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The Essence and Evolution of Culture
The Essence and Evolution of Culture explores the fundamental nature of human culture and how it has transformed over millennia, tracing the roots of shared human experience and the forces that shape our diverse global societies. In an era of rapid global
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- Apr 05, 2026
Culture (or Kultur) is a core concept that encompasses society, cultural norms, and symbolic systems. It encompasses human collective practices, as well as the beliefs, behavioral norms, language, customs, ethics, skills, habits, and values of individuals within a specific group. Culture typically originates from or is attributed to a specific region or location, and serves as a central vehicle for group identity.
Humans acquire Culture through the process of socialization, a process that also gives rise to cultural diversity within society. Cultural norms define the boundaries of acceptable behavior in society; they provide guiding principles for behavior, dress, language, and attitudes in specific contexts, serving as shared behavioral templates for social groups. Accepting only a single sociocultural framework carries risks, much like how a single species may wither in the face of environmental change due to a lack of adaptive responses. Therefore, in military Culture, aggression is viewed as typical individual behavior, while responsibility, honor, and loyalty to the social group are regarded as virtues or adaptive responses. Similar attributes can also be identified in religious Cultures.
Cultural reset, or reorientation, refers to the reconstruction of sociocultural concepts. Within a Culture, forces that encourage change coexist with those that resist it. Simultaneously, Culture is influenced by external factors through social interactions. International organizations such as UNESCO have long been committed to protecting global cultural diversity.
Culture is regarded as a core concept in anthropology, encompassing various phenomena transmitted through society within human communities. Cultural elements exist in all human societies, including tools, clothing, rituals, architecture, art, and technology. The concept of material Culture encompasses the physical manifestations of Culture, such as technology, architecture, and art, while the intangible aspects of Culture—such as ethical principles (including religious and moral practices), language, knowledge, beliefs (including myths and philosophy), and customs—constitute intangible Culture.
In sociology, Culture is defined as an individual attribute representing a certain level of sophistication cultivated in areas such as art, science, education, or etiquette. Cultural complexity is sometimes used to distinguish complex societies from less complex ones. This view of Culture is also reflected in the distinction between high and low Culture, such as the refined Culture of the upper classes and the popular Culture of the lower classes, the latter being characterized by hierarchical channels of cultural transmission. In everyday language, Culture typically refers specifically to the symbolic markers that groups use to distinguish themselves from one another, such as high art or popular Culture. Popular Culture refers to the forms of mass production and mass media consumption that emerged in the 20th century.
Some philosophical schools, such as Marxism and critical Theory, argue that Culture is often used by elites as a political tool to manipulate classes and create false consciousness. This perspective is common in the field of cultural studies. Within the broader Marxist tradition, the historical materialist perspective holds that human symbolic Culture stems from the material conditions of human life, with Culture grounded in economic production.
When used as a sociological concept, “Culture” refers to the customs, beliefs, and values of a society or community (such as a nation or ethnic group), as well as the collective knowledge accumulated over time. In this sense, multiculturalism emphasizes the peaceful coexistence and mutual respect of different Cultures on the same planet. Sometimes the term “Culture” is also used to describe specific practices within a social subgroup, a subCulture (such as “punk Culture”), or an organizational Culture. In cultural relativism, an anthropological ideology and analytical stance holds that Cultures cannot be objectively ranked or evaluated, as any evaluation is necessarily situated within the value system of a particular Culture.
Writer Wendy Brown writes: “In Middle English, the word ‘Culture’ meant ‘cultivated land’; the same word derives from the Latin colere, meaning ‘to inhabit, care for, cultivate, worship,’ and from cultus, ‘a form of worship, especially religious worship.’ To possess a Culture is to inhabit a place deeply enough to cultivate it—to take responsibility for it, respond to it, and attend to it with care.”
Historian Philip Delora describes Culture: “Culture” originally meant the cultivation of the soul or mind, and most of its modern meanings were derived from the writings of 18th-century German thinkers, who developed critiques of “civilization and progress” at various levels. Thus, these authors often imply a contrast between “Culture” and “civilization,” even if they do not explicitly state it.
In the words of anthropologist Edward Tylor, Culture is “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morality, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Alternatively, in a contemporary formulation, “Culture is defined as a social domain that emphasizes practices, discourses, and material expressions which, over time, convey the continuity and discontinuity of the social meanings of shared life.”
