & Co.
• Jary, D. and J. Jary. 1991. The HarperCollins Dictionary of Sociology. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-271543-7
• Keiser, R. Lincoln 1969. The Vice Lords: Warriors of the Streets. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. ISBN 978-0-03-080361-1.
• Kroeber, A.L. and C. Kluckhohn, 1952. Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum
• Kim, Uichol (2001). «Culture, science and indigenous psychologies: An integrated analysis.» In D. Matsumoto (Ed.), Handbook of culture and psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press
• McClenon, James. «Tylor, Edward B(urnett)». Encyclopedia of Religion and Society. Ed. William Swatos and Peter Kivisto. Walnut Creek: AltaMira, 1998. 528–29.
• Middleton, R. 1990. Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press. ISBN 978-0-335-15275-9.
• O’Neil, D. 2006. Cultural Anthropology Tutorials Archived December 4, 2004, at the Wayback Machine, Behavioral Sciences Department, Palomar College, San Marco, California. Retrieved: 2006-07-10.
• Reagan, Ronald. «Final Radio Address to the Nation» Archived January 30, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, January 14, 1989. Retrieved June 3, 2006.
• Reese, W.L. 1980. Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion: Eastern and Western Thought. New Jersey U.S., Sussex, U.K: Humanities Press.
• Tylor, E.B. (1974) [1871]. Primitive culture: researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art, and custom. New York: Gordon Press. ISBN 978-0-87968-091-6.
• UNESCO. 2002. Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, issued on International Mother Language Day, February 21, 2002. Retrieved: 2006-06-23.
• White, L. 1949. The Science of Culture: A study of man and civilization. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Wilson, Edward O. (1998). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Vintage: New York. ISBN 978-0-679-76867-8.
• Wolfram, Stephen. 2002 A New Kind of Science. Wolfram Media, Inc. ISBN 978-1-57955-008-0.

Articles

• The Meaning of «Culture» (2014-12-27), Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker

External links

• Cultura: International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology
• What is Culture?

Definition.
The
word culture has many different meanings. For some it refers to the
good literature, music, art, and food. For a biologist, it is a
colony of bacteria or other microorganisms. However, for
anthropologists and other behavioral scientists, culture
is the full range of learned human behavior patterns.
The term was first used in this way by the pioneer English
Anthropologist Edward B. Tylor in his book “Primitive
Culture”,
published in 1871. Tylor said that culture “includes knowledge,
belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and
habits acquired by man as a member of society.”

Culture
is a powerful human tool for survival, but it is a fragile
phenomenon. It is constantly changing and easily lost because it
exists only in our minds. Our written languages, governments,
buildings, and other man-made things are merely the products of
culture. They are not culture in themselves.

In
order to live man, like all other species, must come to terms with
the external world…. Man employs his sense organs, nerves, glands,
and muscles in adjusting himself to the external world. But in
addition to this he has another means of adjustment and control….
This mechanism is culture.

Layers
of Culture.
There are three layers or levels of culture that are part of your
learned behavior patterns and perceptions. Most obviously is the body
of cultural traditions that distinguish your specific society. When
people speak of Italian, or Japanese culture, they are referring to
the shared language, traditions, and beliefs. In most cases, those
who share your culture do so because they acquired it as they were
raised by parents and other family members who have it.

The
second layer of culture that may be part of your identity is asubculture.
In complex, diverse societies in which people have come from many
different parts of the world, they often retain much of their
original cultural traditions. As a result, they are part of an
identifiable subculture in their new society. The shared cultural
traits of subcultures set them apart from the rest of their society.
Examples of easily identifiable subcultures in the United States
include ethnic groups such as Vietnamese Americans, African
Americans, and Mexican Americans. Members of each of these
subcultures share a common identity, food tradition, dialect or
language, and other cultural traits that come from their common
background and experience.

