Culture definition changes all the time. It always will depends on contexts. So is quite hard thing to do. And what about all those books already written about it? There is a lot. Even there is one written in 1952, where the authors (Kluckhorn and Kroeber) gathered 163 definitions. The thing is that word is "polisemic", it has a lot of meanings, and all of them change following where, what historic time and with who you are. So we'll start to saying that culture definition is, defintly, something that doesn't stay fix, is something dinamic. So, Where do we begin?
Defining by time, place and class.
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| Civilizations Map by Huntington |
Let check this little history out...
Romans started to talk about culture, but in very different way that we are used to. They said culture is when you grow a plant. Yes, they used to refer to something that today we call "agri-culture". But, there were some who thought that word could be use to speak about growing your soul. That idea wasn't really popular, but it was good enough to be remembered.
While the dark age started in europe, the monks and other intelectuals kept such a knowledge. With the rise of enlightment, some retake that idea, specially Rousseau, who used to make a difference between humans and animals, because just the human can cultivated himself. He talk about culture without distintion of the concept "civilization".
He wasn't the only one. All french in that time thought the same. They thought that culture is refine manners and soul. Civilizacion was the progressive improvement. Of course, they thought they were the maximum expression of civilization. Pretty humble. So, culture and civilizations was a kind of stairs, going up if you have much culture and going down if you have just a little, also with non, you were no more than a "savage" or "barbarian". There was only one way, culture was singular and universal, difference is just different step in civilization stairs.
But in the other side of the Rhin river, people thought different indeed, basicly because Germany wasn't a unified and centralized nation, but many different states. No one could said "we are the most civilized ones here", but every one had a particularities. So their thinkers at that time, the romantics, thought that the culture (kultur) was different for every town, and there is no one culture but many, every nation has different goals in this life, then different ways to live.
Later, with awakening of science, some started to study it formally. In the begining, they followed the civilization idea, strongly motivated by evolutionary ideas. Some (Maine, Taylor, Morgan) thought that the "natural" course of culture was going from savage to barbaric and end in civilization. But there were some others that thought in several nuclear civilizations and their influence area where they diffuse their culture. They even thought in some crossing in the middle of two civilizations.
Both approaches (evolutionist and diffusionist) were considered pre-scientific because they used poor quality data, didn't sistematic analysis and got conclusions before results. However, their focus remained. Neo-evolutionist, as White who change "civilization" for "Optimal energy use" or Huntington, who wrote about a multicivilization world conflict, a kind of new "western civilization against barbarics", are still present. In the other hand, Cultural relativism developed diversity and particularity as basic terms just to start to talk about other people and culture.
This last particular approach has been very influential among international institutions. The UNESCO (United Nations for Education, Science and Culture Organization) use it as basis of its concept and work, and provide us one of the most popular definition of the term.
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that in its widest sense, culture may now be said to be the whole complex of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features that characterize a society or social group. It includes not only the arts and letters, but also modes of life, the fundamental rights of the human being, value systems, traditions and beliefs;
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However, culture term is a very european concept and the "social groups" outside europe and western cultures, have serious problems to work with tit. There are not a few who question it. The concept itself has been in the middle of many problematics around the world (e: Sudafrican Apartheid). But at the same time, there are others who used as argument to defend their political, economic or ecological causes.
Culture definition today is still on going. How we used and thought it is a long argument, but for now we have a map to locate future definitions.
Sources:
Kottack, Cultural Anthropology.
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