The Encyclopædia Britannica notes that Culture is “the way of life of a particular group at a particular time, especially its customs and beliefs.” Anthropologist Clifford Geertz argues that Culture is a set of activities and worldviews that provides the foundation for humans to recognize themselves as “valuable beings in a world of meaning”—they elevate themselves beyond the mere physical level of existence to counter the insignificance and mortality of animals, which Homo sapiens became aware of after acquiring a larger brain.
The term broadly refers to the evolutionary capacity to classify and represent experience, as well as to engage in imaginative and creative behavior. This capacity emerged approximately 50,000 years ago with the evolution of modern human behavior and is generally considered unique to humans. However, some other species also exhibit similar, albeit simpler, social learning abilities. It is also used to refer to the complex networks of practices, accumulated knowledge, and ideas transmitted through socialization that exist within specific human groups or Cultures—which is why we use the plural form “Cultures.”
II. Cultural Change: Internal Evolution and External Influences
Anthropologist David Linden identifies 29 ways in which cultural change occurs, including growth, development, evolution, innovation, renewal, diffusion, reform, revolution, revivalism, assimilation, fusion, borrowing, eclecticism, nationalism, modernization, localization, and transformation. In this context, modernization can be viewed as the adoption of Enlightenment-era beliefs and practices, such as science, rationalism, industry, commerce, democracy, and the idea of progress. Building on the work of Richard Nelson, Sydney Winter, and Donald Campbell, Mark Fleury proposed a model of cultural change based on claims and bids, which are judged by adequacy and either endorsed or rejected by the symbolic authority of the relevant cultural community.
Innovation has come to refer to any novelty that is useful to a particular group and manifests itself in behavior, rather than existing as a physical object. Humanity is currently in a period of “accelerated cultural change” on a global scale, driven by various factors such as the expansion of international business, mass media, and, most importantly, the explosion of the internet. Cultural reset implies a reconstruction of sociocultural concepts.
Within a Culture, forces that encourage change coexist with those that resist it. These forces are related to both social structures and natural events, and they participate in perpetuating cultural ideas and practices within social systems, while the structures themselves are also subject to change.
Social conflict and technological development can bring about change in society by altering social dynamics, promoting new norms, and stimulating or facilitating generative actions. These social transformations may be accompanied by shifts in values and other types of cultural change. For example, the feminist movement involved new practices that brought about shifts in gender relations and altered gender and economic structures. Environmental conditions may also be a contributing factor. For instance, following the end of the last Ice Age, the return of tropical forests and the emergence of plants suitable for domestication facilitated the invention of agriCulture, which in turn led to numerous cultural innovations and shifts in social dynamics.
Culture is influenced by external factors through inter-societal contact, which may also generate or inhibit social transformation and changes in cultural practices. War or competition for resources may influence technological development or social dynamics. Furthermore, cultural concepts may transfer from one society to another through diffusion or cultural adaptation. In cultural diffusion, the form of something (though not necessarily its meaning) is transferred from one Culture to another. For example, as China opened its economy to international trade in the late 20th century, Western chain restaurants and Food brands sparked curiosity and fascination among the Chinese.
“Stimulus diffusion” (the sharing of ideas) refers to an element within one Culture that leads to its invention or transmission to another Culture. “Direct borrowing,” on the other hand, typically refers to technology or tangible cultural artifacts spreading from one Culture to another. Innovation diffusion Theory proposes a research-based model explaining why and when individuals and Cultures adopt new ideas, practices, and products.
Cultural assimilation has various meanings. However, in this context, it refers to the replacement of one cultural trait with another, as experienced by Native American tribes and many indigenous peoples. Related processes at the individual level include cultural adaptation and socialization. Transnational cultural mobility has played a significant role in blending different Cultures and sharing ideas, concepts, and beliefs.
III. Discourses on Modern Culture: From Romanticism to Anthropology
German Romanticism
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) proposed an individualistic definition of “Enlightenment” akin to the concept of “self-improvement”: “Enlightenment is the process by which man emerges from his self-imposed immaturity.” He believed that this immaturity stemmed not from a lack of understanding, but from a lack of the courage to think independently. In response to this intellectual cowardice, Kant advocated: “Sapere Aude” (“Dare to know!”).
