Culture

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

Humans acquire culture through the learning processes of enculturation as well as socialization, which is made 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 office can bear risks, just as a single breed can wither in the face of environmental change, for lack of functional responses to the change. Thus in military culture, valor is counted a typical behavior for an individual and duty, honor, and loyalty to the social chain are counted as virtues or functional responses in the continuum of conflict. In the practice of religion, analogous attributes can be specified 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 modify and forces resisting change. Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies.

Organizations like UNESCO try to preserve culture and cultural heritage.

Etymology

The advanced 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," using an agricultural metaphor for the developing of a philosophical soul, understood teleologically as the highest possible ideal for human development. Samuel Pufendorf took over this metaphor in a contemporary 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 any the ways in which human beings overcome their original barbarism, and through artifice, become fully human."

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, particularly a religious one.' To be cultural, to work a culture, is to inhabit a place sufficiently intensely to cultivate it—to be responsible for it, toto it, to attend to it caringly."

Culture referenced by Richard Velkley:

... originally meant the cultivation of the soul or mind, acquires near of its later sophisticated meaning in the writings of the 18th-century German thinkers, who were on various levels coding Rousseau's criticism of "modern liberalism and Enlightenment." Thus a contrast between "culture" and "civilization" is ordinarily implied in these authors, even when non expressed as such.

In the words of anthropologist E.B. Tylor, this is the "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and all other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a ingredient of society." Alternatively, in a contemporary variant, "Culture is defined as a social domain that emphasizes the practices, discourses and the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical thing expressions, which, over time, express the continuities and discontinuities of social meaning of a life held in common.

The Cambridge English Dictionary states that culture is "the way of life, particularly the general customs and beliefs, of a specific group of people at a particular time." Terror supervision theory posits that culture is a series of activities and worldviews that dispense 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 format to deny the animal insignificance and death that Homo sapiens became aware of when they acquired a larger brain.

The word is used in a general sense as the evolved ability to categorize and survive 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 work demonstrated similar, though much less complicated, abilities for social learning. this is the also used to denote the complex networks of practices and accumulated knowledge and ideas that are transmitted through social interaction and represent in specific human groups, or cultures, using the plural form.