Definitions of the word culture

Culture consists of all learned, normative behavior patterns – that is, all shared ways or patterns of thinking and feeling as well as doing.

The word ‘culture’ comes from the Latin word ‘cultura,’ related to cult or worship. In its broadest sense, the term refers to the result of human interaction.

Society’s culture comprises the shared values, understandings, assumptions, and goals learned from earlier generations, imposed by present members of society, and passed on to succeeding generations.

Sometimes an individual is described as highly cultured, meaning that the person in question has certain features, such as his/her speech, manner, and taste for literature, music, or painting, which distinguish him from others.

Culture, in this sense, refers to certain personal characteristics of an individual.

However, this is not the sense in which the word culture is used and understood in social sciences.

Sometimes culture is used in popular discourse to refer to a celebration or an evening of entertainment, as when one speaks of a ‘cultural show.’ Culture is identified with aesthetics or the fine arts, such as dance, music, or drama.

This is also different from the technical meaning of the word culture.

Culture is used in a special sense in anthropology and sociology. It refers to the sum of human beings’ lifeways, behavior, beliefs, feelings, and thoughts; it connotes everything they acquire as social beings. Culture has been defined in several ways.

There is no consensus among sociologists and anthropologists regarding the definition of culture.

Some writers add to these definitions some of the important” other capabilities and habits,” such as language and the techniques for making and using tools.

Meaning of Culture

Culture is a comprehensive and encompassing term that includes what we have learned about our history, values, morals, customs, art, and habits.

Culture is the complex of values, ideas, attitudes, and other meaningful symbols created by people to shape human behavior and the artifacts of that behavior as they are transmitted from one generation to the next.

The above definition highlights three important attributes of an individual’s culture.

First, it is ‘created by people,’ evolving due to human activities, and passed on to the succeeding generations.

Second, the impact of cultural influence is both intangible and tangible. People’s basic attitudes and values directly result from their cultural environment. Beliefs in freedom of speech and choice, heterosexuality, and God are products of human action.

Additionally, people leave physical evidence of their culture through art and craftwork, buildings, furniture, laws, and food.

Third, the cultural environment evolves, and it most often evolves over lengthy periods. Changes in women’s roles in the home and business and the outward desire for leisure time have come about quite slowly. Other changes, however, occur more quickly. Clothing styles, for example, come and go rather hastily.

Culture may also be defined in other ways. According to Kroeber, “the mass of the learned and transmitted motor reactions, habits, techniques, ideas, and values – and the behavior they include – is what constitutes culture. It is all those things about men that are more than just biological or organic and more than merely psychological.”

It is the human-made part of the environment, the total way of life of a people, and the social legacy that the individual acquires from his group. The culture into which we are born provides many ready-made solutions to problems growing out of the geographic, biological, and social environment in which we live.

These ready-made solutions are provided in the form of cultural patterns relating to the ideology, role definitions, and socialization procedures of the society in which we live.

These cultural patterns are transmitted to individuals through social institutions such as family, educational institutions, religious institutions, social classes, languages, parents’ attitudes, behavior, and reading.

As a result, the cultural patterns that consumers learn to influence their ideas and values, the roles they play, how they carry those roles out, and how their needs and desires are handled.

E. B. Taylor defined culture as that complex whole, including knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.

Culture is thus composed of common habits and patterns of living of people in daily activities and common interests in entertainment, sports, news, and even advertising.

Culture is a comprehensive concept that includes almost everything that influences an individual’s thought processes and behaviors. Culture does not include inherited responses and predispositions.

Rather it is acquired. One more thing should also be borne in mind about culture. That is, in modern complex societies, culture seldom provides detailed prescriptions for appropriate behavior. Rather, it supplies boundaries within which most individuals think and act.

You should also keep in mind that the nature of cultural influences is such that we are seldom aware of them. An individual behaves, thinks, and feels like other members of the same culture because it seems natural.

The concept of culture has been debated in anthropological literature for at least two centuries and has acquired almost as many definitions as those trying to define it.

According to Singer, recent definitions of culture have grown progressively more formal and abstract. Culture has often been loosely defined as a behavior observed through social relations and material artifacts.

Although these may provide some raw data for a construct of culture, they are not, in themselves, the constituents of culture. In a deeper anthropological sense, culture includes patterns, norms, rules, and standards that find expression in behavior, social relations, and artifacts.