In response to Kant, German scholars such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) argued that human creativity inevitably takes unpredictable and highly diverse forms, and is just as important as human reason. Furthermore, Herder proposed a form of collective growth: “For Herder, growth is the sum of experiences that provide a nation with a coherent identity and a sense of shared destiny.”
In 1795, the Prussian linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) called for the establishment of an anthropology that synthesized the interests of Kant and Herder. In the 19th century, German scholars—particularly those focused on nationalist movements, such as the struggle to unite multiple principalities into “Germany” and the nationalist struggles of ethnic minorities within the Austro-Hungarian Empire—developed a more inclusive view of Culture known as the “worldview” (Weltanschauung). According to this school of thought, each nation possesses a unique worldview that is incommunicable with those of other groups. Although this view of Culture was more inclusive than earlier perspectives, it still permitted a distinction between “civilized” Cultures and “primitive” or “tribal” Cultures.
In 1860, Adolf Bastian (1826–1905) advocated for the “psychological unity of mankind.” He proposed that a scientific comparison of all human societies would reveal that different worldviews are composed of the same basic elements. According to Bastian, all human societies share a set of “elementary ideas” (Elementargedanken); different Cultures or different “folk ideas” (Völkergedanken) are local variants of these elementary ideas. This view paved the way for modern cultural understanding. Franz Boas (1858–1942) was trained in this tradition and brought it to the New World when he left Germany for the United States.
British Romanticism
In the 19th century, intellectuals such as the British poet and essayist Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) used the term “Culture” to refer to the refined ideals of the individual human being—that is, “the best things in the world thought and expressed.” This concept of Culture is also akin to the German concept of Bildung: “... Culture is the pursuit of our complete self-improvement through an understanding of the things we care about most, as well as the finest thoughts and expressions in the world.”
In practice, Culture referred to the ideals of the elite, associated with activities such as the arts, classical music, and higher education. Because these forms were linked to urban life, “Culture” came to be identified with “civilization” (derived from the Latin civitas, meaning “city”). Another aspect of the Romantic movement was an interest in folk Culture, which led to the identification of a “folk Culture” among non-elite classes. This distinction is often described as the difference between high Culture (i.e., that of the elite) and popular Culture. In other words, the concept of “Culture” that developed in Europe from the 18th to the early 19th century reflected the inequalities within European society.
Matthew Arnold contrasted “Culture” with a state of anarchy; other Europeans, following the philosophers Hobbes and Rousseau, contrasted “Culture” with the “state of nature.” According to Hobbes and Rousseau, the indigenous peoples conquered by Europeans from the 16th century onward lived in a state of nature; this opposition was expressed through the contrast between “civilization” and “uncivilization.” Based on this way of thinking, certain nations and peoples could be classified as more civilized than others, and some individuals as more Cultured than others. This contrast gave rise to the theories of social Darwinism and cultural evolution.
Just as some critics argue that the distinction between high and low Culture reflects the conflict between European elites and non-elites, others contend that the distinction between civilized people and uncivilized peoples embodies the conflict between European colonial powers and their colonial subjects. Other 19th-century critics, following Rousseau, accepted the distinction between high and low Culture but viewed the refinement and urbanization of high Culture as a corrupt and unnatural development that obscured and distorted human nature. These critics believed that folk Culture—composed of “folk songs,” created by rural, illiterate peasants—honestly expressed a natural way of life, whereas classical music appeared superficial and decadent. Similarly, this perspective often portrayed indigenous peoples as “noble savages” living innocent and unblemished lives, untouched by the complexity and corruption of highly stratified cultural systems.
In 1870, anthropologist Edward Tylor (1832–1917) applied these ideas about higher and lower Cultures to propose a Theory of religious evolution. According to this Theory, religion evolves from polytheistic to monotheistic forms. In doing so, he redefined Culture as the diverse set of activities characteristic of all human societies. This perspective paved the way for modern understandings of religion.
IV. Cultural Studies from a Multidisciplinary Perspective
Anthropology
Although anthropologists worldwide cite Taylor’s definition of Culture, during the 20th century, “Culture” became the central and unifying concept in American anthropology, most often referring to the universal human capacity for symbolic classification and coding of human experience, as well as the experience of transmitting symbolic codes within society. American anthropology is divided into four fields, each of which plays a significant role in cultural studies: biological anthropology, archaeology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology in the United States and Canada.
