Culture

Culture (/ˈkʌltʃər/ KUL-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 is considered a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of phenomena that are transmitted through social learning in human societies.

These include expressive forms like art, music, dance, ritual, religion, and technologies like tool usage, cooking, shelter, and clothing.

[5] 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.

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.

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 proletariat and create a false consciousness.

Tylor, it is "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.

[10] The Cambridge English Dictionary states that culture is "the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time.

"[11] Terror management theory posits that culture is a series of activities and worldviews that provide 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 order to deny the animal insignificance and death that Homo sapiens became aware of when they acquired a larger brain.

It is also used to denote the complex networks of practices and accumulated knowledge and ideas that are transmitted through social interaction and exist in specific human groups, or cultures, using the plural form.

[citation needed] Raimon Panikkar identified 29 ways in which cultural change can be brought about, including growth, development, evolution, involution, renovation, reconception, reform, innovation, revivalism, revolution, mutation, progress, diffusion, osmosis, borrowing, eclecticism, syncretism, modernization, indigenization, and transformation.

[14] In this context, modernization could be viewed as adopting Enlightenment-era beliefs and practices, such as science, rationalism, industry, commerce, democracy, and the notion of progress.

[15] Cultural invention has come to mean any innovation that is new and found to be useful to a group of people and expressed in their behavior, but which does not exist as a physical object.

For example, after tropical forests returned at the end of the last ice age, plants suitable for domestication were available, leading to the invention of agriculture, which in turn brought about many cultural innovations and shifts in social dynamics.

For example, Western restaurant chains and culinary brands sparked curiosity and fascination to the Chinese as China opened its economy to international trade in the late 20th-century.

Still, in this context, it refers to the replacement of traits of one culture with another, such as what happened to certain Native American tribes and many indigenous peoples across the globe during colonization.

[26] In the 19th century, humanists such as English poet and essayist Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) used the word "culture" to refer to an ideal of individual human refinement, of "the best that has been thought and said in the world.

According to Hobbes and Rousseau, the Native Americans who were being conquered by Europeans from the 16th centuries on were living in a state of nature; this opposition was expressed through the contrast between "civilized" and "uncivilized.

In 1870 the anthropologist Edward Tylor (1832–1917) applied these ideas of higher versus lower culture to propose a theory of the evolution of religion.

Martin Lindstrom asserts that Kulturbrille, which allow a person to make sense of the culture they inhabit, "can blind us to things outsiders pick up immediately.

These scholars reject the abstracted postmodern aspects of cultural sociology, and instead, look for a theoretical backing in the more scientific vein of social psychology and cognitive science.

In the United Kingdom, sociologists and other scholars influenced by Marxism such as Stuart Hall (1932–2014) and Raymond Williams (1921–1988) developed cultural studies.

Following nineteenth-century Romantics, they identified culture with consumption goods and leisure activities (such as art, music, film, food, sports, and clothing).

From the 1970s onward, Stuart Hall's pioneering work, along with that of his colleagues Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Tony Jefferson, and Angela McRobbie, created an international intellectual movement.

In a Marxist view, the mode and relations of production form the economic base of society, which constantly interacts and influences superstructures, such as culture.

This view comes through in the book Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (by Paul du Gay et al.),[54] which seeks to challenge the notion that those who produce commodities control the meanings that people attribute to them.

The writer Julia Kristeva is among influential voices at the turn of the century, contributing to cultural studies from the field of art and psychoanalytical French feminism.

The notion of the anxious, unstable, and rebellious adolescent has been criticized by experts, such as Robert Epstein, who state that an undeveloped brain is not the main cause of teenagers' turmoils.

[71] According to Robert Epstein and Jennifer, "American-style teen turmoil is absent in more than 100 cultures around the world, suggesting that such mayhem is not biologically inevitable.

"[72] David Moshman has also stated in regards to adolescence that brain research "is crucial for a full picture, but it does not provide an ultimate explanation.