Culture

Culture is the set of social behaviours, institutions, norms, knowledge, beliefs, arts, customs and habits that are transmitted and learned within human groups, as opposed to what is owed to biological inheritance or to nature not made by humans.

The term derives from the Latin cultus, linked to the verb colere, meaning to tend the land or livestock. By the time of Cicero it was used figuratively for the cultivation of the soul or mind, a metaphor that Enlightenment thinkers applied to the formation of the individual. Samuel Pufendorf extended it to the ways human beings overcome their original barbarism through artifice. In the eighteenth century, German thinkers gave it the meanings we recognise today: culture as the spirit of a people, often distinguished from mere civilisation, and culture as the cultivation of spirituality and free individuality.

In anthropology the concept became central in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Edward B. Tylor defined it as a complex whole including knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and other capabilities acquired by man as a member of society. On this view culture does not depend on genetics but on social learning, enculturation and socialisation. Thorstein Veblen stressed that the economy itself is shaped by highly variable cultural habits and norms, while Malek Bennabi understood culture as a people's way of being and becoming, with aesthetic, ethical, pragmatic and technical dimensions. Antonio Banfi approached it through the philosophy of culture, as an analysis of the concrete life of knowledge and history.

A simple example is the rule governing how one greets, dresses or eats in a community: no one is born knowing it, yet everyone learns and reproduces it, and its variation from place to place shows its historical character.

Today the debate turns on several questions. One is the distinction between high culture, popular culture and mass culture, which critical theory and Marxism have read as instruments of domination. Another is cultural relativism, which holds that cultures cannot be objectively ranked, against those who defend universal values. Finally, multiculturalism and the preservation of cultural heritage, promoted by bodies such as UNESCO, raise the tension between conserving traditions and their inevitable change.