The
third layer of culture consists of cultural
universals.
These are learned behavior patterns that are shared by all of
humanity collectively. No matter where people live in the world, they
share these universal traits. Examples of such «human cultural»
traits include:

1.	communicating with a verbal language consisting of a limited set of sounds and grammatical rules for constructing sentences
2.	using age and gender to classify people (e.g., teenager, senior citizen, woman, man)
3.	classifying people based on marriage and relationships and having kinship terms to refer to them (e.g., wife, mother, uncle, cousin)
4.	raising children in some sort of family setting
5.	having a sexual division of labor (e.g., men’s work versus women’s work)
6.	having a concept of privacy
7.	having rules to regulate sexual behavior
8.	distinguishing between good and bad behavior
9.	having some sort of body ornamentation
10.	making jokes and playing games
11.	having art
12.	having some sort of leadership roles for the implementation of community decisions

Johann Herder called attention to national cultures	Adolf Bastian developed a universal model of culture
Edward Tylor British anthropologist was one of the first English-speaking scholars to use the term culture in an inclusive and universal sense	Matthew Arnold British poet and critic viewed «culture» as the cultivation of the humanist ideal

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Culture means the patterns and characteristics of human behavior, and all that entails in terms of religion, beliefs, social norms, arts, customs, and habits

The word “culture” is used in different ways by different people.

To some, it might mean a string quartet and the use of multiple utensils at dinner. To others, it might be used in a vague way when planning a holiday overseas. If you are a scientist it means a petri dish full of microorganisms.

This is something every human experience and the way you experience it can define your life.

Culture is shared. Culture is learned, and it is not biological.

Rather, it might be said that it is developed as we seek to satisfy our biological needs. It belongs to us, to our families, our peers, our art, and institutions.

What is Culture?

Culture means the patterns and characteristics of human behavior.  Culture is one collective term of religion, beliefs, social norms, arts, customs, and habits that we possess

The interesting part is that culture, as a term, almost eludes absolute definition.

Because it is something intrinsic to our humanity, perhaps, and humans, as a rule, also elude definition. That has not stopped some of history’s brightest minds from attempting to define it, however.

The first person to use the term “culture” in the way we currently understand it was  Edward B. Tylor, an anthropologist,

He explained culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” ( Primitive Culture, 1871).

The Famous Definitions of Culture

Geert Hofstede said

“Culture is the collective programming of the human mind that distinguishes the members of one human group from those of another. Culture in this sense is a system of collectively held values.”

Linton said

“A culture is a configuration of learned behaviors and results of behavior whose component elements are shared and transmitted by the members of a particular society”

In L.A. Samovar & R.E. Porter (Eds.), Communication Between Cultures. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. refers

“Culture is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one category of people from another.” – National cultures and corporate cultures.

Edgar Schein quoted

“Culture is the deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members of an organization, that operate unconsciously and define in a basic ‘taken for granted’ fashion an organization’s view of its self and its environment.”

What is Culture in Anthropology?

Anthropology is the study of humanity, including prehistoric origins and contemporary human diversity. Often, it is confused with many other disciplines around humanity, history, sociology, etc., anthropology is far broader in scope

The culture of a society pervades it to its very roots.

• Biological anthropology — the study of the biological side of human including the evolution
• Archaeology – the study of past human cultures through their material remains.
• Linguistic anthropology – the study of human communication, including its origins, history, and variation, and change.
• Cultural anthropology – the study of living peoples and their cultures, including variation and change.

The fourth discipline – cultural anthropology – defines the culture to a deeper level by analyzing various two key aspects of culture

1. Diversity – Refers to the distinctive behaviors of humans and societies
2. Change – Refers to the evolution of these distinct behaviors and humans adapted to it.

Overall, cultural anthropology refers to how culture affects the way people live, the way they interact, the art they make, the jobs they hold, their beliefs, and relationships.

And yet an archaeologist digging up an ancient site, finding wall stubs and pottery fragments, could never say that they have dug up “culture”.

The results of the culture are there for all to see: the patterns on the pottery, the places of worship, the way a family home was set up. But they are remains, nothing more.

Culture belongs to life itself.

The relation between culture and society

It can be a little difficult to draw the lines between culture and society. Both involve the way we live, both involve beliefs and systems, both are formed by groups of people.