These are the constituents of culture. Singer’s definition revealed this development: ‘Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior, acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups including their embodiments in artifacts.

The essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected) ideas, especially their attached values. Thus, according to the above definition, culture is the conditioning elements of behavior and its products.

Referring to Ralph Linton, Berkman, and Gilson, in their book ‘Consumer Behavior – Concepts and Strategies,’ defined culture as ‘patterns of learned behavior held in common and transmitted by the members of any given society.’

Thus, culture consists of a society’s behaviors, which are well-established and accepted by the members of that society. The majority follow these patterns.

For example, most South-Asian women wear ‘sharee,’ and it is an established behavior pattern in this culture. There are exceptions to this pattern as well.

For example, some women may wear T-shirts and trousers, but this will not be considered a pattern since it is not found in the majority’s behavior. Let us now explain this definition at some length.

Definition of Culture

Culture has been defined in some ways, but most simply, as the learned and shared behavior of a community of interacting human beings.

According to British anthropologist Edward Taylor, “Culture 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”.

According to Phatak, Bhagat, and Kashlak, “Culture is a concept that has been used in several social science disciplines to explain variations in human thought processes in different parts of the world.”         ‘

According to J.P. Lederach, “Culture is the shared knowledge and schemes created by a set of people for perceiving, interpreting, expressing, and responding to the social realities around them.”

According to R. Linton, “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.”

According to G. Hofstede, “Culture is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one category of people from another.”

According to H.T. Mazumdar, “Culture is the total of human achievements, material and non-material, capable of transmission, sociologically, i.e., by tradition and communication, vertically as well as horizontally.”

Culture is defined as the shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs, and affective understanding learned through socialization. These shared patterns identify the members of a culture group while distinguishing those of another group.

Characteristics of Culture

All organizations have a culture because they are embedded in specific societal cultures and are part of them. Some values create a dominant culture in organizations that help guide employees’ day-to-day behavior.

There is also evidence that these dominant cultures can positively impact desirable outcomes, such as successfully conducting mergers and acquisitions, supporting product innovation processes, and helping firms cope with rapid economic and technological change.

Learned Behavior

Not all behavior is learned, but most of it is learned; combing one’s hair, standing in line, telling jokes, criticizing the President, and going to the movie all constitute behaviors that had to be learned.

Sometimes the terms conscious learning and unconscious learning are used to distinguish the learning.

Some behavior is obvious. People can be seen going to football games, eating with forks, or driving automobiles. Such behavior is called “overt” behavior. Other behavior is less visible.

Culture is Abstract

Culture exists in the minds or habits of the members of society. Culture is the shared ways of doing and thinking. There are degrees of visibility of cultural behavior, ranging from persons’ regularized activities to their internal reasons for so doing.

In other words, we cannot see culture as such; we can only see human behavior. This behavior occurs in a regular, patterned fashion and is called culture.

Culture Includes Attitudes, Values, and Knowledge

There is a widespread error in the thinking of many people who tend to regard the ideas, attitudes, and notions they have as “their own.”

It is easy to overestimate the uniqueness of one’s attitudes and ideas. When there is an agreement with other people, it is largely Unnoticed, but when there is a disagreement or difference, one is usually conscious of it.

Your differences, however, may also be cultural. For example, suppose you are a Muslim, and the other person is a Christian.

Culture also Includes Material Objects.

Man’s behavior results in creating objects.

Men were behaving when they made these things. Making these objects required numerous and various skills, which human beings gradually built up through the ages. Man has invented something else, and so on.

Occasionally, one sees that man does not really “make” steel or a battleship.

All these things first existed in a “state of nature.”

The man merely modified their form and changed them from the state in which they were to the state in which he now uses them. The chair was first a tree which man surely did not make. But the chair is more than trees, and the jet airplane is more than iron ore and so forth.

The patterns of learned behavior and behavior results are possessed not by one or a few people but usually by a large proportion.

Thus, many millions share such behavior patterns as automobiles or the English language. Persons may share some part of a culture unequally.

Sometimes people share different aspects of culture.

Culture is Super-Organic

Culture is sometimes called super organic. It implies that “culture” is somehow superior to “nature.” The word super-organic is useful when it implies what may be quite a different phenomenon from a cultural point of view.

For example, a tree means different things to the botanist who studies it, the older woman who uses it for shade in the late summer afternoon, the farmer who picks its fruit, the motorist who collides with it, and the young lovers who carve their initials in its trunk.

