Concept
Culture
Overview
Culture ( KUL-chər or KUUL-chər) is a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, attitudes, and habits of the individuals in these groups. Culture often originates from or is 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 such change. Thus in military culture, valor is counted as a typical behavior for an individual, and duty, honor, and loyalty to the social group are regarded as virtues or functional responses in the continuum of conflict. In religion, analogous attributes can be identified in a social group.
Cultural change, or repositioning, is the reconstruction of a cultural concept of a society. Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces resisting change. Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies.
Organizations such as UNESCO attempt to preserve culture and cultural heritage.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Culture is discussed.
This new world culture possesses two distinctive characteristics. The first of these consists in a growing indifference to the State as such.
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; opens on it
Wolf's[4] reasons why the Egyptians, Hebrews, Persians, and other Oriental nations were not to be set on the same plane with the Greeks and Romans: "The former have either not raised themselves, or have raised themselves only to a slight extent, above that type of culture which should be called a mere civilisation and bourgeois acquirement, as opposed to the higher and true culture of the mind." He then explains…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, We Philologists
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
The extent to which cultural rules have been internalized—to express it popularly and unpsychologically: the moral level of the members—is not the only psychical asset to be considered if one is estimating the value of a culture. In addition there is its heritage of ideals and artistic creations, that is to say, of the satisfactions they both yield. One will be only too readily inclined to include among the…
Sigmund Freud, The future of an illusion
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
Culture means at least something cultivated, something ripened; it is opposed to the raw and crude. When the "natural" is identified with this rawness, culture is opposed to what is called natural development. Culture is also something personal; it is cultivation with respect to appreciation of ideas and art and broad human interests. When efficiency is identified with a narrow range of acts, instead of with the…
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
True, this culture is without the erudition of those establishments, but assumes nevertheless the mien of a sovereign; so that, for example, Gutzkow the novelist might be pointed to as the best example of a modern public school boy turned æsthete. Such a degenerate man of culture is a serious matter, and it is a horrifying spectacle for us to see that all our scholarly and journalistic publicity bears the stigma of…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, On the Future of our Educational Institutions
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
Philosophers who discussed Culture
- James Mark Baldwin
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- Claude Lévi-Strauss
- Oswald Spengler
- Intellectual
- Jews
- Richard McKeon
- Ernst Cassirer
- Frantz Fanon
- Aeon (magazine)
- Susan Bordo
- Joseph Margolis
- Tetsurō Watsuji
- Václav Bělohradský
Related ideas
- Belief
- Ritual
- Ethnicity
- Georg Simmel
- Film theory
- Pierre Bourdieu
- Feminism
- Folklore
- Matthew Arnold
- Franz Boas
- Philosophy
- High culture
- Hierarchy
- Counterculture
- Immanuel Kant
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Karl Marx
- Learning
- Samuel von Pufendorf
- Left-wing politics
- Modernity
- Sociology
- Music
- Law
Opposing perspectives
- Moral universalism
- Counterculture
- Art history
- Architecture
- Social science
- Cultural identity
- Humanities
- Trotskyism
- Civilization
Place in the tradition
Part of Animism.