Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to
cultivate")[1] 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.[2] 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. For the German nonpositivist sociologist, Georg Simmel, culture
referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms
which have been objectified in the course of history".[3]
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 cultural studies, organizational psychology and management studies
.