The same physical objects and physical characteristics, in other words, may constitute a variety of quite different cultural objects and cultural characteristics.

Culture is Pervasive

Culture is pervasive; it touches every aspect of life. The pervasiveness of culture is manifest in two ways.

First, culture provides an unquestioned context for individual actions and responses. Cultural norms govern not only emotional actions but relational actions.

Second, culture pervades social activities and institutions.

Culture is a Way of Life

Culture means simply the “way of life” of a people or their “design for a living.” Kluckhohn and Kelly define it in his sense”, A culture is a historically derived system of explicit and implicit designs for living, which tends to be shared by all or specially designed members of a group.”

Explicit culture refers to similarities in words and actions which can be directly observed.

For example, adolescent cultural behavior can be generalized from regularities in dress, mannerisms, and conversation. Implicit culture exists in abstract forms, which are not quite obvious.

Culture is Idealistic

Culture embodies the ideals and norms of a group. It is the sum total of a group’s ideal patterns and norms of behavior. Culture consists of the intellectual, artistic, and social ideals and institutions that the members of society profess and strive to confirm.

Culture is Transmitted among Members of Society

Persons learn cultural ways from people.

Many of them are “handed down” by their elders, parents, teachers, and others. Other cultural behaviors are “handed up” to elders. Some of the transmission of culture is among contemporaries.

For example, the styles of dress, political views, and the use of recent labor-saving devices. One does not acquire a behavior pattern spontaneously.

He learns it. That means that someone teaches him, and he learns. Much of the learning process for the teacher and the learner is unconscious, unintentional, or accidental.

Culture is Continually Changing

One fundamental and inescapable attribute (a special quality) of culture is the fact of unending change.

Some societies sometimes change slowly, and hence in comparison to other societies, seem not to be changing. But they are changing, even though not obviously so.

Language is the Chief Vehicle of Culture

Man lives not only in the present but also in the past and future.

He can do this because he possesses a language that transmits what was learned in the past and enables him to transmit the accumulated wisdom to the next generation.

A specialized language pattern serves as a common bond to the members of a particular group or subculture.

Although culture is transmitted in various ways, language is one of the most important vehicles for perpetuating cultural patterns.

Culture is Integrated

This is known as holism, or the interconnected parts of a culture.

All aspects of a culture are related to one another, and to truly understand a culture, one must learn about all of its parts, not only a few.

Culture is Dynamic

This simply means that cultures interact and change.

Because most cultures are in contact with other cultures, they exchange ideas and symbols. All cultures change. Otherwise, they would have problems adapting to changing environments.

And because cultures are integrated, the entire system must likely adjust if one component in the system changes.

Culture is Transmissive

Culture is transmissive as it is transmitted front one generation to another.

Language is the main vehicle of culture. Language in different forms makes it possible for the present generation to understand the achievement of earlier generations.

Transmission of culture may take place by imitation as well as by instruction.

Culture Varies from Society to Society

Every society has a culture of its own. It differs from society to society. The culture of every society is unique to itself. Cultures are not uniform.

Cultural elements like customs, traditions, morals, values, and beliefs are not uniform everywhere. Culture varies from time to time also.

Culture is Gratifying

Culture provides proper opportunities for the satisfaction of our needs and desires.

Our needs, both biological and social, are fulfilled in cultural ways. Culture determines and guides various activities of man. Thus, culture is defined as the process through which human beings satisfy their wants.

So we can easily say that culture has various features that embody it in an important position in organizations and other aspects.

Functions of Culture

We will review the functions that culture performs and assess whether culture can be a liability for an organization. Culture performs some functions within an organization.

• First, it has a boundary-defining role; it creates distinctions between one organization and another.
• Second, it conveys a sense of identity for organization members.
• Third, culture facilitates the generation of commitment to something larger than one’s individual self-interest.
• Fourth, it enhances the stability of the social system. Culture is the social glue that helps hold the organization together by providing appropriate standards for what employees should say and do.
• Finally, culture serves as a sense-making and control mechanism that guides and

shapes employees’ attitudes and behavior. It is this last function that is of particular interest to us.

The role of culture in influencing employee behavior appears to be increasingly important in today’s workplace.

As organizations have widened spans of control, flattened structures have been introduced, and teams reduced formalization and empowered employees. The shared meaning provided by a strong culture ensures that everyone is pointed in the same direction.

