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.[3]
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 lower classes 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,"[4] 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."[5]
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." [6]