The term “cultural glasses,” coined by the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas, refers to the “lens” through which people view their own Culture. Martin Lindstrom argues that Kulturbrille enables people to understand their own Culture but “makes us blind to things that outsiders can immediately perceive.”
Sociology
Cultural sociology focuses on the Culture manifested within society. For the sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918), Culture refers to “the external forms that have been objectified through the historical process and serve to shape the individual.” Therefore, Culture in the field of sociology can be defined as ways of thinking, ways of behaving, and the material objects that collectively shape a people’s way of life.
Culture can be divided into two types: intangible Culture and material Culture. Intangible Culture refers to individuals’ non-material conceptions of their Culture, including values, belief systems, rules, norms, ethics, language, organizations, and institutions, while material Culture is the physical evidence of Culture found in the objects and structures it has produced or constructed. The term is typically applied only to archaeological and anthropological research, but it specifically refers to all material evidence attributable to Culture, whether past or present.
Cultural sociology first emerged in Weimar Germany (1918–1933), when sociologists such as Alfred Weber used the term “cultural sociology” (Kultursoziologie, meaning “cultural sociology”). Cultural sociology was subsequently redefined in the English-speaking world as a product of the 1960s, a shift that brought about qualitative and hermeneutic approaches to the social sciences. This type of cultural sociology can broadly be viewed as a synthesis of the methods of Weber and Simmel.
Cultural sociologists tend to reject the scientific method, turning instead to an examination of language, artifacts, and symbols. Culture has since become a key concept in multiple branches of sociology, including firmly scientific fields such as network analysis and demography. Consequently, quantitative sociologists have flocked to the field in recent years. As a result, there is now a group of cultural sociologists who, confusingly, are not cultural sociologists. These scholars reject the abstract postmodern aspects of cultural sociology, seeking instead more scientific theoretical support from fields such as social network analysis and demography.
Early Researchers and the Development of Cultural Sociology: Cultural sociology originated at the intersection of sociology—shaped by early theorists such as Marx, Durkheim, and Weber—and the discipline of anthropology, where researchers pioneered ethnographic strategies for describing and analyzing diverse Cultures worldwide. The legacy of the field’s early development is reflected in part in its methods (cultural and sociological research is largely qualitative), its theories (various critical approaches within sociology form the core of the current research community), and its substantive concerns. For example, the relationship between the media, political control, and cultural production has been an early and enduring focus of the field.
Cultural Studies
In the United Kingdom, sociologists and scholars influenced by Raymond Williams, such as Richard Hoggart (1918–2014) and E.P. Thompson (1921–88), developed the field of cultural studies. Building on the legacy of nineteenth-century Romantics, they linked Culture to consumer goods and leisure activities (such as art, music, film, television, sports, and fashion). They believed that patterns of consumption and leisure were determined by class, and thus focused on class relations and the organization of production.
In the UK, cultural studies primarily focused on the study of popular Culture—that is, the social significance of mass-produced consumer and leisure goods. Richard Hoggart coined the term when he founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham in 1964. Thus, cultural studies can be viewed as a narrow focus on the complexities of consumerism, which is part of a broader Culture sometimes referred to as popular Culture.
Beginning in the 1970s, the pioneering work of Stuart Hall, together with his colleagues Williams, Hoggart, Tony Jefferson, and Vidić Bennett, gave rise to an international intellectual movement. As the field developed, it began to integrate anthropology, sociology, political science, gender studies, race studies, literature, media studies, and communication studies to examine cultural phenomena or cultural texts. Within the field, researchers typically focus on how specific phenomena relate to ideology, nationality, class, or gender.
Cultural studies examines the customs and practices of everyday life. These customs include the ways in which people do specific things within a particular Culture (such as watching television or dining out). It also studies the meanings of various objects and practices, employing ethnographic methods. Specifically, Culture involves meanings and practices that exist independently of reason. Watching television to gain a public perspective on historical events should not be considered cultural unless it involves the television itself, as the medium of television may be a cultural choice; however, students who “hang out” watching television with friends after school fully qualify, as there is no rational justification for engaging in this behavior.