3 Components Of Culture

If you study a modern or backward culture, you will identify three important components of it. 3 components of culture are;

1. cognitive component,
2. material component, and
3. normative component.

In other words, the culture of a particular society is composed of three distinct elements or components. Let us now have a brief discussion on them:

Cognitive Component

The basic component of any culture is one relating to people’s knowledge about the universe’s creation and existence. This aspect is based on either people’s observations or on certain factual evidence that they have.

An individual of a backward culture believes in gods, superstitions, and other objects as a part of their cognitive aspect. But, in a technologically advanced society, the cognitive aspect is based on scientific experiments and their applications.

The cognitive component of an advanced society’s culture is quite distinct from that of a primitive one because of the refinement of knowledge through systematic testing and observation.

Material Component

Another important component of any given culture is the material feature of society. It consists of all the tangible things that human beings make, use, and give value to. The material component varies from culture to culture as the cognitive component.

It is based on the technological state that society has achieved and understood, looking at society’s artifacts. The artifacts include the type of housing where people live, the furniture they use, and other material goods they possess.

Since it is tied to the level of technological advancement of society, the material features of cultures are very diverse as technological achievements vary.

Cognitive Component

The other important component of a culture is the cognitive component. The cognitive component is composed of society’s values and norms, which guide and regulate behavior.

In other words, it consists of the values, beliefs, and rules by which society directs people’s interactions. Understanding culture means understanding its values.

Values are shared standards of acceptable and unacceptable, good and bad, desirable and undesirable. Values are abstract, very general concepts that are expressed by norms.

Norms are rules and guidelines that set forth proper attitudes and behaviors for specific situations.

For example, in South Asian countries, the culture places a high value on religious training; therefore, our norms specify formal religious education for every child up to a certain age. Mass religious education norms create a need for religious teachers, books, and other related materials.

Among the values the culture holds, some are core or central values, while others are peripheral values. Core values are the deeply held enduring beliefs that guide our actions, judgments, and specific behaviors, supporting our efforts to realize important aims.

Although not as deeply embedded or fundamental as central values, our peripheral values reflect our central ones. You may value regular exercise and a low-salt, low-cholesterol diet if you value your health. You may also abstain from smoking cigarettes and drinking alcoholic beverages.

Marketers should give a deep look at each of the three components of culture discussed above as they determine the consumption of goods and services by people of a particular culture to a great extent. Failure to understand them may become a grave concern for marketers.

3 Aspects of Culture

If we explain the above definition, we can identify three aspects of a given culture;

1. culture is a pattern of behavior,
2. culture is learned, and
3. culture is transmitted from one generation to the next.

Culture is a Pattern of Behavior

Culture refers basically to the style of behavior. This style is found to be present in the behaviors of the majority of people living in a particular culture.

This pattern varies from culture to culture, and as a result, consumptions vary among countries. The pattern of behavior you will see in South-Asian culture will definitely not be seen in other cultures. The behavior established by culture is found to be practiced by the majority as it satisfies their needs.

Someone not following the established pattern of behavior is likely to be condemned by others in society. Since the majority follows the same style of behavior in a particular culture, it becomes a pattern.

To be successful, marketers must find out the patterns of behavior and design their marketing strategies accordingly to be successful in a culture.

Culture is Learned

The second important aspect relating to culture is that we learn it through experiences and interactions.

The aspects of culture are not found in an individual right from his birth. He rather learns those from others in society as he follows, observes, and interacts with them. Since experiences vary among people of different societies, they learn different things resulting in differences among cultures.

For example, a South-Asian child grows up in a European country among Europeans and will definitely not learn South-Asian cultural aspects but the European cultural aspects, influencing his behavior.

It clearly indicates that culture is learned, not present from birth, which is why people of different cultures see the same object or situation differently.

The reason is that their learning differs. For example, wearing mini-skirts by females is seen negatively in South Asia, whereas it is seen positively in Western countries. Since people of two different cultures learn differently, they are likely to view the same object differently.

People learn about their cultures from their parents and different social organizations and groups. This will be discussed later.

Culture is Transmitted from One Generation to the Next.

We have in our culture in terms of values, ideas, attitudes, symbols, artifacts, or other, and we are likely to conform to those.

We follow the patterns of our cultures and teach them to the next generation to guide them. This process of transmitting the cultural elements from one generation to the next is known as ‘Enculturation”.

