Culture is the total way of life of a group of people. It is a combination of beliefs, behaviors and values that are passed along by imitation from one generation to the next. It also includes the arts, language, ideas and philosophies that are shared by a community.
The word cultural derives from the Latin verb “colere,” meaning to cultivate. It is a concept that can be difficult to define, because it consists of many things that are not easily seen. It is a complex and diverse set of values, beliefs and practices. While different cultures may have very different ways of defining their culture, there are some things that are common to all social groups. These are called cultural universals and include concepts like the family, religion, education, art and societal structure.
Anthropologist Edward Tylor was the first English-speaking scholar to use the term culture in a broad sense, to describe the totality of the human environment. He contrasted it with barbarism, as well as with civilization, the neologism of Voltaire that was meant to designate the highest stage of human development. Since then, the concept of culture has gained a wide acceptance among scholars as a means of understanding all human societies and as the foundation for understanding human differences.
Although some academics have criticized the idea of culture as a distinct entity that can be separated from other socioeconomic determinants, most scholars agree that there are strong relationships between social relations and consciousness, which is in turn determined by the cultural environment in which one lives. This consensus has made the study of culture central to anthropology and sociology, as well as in some areas of literary studies, history and philosophy.
In recent years, the study of culture has been influenced by semiotics, an approach to human communication devised by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure early in the twentieth century. This method emphasizes the importance of the structural properties of words and the way they create meaning. Moreover, it rejects the idea that an individual speaker is the creator and guarantor of language’s meaning, and instead suggests that words themselves have meaning by virtue of the relationships they form in a given system of signification.
A number of newer scholars have sought to re-link the study of culture with anthropology and history. They have re-evaluated the traditional definition of culture as an apex of historical inquiry, and have also sought to analyze the relationship between the cultural level and other levels of analysis such as the political or economic. This movement, often referred to as postmodernist cultural history, has been opposed by some historians who feel that it undermines the traditional discipline of labor studies. It has also come into conflict with some marxist historians, who argue that discourses about culture cannot be thoroughly severed from their extralinguistic referents. Nonetheless, this movement has had a considerable impact on world history and has been incorporated into most academic curricula at the university level.