In the context of cultural studies, texts include not only literary texts but also films, television programs, advertisements, or fashion: cultural studies texts encompass all meaningful cultural products. Similarly, the discipline has broadened the concept of Culture. For cultural studies scholars, Culture encompasses not only traditional high Culture (the Culture of the ruling social groups) and popular Culture, but also everyday meanings and customs. In fact, the latter two have become the primary focus of cultural studies. A more advanced and recent approach is comparative cultural studies, which draws upon both anthropology and the discipline of cultural studies.
Scholars in the United Kingdom and the United States developed different versions of cultural studies after the 1970s. The British version of cultural studies originated in the 1950s and 1960s, primarily influenced by Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and E.P. Thompson, and later by figures such as Stuart Hall at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. This included overtly political, left-wing perspectives, as well as critiques of capitalism, which it termed “cultural capitalism”; It incorporated ideas from the critique of “mass Culture.” This is evident in the works of early British cultural studies scholars and their influence: see the work of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, and Angela McRobbie.
Lindlöv and Taylor write that in the United States, “cultural studies is rooted in a pragmatic, liberal, pluralist tradition.” The American version of cultural studies initially focused more on understanding the subjective and appropriative aspects of audiences’ responses to and use of the media; for example, American cultural studies advocates have written about the emancipatory aspects of fandom.
Some researchers, particularly in the early British cultural studies field, applied Marxist models to the discipline. This approach was influenced by Louis Althusser, and specifically by the Marxism of figures such as Lucien Goldmann. The orthodox Marxist approach focuses primarily on the model of meaning, which assumes the mass production of Culture and locates ideological power in the producers.
From a Marxist perspective, production and consumption constitute the economic foundation of society, and society constantly interacts with and influences Culture, among other things. Other approaches to cultural studies, such as those in the UK and later developments in the United States, have distanced themselves from this view. They criticize Marxism’s assumption that any cultural product possesses a single, dominant meaning. Non-Marxist approaches argue that the ways in which different cultural products are consumed influence the meanings attributed to them.
This perspective is exemplified in the book *Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman* by Paul du Gay and others, which seeks to challenge the notion that those who produce commodities control the meanings people ascribe to them. Feminist cultural analysts, queer theorists, and art historians have contributed to cultural studies from the perspectives of gender and sexual orientation. Writer Laura Mulvey, one of the influential voices of the turn of the century, contributed to cultural studies from the fields of art and French psychoanalytic feminism.
Petrakis and Kostis (2013) categorize cultural context variables into two main groups:
The first group encompasses variables representing a society’s “efficiency orientation”: performance orientation, altruism, self-confidence, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance.
The second category encompasses variables representing a society’s “social orientation,” namely the attitudes and lifestyles of its members. These variables include gender egalitarianism, institutional collectivism, in-group collectivism, and human orientation.
In 2016, Witold Jankowski proposed a new approach to Culture, defining it as the sum of resources available to humans for understanding the world. He introduced a two-tiered methodology that combines the study of texts (all concrete meanings in circulation) with cultural practices (all repeatable behaviors involving production, dissemination, or transmission), thereby enabling anthropological and sociological studies of Culture to reconnect with the tradition of textual Theory.
Psychology
Since the 1990s, psychological research on the influence of Culture has grown, challenging widely held assumptions in psychology. Cultural psychologists have begun to explore the relationship between Culture and the mind, and to address the question of whether the human mind exists independently of Culture. For example, people from collectivist Cultures, such as the Japanese, suppress positive emotions more than Americans do. Culture may influence how people experience and express emotions. On the other hand, some researchers seek to identify cross-cultural differences in personality. Since different Cultures prescribe unique rules for emotional expression, Culture is also studied to understand how people react when encountering other Cultures.
The degree of individualism varies significantly across Cultures and countries. Cognitive tools may not be accessible or may function differently across Cultures. For example, people raised in a particular Culture are trained in unique ways of reasoning. Cultural perspectives may also lead people to view the outcomes of the same event differently. Westerners are more motivated by success than by failure, whereas East Asians are more motivated by the avoidance of failure.