Thus, cultural elements do not persist in one generation but are transmitted to the next generation and survive the entire life span of an individual. That is why a lot of similarities in behaviors are found between people of two different generations.

Importance of the Cultural Study

The influence of society’s religious, family, educational, and social system on consumers’ behavior and their impacts on marketing comprise a company’s cultural environment. It would be difficult to overlook the importance of culture as a motivator of consumer behavior.

While it is easy to state the general significance of culture, it is more difficult to define the term to receive general acceptance.

Consequently, it is hard to be precise about the impacts of culture on consumer behavior. Cultural dimensions among countries vary even more than economic ones, so it becomes difficult to find general patterns at best.

For example, even though Western European countries’ economic characteristics are similar, their cultural dimensions make for very different eating habits.

Certainly, culture is the most pervasive external force on an individual’s consumption behavior. How people work and play, what they eat, how they eat, how and what they buy, and the cultural traditions and socially developed modes of behavior are all affected.

Even a slight change in them can significantly alter how and what people buy.

For example, in the US, in the early 1980s, some religious groups began a movement to boycott products promoted on certain highly popular but “immoral” (sex-oriented) Consumer Behavior Television shows.

Over 6000 churches joined the movement, and some companies agreed to cease their advertising on those shows.

Marketing executives must consider the importance of the cultural setting in which consumer behavior occurs. The attitudes people possess, the values they hold dear, the lifestyles they enjoy, and the interpersonal behavioral patterns they adopt are the outcomes of the cultural setting.

These forces affect the marketplace by influencing other external forces. They undoubtedly have a bearing on government standards, the state of the economy, and the intensity of competition and technological development.

You should remember that cultures vary from country to country, so consumption patterns among people vary.

Failure to carefully consider cultural differences is often responsible for monumental marketing failures. In fact, it has been convincingly argued that the root cause of most international business problems is the self­reference criteria, i.e., the unconscious reference to one’s own cultural values.

Marketing across cultural boundaries is a challenging and difficult task. You know that consumer behavior always occurs within a specific environment, and an individual’s culture provides the most general environment in which his consumption behavior occurs.

Cultural influences broadly affect buying behavior because they permeate our daily lives. Our culture determines what we wear and eat and where we reside and travel. It broadly affects how we buy and use products and influences our satisfaction with them.

For example, in our urban culture, time scarcity increases because of the number of females working. Because of the current emphasis we place on physical and mental self-development. Many people shop and buy time-saving products, such as instant noodles, to cope with time scarcity.

Culture, to some degree, determines how products are purchased and used, which affects the development, promotion, distribution, and pricing of products.

From the premise given above, it is now quite evident that studying the market’s culture where you operate or plan to operate is vital for your success and even existence.

Understanding culture is important to you as a marketing manager because it always provides approved specific goal objects for any generalized human want.

Conclusion: Understanding Culture is important

Culture is a comprehensive concept that includes almost everything around us and influences an individual’s thought processes and behavior. It would be difficult for a marketer to succeed if he overlooks culture’s importance as an indicator of behavior.

So, it is a must for marketing executives, business executives, entrepreneurs, and decision-makers to consider the importance of the cultural setting within which consumer behavior occurs.

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?

Culture is defined as the collective values, customs, norms, arts, social institutions, and intellectual achievements of a particular society.

Culture influences consumers through the norms and values established by the society in which they live. It is the broadest environmental factor that influences you as consumer. Cultural values are enduring and any attempts to change them generally fail.

The study of culture is concerned with a comprehensive examination of factors such as language, religion, knowledge, laws, art, music, work patterns, social customs, festivals and food etc. of a society. The impact of culture is automatic and almost invisible and its influence on behaviour is usually taken for granted.

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Definition of culture

The collective values, customs, norms, arts, social institutions, and intellectual achievements of a particular society.

• Culture is the complex whole that includes knowledge, art, law, morals, customs, belief and any other capabilities and habits acquired by human as members of society.
• Learned behavior and results of behavior whose component elements are shared and transmitted by members of a particular society. It is learned as opposed to genetically inherited behavior.
• It is a (shaped) configuration of behaviors rather than fragmented isolated behavioral elements. It also implies that culture is interactive and passed from one generation to another.

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Characteristics of culture

There are following characteristics of culture:

1. Functional
2. Socialization
3. Prescriptive
4. Learnable
5. Arbitrariness
6. Evaluative
7. Cumulative
8. Adaptive

Functional

The culture of every society has specific functions that it performs. It offers stability, dependability framework of common values, traditions, beliefs, practices and facilitative behavior for societal interaction.