A society is a group of organisms that interact with one another. This might mean a school of fish, a flock of birds, a beehive, and so on. Human societies are similar, as they are groups of individuals who interact with one another, though not always directly. In human societies, however, the behavior of the group is not just determined by survival, but by history, tradition, and expectation.

Yet people living in a single society can have different cultures. So society and culture are not the same things – but they are linked.

If culture is a pattern of people’s behavior, and if people live in societies, then, of course, they are going to be tied together at multiple points.

And culture cannot exist without society, without people coming together and exchanging ideas and experiences. Without groups of people living together, why would we ever have needed to develop language or politics? You cannot have one without the other.

Culture is all about Learned Behaviors

Culture is not something that we are born knowing. No baby is born being able to understand art, or speaking the language of its parents. Yet what it does possess is a desire to communicate and be understood – a desire it generally seeks to fill by screaming, which works out just fine, to begin with. But then, it learns that different noises mean different things, and so language begins to be learned.

Because of this, culture is also something that accumulates. It is built on overtime.

It’s not as though a group of people in 1000BC sat down and discussed whether they were going to use forks or chopsticks, or whether they were going to teach math in school. These things developed slowly – and now, millennia later, schoolchildren are learning mathematical concepts developed by ancient Greeks.

Art and Culture – A soulful connection

Art is yet another concept that is very difficult to define.

Abby Willowroot  – “Art speaks the soul of its culture”

But when it comes to a shared understanding of art within a group of people, one could say that art is the physical manifestation of the culture to which it belongs – to the point that sometimes it almost seems impossible to separate the culture from its art.

If you pass a wedding venue and see it crowded with paper swans, it doesn’t matter if you are in Texas, Perth or Abu Dhabi, you will immediately recognize the sight as belonging to the culture of Japan.

Geometric patterns with bright colors and striking contrast might bring to mind traditional Kenyan textiles, even if seen in a window in Prague.

“Scandinavian interior design” could be found in a desert.

In addition to this, there is a reason great art movements tend to find their momentum in cities.

That’s where you can find the most people, packed in closely together – and, as a result, that’s where the cultures to which they belong become the richest, the densest, the most likely to turn into something new.

And sometimes, finding themselves so close to other cultures, they find themselves rubbing together and creating sparks.

An Adaptive Mechanism

When we look at the human experience in all its needs and forms, culture can sometimes seem like something of an extra.

True, humans create art, and language, and politics.

But these things, while adding to the richness, complexity, or possibilities of our lives, do not seem to be necessary for survival.

After all, a person could live in a hut on a hill for their entire lives and never see another human being.

They might never learn a language, create art, or develop an understanding of authority; as long as they can hunt and gather, they will do just fine.

And yet, if you look at cultures across the world, there seem to be very obvious differences between them that have sprung from a need to adapt.

For example, humans are warm-blooded creatures, which was fine when we were all living in subtropical conditions a few million years ago, but when you look further afield and forward in time, you see the mechanisms humans have put in place to survive the environments they moved to.

Thus we have architecture and communal planning.

Unlike other organisms, we did not wait for evolutionary adaptation to allow us to thrive in these new climates. Instead, we invented things to help us – things which became a part of the cultures which developed them.

From the clothes we wear to the food we eat, to the shape of our roofs, we can see how each culture was affected by humanity’s need for survival.

And, let’s be honest, it worked – we have dominated the planet with our technology and subsequent population growth. (Whether that is a good thing or not is quite another matter.)

Culture’s relation to Nature

Depending on the way we have defined culture, it can be argued that humans are not the only species to have developed it.

Not that we’re going to find any other animals that create paper cranes for their weddings, but using the broad and relatively simplistic definition of a complex pattern of learned behavior, we can see examples of culture in other species.

Chimpanzees, along with other intelligent primates, seem to be the closest contenders for this.

The young chimpanzees learn from the older ones – whether hunting or gathering skills, communication, or sexual education.

This is a fascinating addition to any discussions one might have regarding culture.

It opens up the possibility that culture is not strictly something that belongs to humans, but perhaps that it is the skill we have developed above all other animals.

We can be outrun, out-swam or out-fought by any number of other species. But our patterns of behavior, in terms of complexity and possibility, leave them all behind.

Culture, from a historical perspective..