Culture is crucial for psychologists in understanding human psychological processes. The notion of adolescents as anxious, unstable, and rebellious has been criticized by experts, who argue, for instance, that an underdeveloped brain is not the primary cause of adolescent turbulence. Some critics challenge this understanding of adolescence, arguing that it is a relatively recent phenomenon in human history created by modern society, and they strongly criticize what they perceive as the phenomenon of young adults in American society. According to Robert Epstein and Jennifer Roberts, “American-style adolescent turmoil does not exist in over 100 Cultures worldwide, suggesting that this turmoil is not biologically inevitable. Furthermore, the brain itself changes with experience, raising the question: Are the characteristics of the adolescent brain the cause of adolescent turmoil, or are they the result of lifestyle and experience?” David Moschman has also stated that, regarding adolescence, brain research “is crucial to a comprehensive understanding, but it cannot provide the final explanation.”
V. Cultural Preservation: Safeguarding Our Cultural Heritage
There are numerous international agreements and national laws concerning the protection of Culture and cultural heritage. UNESCO and its partner organizations, such as Blue Shield International, coordinate international conservation efforts and local implementation. The Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage and the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage address cultural preservation. Article 27 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights addresses cultural heritage in two ways: on the one hand, it grants people the right to participate in cultural life, and on the other, it grants the right to protect their contributions to cultural life.
Entering the 21st century, cultural preservation has become a growing priority for organizations both domestically and internationally. The United Nations and UNESCO promote cultural preservation and cultural diversity through declarations and legally binding conventions or treaties. The goal is not to protect private property, but to safeguard humanity’s cultural heritage, particularly during times of war and armed conflict. According to the President of Blue Shield International, the destruction of cultural assets is also part of psychological warfare. The target of such attacks is the adversary’s identity, which is why symbolic cultural assets become primary targets. It also aims to impact particularly sensitive cultural memories, growing cultural diversity, and the economic foundations of states, regions, or municipalities (such as tourism).
Tourism is having an increasingly significant impact on various forms of Culture. On the one hand, this may involve physical damage to individual objects or destruction caused by increased environmental pollution; on the other hand, it involves the impact of sociocultural changes on society.
Humans acquire Culture through the process of socialization, a process that also gives rise to cultural diversity within society. Cultural norms define the boundaries of acceptable behavior in society; they provide guiding principles for behavior, dress, language, and attitudes in specific contexts, serving as shared behavioral templates for social groups. Accepting only a single sociocultural framework carries risks, much like how a single species may wither in the face of environmental change due to a lack of adaptive responses. Therefore, in military Culture, aggression is viewed as typical individual behavior, while responsibility, honor, and loyalty to the social group are regarded as virtues or adaptive responses. Similar attributes can also be identified in religious Cultures.
Cultural reset, or reorientation, refers to the reconstruction of sociocultural concepts. Within a Culture, forces that encourage change coexist with those that resist it. Simultaneously, Culture is influenced by external factors through social interactions. International organizations such as UNESCO have long been committed to protecting global cultural diversity.
Culture is regarded as a core concept in anthropology, encompassing various phenomena transmitted through society within human communities. Cultural elements exist in all human societies, including tools, clothing, rituals, architecture, art, and technology. The concept of material Culture encompasses the physical manifestations of Culture, such as technology, architecture, and art, while the intangible aspects of Culture—such as ethical principles (including religious and moral practices), language, knowledge, beliefs (including myths and philosophy), and customs—constitute intangible Culture.
In sociology, Culture is defined as an individual attribute representing a certain level of sophistication cultivated in areas such as art, science, education, or etiquette. Cultural complexity is sometimes used to distinguish complex societies from less complex ones. This view of Culture is also reflected in the distinction between high and low Culture, such as the refined Culture of the upper classes and the popular Culture of the lower classes, the latter being characterized by hierarchical channels of cultural transmission. In everyday language, Culture typically refers specifically to the symbolic markers that groups use to distinguish themselves from one another, such as high art or popular Culture. Popular Culture refers to the forms of mass production and mass media consumption that emerged in the 20th century.
Some philosophical schools, such as Marxism and critical Theory, argue that Culture is often used by elites as a political tool to manipulate classes and create false consciousness. This perspective is common in the field of cultural studies. Within the broader Marxist tradition, the historical materialist perspective holds that human symbolic Culture stems from the material conditions of human life, with Culture grounded in economic production.
