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Definition: culture from Philip's Encyclopedia

In anthropology, all knowledge that is acquired by human beings through their membership of a society. A culture incorporates all the shared knowledge, expectations and beliefs of a group. Culture in general distinguishes human beings from animals, since only humans can pass on accumulated knowledge by means of symbolic systems such as language.


Culture

From Encyclopedia of Identity
To give a single, uncontroversial definition of the concept culture is a difficult task, for any definition of culture is itself an expression of a theoretical stance. With this caveat, the following definition summarizes a conception of culture widely used in contemporary psychology. Broadly, culture is a collection of information (or meanings) that is (a) nongenetically transmitted between individuals, (b) more or less shared within a population of individuals, and (c) maintained across some generations over a period of time. As such, culture plays an important role in the formation of individual and collective self-concepts or identities and has implications for human psychology. This definition, however, excludes behavior or artifacts (i.e., products of human behavior) from culture. Information or meaning may be inferred from overt behavior or artifacts. That is, behavior and artifacts may act as markers of culture, but they are not part of culture themselves. Culture differs from…
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Full text Article culture

From Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology
Traditionally the province of either anthropology or the humanities, culture has become increasingly central to sociology , both as a subject of study, and as a theoretical challenge to sociology's self-conception. The sociological definition of and approach to culture, which refers to the form, …
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Full text Article Culture

From World of Sociology, Gale
Culture, for sociologists, refers to interconnected collective symbols, practices, and meanings specific to a society or to a group of persons within a society. The growing study of culture within sociology covers diverse topics, for example, art and literature, everyday culture and practices, …
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Full text Article culture

From The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology
Over the last two decades there has been a burgeoning interest in the concept of culture. There has not unfortunately been much precision in its use. As a result, the concept has been used in a number of different ways which tend to overlap one another. Culture is contrasted with the biological. …
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Full text Article culture

From Collins Dictionary of Business
The norms and shared attitudes that pervade an ORGANIZATION . It may be expressed in symbols, rituals and the language used by organization members. It thus constitutes the distinctive characteristics of an organization. In recent years managerial interest in organizational culture has grown…
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Full text Article culture

From The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style
Ever since C.P. Snow wrote of the gap between “the two cultures” (the humanities and science) in the 1950s, the notion that culture can refer to smaller segments of society has seemed implicit. The application of the term culture to the collective attitudes and behavior of corporations, which arose…
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Full text Article CULTURE

From The Edinburgh International Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysis
Freud did not distinguish culture from civilisation ; however, culture may be considered to be the particular set of conditions by which civilisation influences how the instinctual drives will be expressed. The ten commandments are an example of the control of instincts, and the seven deadly sins…
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Full text Article CULTURE

From Dictionary of Race, Ethnicity & Culture
From the Latin verb colere , to cultivate and the noun cultura , the term ‘culture’ is used today mainly with two meanings; the first and most ancient of these, taken up at the beginning of the seventeenth century by Francis Bacon, refers to the body of knowledge and manners acquired by an…
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Full text Article CULTURE

From Dictionary of Visual Discourse: A Dialectical Lexicon of Terms
Latin culter , English coulter: knife or ploughshare (OED) ‘Culture, that system of prostheses…’ Stanislav Lem, 1979:137 ‘Every culture - every cultural form - is a means of contradicting chance’ Stanislav Lem, in conversation ‘“Culture” is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world…
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Full text Article Culture

From International Encyclopedia of Human Geography
© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Glossary Hybridity Something new created by the merging of two things previously thought to be qualitatively different. Material Culture The relationship between things and people. Nonrepresentational Theory Concerned with the performance of everyday life. …
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Full text Article culture

From Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
The word ‘culture’ is probably the single most central concept in twentieth-century anthropology. It has an especially complex history, of which anthropological usage is only one small part. Etymologically it is linked to words like ‘cultivate’ and ‘cultivation’, ‘agriculture’ and ‘horticulture’. …
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