The following extract from Kevin Avruch, famous anthropologist and sociologist

A great deal of the problem [of understanding the idea of culture] is caused by the different usages of the word as it was increasingly used in the nineteenth century. Broadly talking, it had been found in three ways (most of that can be found nowadays at the same time). Initial, as stated in Matthew Arnolds’ Culture and Anarchy (1867), cultures are known as special intellectual or imaginative endeavors or items, what right now we might get in touch with “high culture” in contrast to “popular culture” (or “folkways”).

From this classification, only a portion – typically a small one – associated with a sociable team “has” culture. (The rest are possible resources for anarchy!) This sensation of traditions is a lot more closely linked to beauty rather than to interpersonal science.

To some extent in the reaction to this utilization, another, as pioneered by Edward Tylor in Primitive Culture (1870), described a quality possessed by everybody in most social groupings, who nevertheless may be arrayed over an improvement (evolutionary) continuum (in Lewis Henry Morgan’s plan) from “savagery” through “barbarism” to “civilization”.

It is actually really worth quoting Tylor’s definition in their entirety initial, mainly because it became the foundational one for anthropology and 2nd because it in part explains why Kroeber and Kluckhohn located definitional fecundity from the early 1950s. Tylor’s meaning of traditions is “that intricate whole which includes understanding, notion, artwork, morals, regulation, custom, and any other features and practices obtained by a person as part of society”.

As opposed to Arnold’s perspective, all people “have” customs, they will obtain by virtue of account in some social team – culture. And a total grab case of stuff, from knowledge to behavior to features, tends to make up customs. The extreme inclusivity of Tylor’s description stayed with anthropology a very long time it can be one particular reason politics experts who became interested in social queries from the late 1950s experienced it needed to delimit their relevant social domain to “political culture”.

Although the best legacy of Tylor’s definition lay down within his “complex whole” formulation. This was recognized even by those later anthropologists who forcefully denied his evolutionism. They had taken it to mean that cultures were wholes – integrated systems. Even if this assertion has fantastic heuristic importance, in addition, it, since we shall disagree below, simplifies the entire world substantially. The third and last using traditions created in anthropology inside the twentieth-century work of Franz Boas and his awesome college students, although with roots within the eighteenth-century articles of Johann von Herder.

As Tylor reacted to Arnold to establish a technological (as opposed to visual) grounds for customs, so Boas reacted against Tylor and other interpersonal evolutionists. Whereas the evolutionists stressed the widespread personality of your single culture, with assorted societies arrayed from savage to civilized, Boas emphasized the individuality of the many and diverse ethnicities of several people or communities. Additionally, he dismissed the worth judgments he found inherent in both the Arnoldian and Tylorean sights of the tradition for Boas, you need to never separate higher from lower traditions, and another ought not differentially valorize civilizations as savage or civilized. Here, then, are three totally different understandings of tradition.

A portion of the difficulty within the expression depends on its number of connotations. But to compound concerns, the difficulties usually are not merely conceptual or semantic. Every one of the usages and understandings come linked to, or Primary Principles 2 Precisely what is Customs? | © Spencer-Oatey 2012 might be connected to, distinct politics or ideological agendas that, in a single type or some other, still resonate these days.

Conclusion – What is Culture?

Culture is inherent.

Culture is developed as we seek to fill our basic needs.

It is learned, taught from one generation to the next, picked up when you had no idea that you were paying attention.

Culture is cumulative, ideas, and behaviors collected by each society.  Yes, like they were debris being picked up and carried along by a river.

It is not programmed, it is not automatic, but it is not something that we can avoid becoming part of.

The beliefs and social behaviors are ingrained into every human on earth. These social norms are connecting us to each other within our own culture.

And cross-culturally, these norms are allowing us to reach each other across what sometimes seems to be unfathomable distances.

Culture is everywhere – It’s is in art, music, dance, the way we decorate our pottery.

It is our governmental systems, it is our leisure time, it is the places of worship we build.

Culture is the way we speak to one another, whether we take our shoes off before we come into the house.

It is shared behavior; the result of humanity trying to negotiate the world it finds itself in and thriving as it does.