It is a social process which arises out of human interaction and is human making; it is created by the society for the society, presented by the society and transmitted through social means.

Prescriptive

Acceptable norms and behaviors are defined and prescribed by the society through the culture. The cultural norm provides the range of desired or acceptable behaviors. Behaviors that fall outside these ranges are frowned at or ignored.

Learnable

Culture is not inherited, nor is it a flexible behavior. It is rather the result of learning it was handed down through formal teaching from parents or teachers. It is also learned through imitation or observation.

Arbitrariness

What is acceptable in one culture may be rejected or frowned at in another. In India, most of the states have banned eating Beef but few states are there those do not have any rules related to eating Beef.

Evaluative

Cultural concepts consist of those things we should or ought to do; we should respect our elders, we should as parents love our children, we should respect the title members of the society, and we should respect authority.

Cumulative

Cultures are an accumulation of years of experience and knowledge. Each generation adds its own to the one it inherited from the previous generation.

Adaptive

As the society changes, so do value, goals, standards and culture, but cultural changes take a long period of time.

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Components of culture

Three principal components of culture are:

1. Cognitive
2. Material components are the artifacts
3. Normative components are the values

Cognitive

This refers to knowledge or idea that is relevant in observable factual evidence. It includes ideas about gods, supernatural phenomenon and concepts of life after death.

Material components are the artifacts

They vary among cultures; in some areas are bronze sculptures, others, high rise Palace, e.g. Taj Mahal.

Normative components are the values

Rules and codes of conduct those serve as the guide and regulator of behavior.

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Types of cultures

Cultural values are enduring beliefs that a given behavior or outcome is desirable or good (Milton J. Rokeach). Our values, as enduring beliefs, serve as standards that guide our behavior across situations and over time. Values are so ingrained that most of us are not really consciously aware of them and individuals often have difficulty describing them.

Social values represent “normal” behavior for a society or group. Personal values define “normal” behavior for an individual. Personal values mirror the individual’s choices made from the variety of social values to which that individual gets exposed. Our value systems refer to the total set of values and the relative importance cultures place on them.

7 Types of cultures are:

1. Maturity
2. Security
3. Pro-social behavior (doing nice things to others)
4. Restrictive conformity
5. Enjoyment in life
6. Achievement
7. Self-direction

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Other Concepts of Culture

1. Cultural symbolism
2. Culture relativism
3. Cultural change
4. Culture and marketing

Cultural symbolism

A symbol is anything that stands for or suggests something else by association such as words, numbers or illustrations, symbols which could be either referential from one generation to another or expressive.

Expensive symbolisms are subject to interpretation, meanings are inferred to them to get the desired message across to the recipient. Symbols could make a product cheap, or prestigious. Car designers make extensive use of expressive symbols.

Culture relativism

This is the tendency of judging any behavior from the context of its own environment and cultural context. For a grown up first son of the father to die before the father is unacceptable in Ibo Land despite the fact that death is not negotiable.

To each culture, there is doubt that each will tend to uphold and defend the values and standards of its own. That is why ethnocentrism concludes that the day we do things is right and the way others do things is right and the way others do things is wrong because we are judging them from the context and standards of our own cultural setting.

Cultural change

Culture must be adaptive to survive. Cultural change therefore must be a continuous process to accommodate the technological and cultural diffusion. When a technological innovation occurs, the culture must change to accommodate it.

To clean one’s teeth is the first thing in the morning in may culture. That could be done with the chewing stick (Stick of Neem, Babool and other medicinal trees). Today, the culture has not changed but the exercise is predominantly done with the tooth brush and paste.

Culture and marketing

To succeed as an effective marketing manager, one must subscribe to the culture, its values, accept its symbols and reflect the appropriate behaviors and norms at the appropriate times.

To market same product with same promotional ideas are not successful every time and in every culture/country. Only a few products such as Coca-Cola and Limca enjoy such cross-cultural acceptance.

The same product could be marketed with different options because of the relativity and symbolism of culture. To an American, refrigerator is a kitchen appliance and should be in the kitchen. In another culture, it could be just any furniture displayed in the sitting room.

Different products and different promotions could be a strategy when the cultural way of life and the individual lifestyles are divergent in any market.

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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

(opens in new tab)

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

(opens in new tab)

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.