Noun

Wikipedia

Singular culture

Plural cultures

culture (plural cultures)

1. The arts, customs, and habits that characterize a particular society or nation.
2. The beliefs, values, behavior and material objects that constitute a people's way of life.
3. (microbiology) The process of growing a bacterial or other biological entity in an artificial medium.
4. (anthropology) Any knowledge passed from one generation to the next, not necessarily with respect to human beings.
5. The collective noun for a group of bacteria.
6. (botany) cultivation

   The Culture of Spring-Flowering Bulbs

Derived terms

• subculture
• cyberculture

Related terms

• agriculture

Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate") is a term that has different meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. However, the word "culture" is most commonly used in three basic senses:

• excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also known as high culture
• an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning
• the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group.

When the concept first emerged in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, it connoted a process of cultivation or improvement, as in agriculture or horticulture. In the nineteenth century, it came to refer first to the betterment or refinement of the individual, especially through education, and then to the fulfillment of national aspirations or ideals. In the mid-nineteenth century, some scientists used the term "culture" to refer to a universal human capacity.

In the twentieth century, "culture" emerged as a concept central to anthropology, encompassing all human phenomena that are not purely results of human genetics. Specifically, the term "culture" in American anthropology had two meanings: (1) the evolved human capacity to classify and represent experiences with symbols, and to act imaginatively and creatively; and (2) the distinct ways that people living in different parts of the world classified and represented their experiences, and acted creatively. Following World War II, the term became important, albeit with different meanings, in other disciplines such as sociology, cultural studies, organizational psychology and management studies.

Culture

• "In 16th-century Italy there lived Lodovico Gonzaga, a 16-year old seminarist who was very fond of playing ball. Once a certain priest passing by wondered if for a future priest the youth was too keen on his pursuit and asked him: 'What would you do if you learned that in half an hour the end of the world was coming?' To which Lodovico replied: 'I'd play on.' According to the Russian thinker Georgy Fedotov, the importance of culture lies in precisely that: we go on playing ball on the verge of Doomsday...."
  • Vladimir Barsky, Chromaticism (1996), ISBN 371865704X

• "Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love and of thought, which, in the course of centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved", AndrĂ© Malraux

• "When two cultures collide is the only time when true suffering exists", Hermann Hesse

• "When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver", attributed to a minister in the Nazi Kulturkammer

• "'Culture' is to make a nice drinking bowl from one's enemy's skull. 'Civilisation' is to go to prison for that", Anonymous

• "Whoever controls the media-the images-controls the culture.", Allen Ginsberg

• "Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.", Thomas Wolfe

From Wikiquote under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Fri Jul 10 06:46:27 2009