Culture (Latin: cultura, lit. “cultivation”) is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. 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”.
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: the evolved human capacity to classify and represent experiences with symbols, and to act imaginatively and creatively; and the distinct ways that people living in different parts of the world classified and represented their experiences, and acted creatively. Nonmaterial culture: The ideas created by members of a society Material culture: The physical things created by members of a society Following World War II, the term became important, albeit with different meanings, in other disciplines such as cultural studies, organizational psychology, the sociology of culture and management studies.