When used as a sociological concept, “Culture” refers to the customs, beliefs, and values of a society or community (such as a nation or ethnic group), as well as the collective knowledge accumulated over time. In this sense, multiculturalism emphasizes the peaceful coexistence and mutual respect of different Cultures on the same planet. Sometimes the term “Culture” is also used to describe specific practices within a social subgroup, a subCulture (such as “punk Culture”), or an organizational Culture. In cultural relativism, an anthropological ideology and analytical stance holds that Cultures cannot be objectively ranked or evaluated, as any evaluation is necessarily situated within the value system of a particular Culture.
I. Etymology: The Evolution from AgriCulture to Civilization
The modern term “Culture” derives from a term used by the ancient Roman orator Cicero in his *Tusculan Disputations*, in which he wrote of the cultivation of the soul or “cultivating the soul,” employing an agricultural metaphor to describe the development of the philosophical soul—which was understood at the time as the highest ideal of human development. In the modern context, people have adopted this metaphor to signify something similar, but no longer assume that philosophy is humanity’s natural perfection. This usage, along with that of many writers, “refers to all the ways in which humans overcome their primitive nature and become fully human through artificial means.”Writer Wendy Brown writes: “In Middle English, the word ‘Culture’ meant ‘cultivated land’; the same word derives from the Latin colere, meaning ‘to inhabit, care for, cultivate, worship,’ and from cultus, ‘a form of worship, especially religious worship.’ To possess a Culture is to inhabit a place deeply enough to cultivate it—to take responsibility for it, respond to it, and attend to it with care.”
Historian Philip Delora describes Culture: “Culture” originally meant the cultivation of the soul or mind, and most of its modern meanings were derived from the writings of 18th-century German thinkers, who developed critiques of “civilization and progress” at various levels. Thus, these authors often imply a contrast between “Culture” and “civilization,” even if they do not explicitly state it.
In the words of anthropologist Edward Tylor, Culture is “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morality, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Alternatively, in a contemporary formulation, “Culture is defined as a social domain that emphasizes practices, discourses, and material expressions which, over time, convey the continuity and discontinuity of the social meanings of shared life.”
The Encyclopædia Britannica notes that Culture is “the way of life of a particular group at a particular time, especially its customs and beliefs.” Anthropologist Clifford Geertz argues that Culture is a set of activities and worldviews that provides the foundation for humans to recognize themselves as “valuable beings in a world of meaning”—they elevate themselves beyond the mere physical level of existence to counter the insignificance and mortality of animals, which Homo sapiens became aware of after acquiring a larger brain.
The term broadly refers to the evolutionary capacity to classify and represent experience, as well as to engage in imaginative and creative behavior. This capacity emerged approximately 50,000 years ago with the evolution of modern human behavior and is generally considered unique to humans. However, some other species also exhibit similar, albeit simpler, social learning abilities. It is also used to refer to the complex networks of practices, accumulated knowledge, and ideas transmitted through socialization that exist within specific human groups or Cultures—which is why we use the plural form “Cultures.”
II. Cultural Change: Internal Evolution and External Influences
Anthropologist David Linden identifies 29 ways in which cultural change occurs, including growth, development, evolution, innovation, renewal, diffusion, reform, revolution, revivalism, assimilation, fusion, borrowing, eclecticism, nationalism, modernization, localization, and transformation. In this context, modernization can be viewed as the adoption of Enlightenment-era beliefs and practices, such as science, rationalism, industry, commerce, democracy, and the idea of progress. Building on the work of Richard Nelson, Sydney Winter, and Donald Campbell, Mark Fleury proposed a model of cultural change based on claims and bids, which are judged by adequacy and either endorsed or rejected by the symbolic authority of the relevant cultural community.
Innovation has come to refer to any novelty that is useful to a particular group and manifests itself in behavior, rather than existing as a physical object. Humanity is currently in a period of “accelerated cultural change” on a global scale, driven by various factors such as the expansion of international business, mass media, and, most importantly, the explosion of the internet. Cultural reset implies a reconstruction of sociocultural concepts.
Within a Culture, forces that encourage change coexist with those that resist it. These forces are related to both social structures and natural events, and they participate in perpetuating cultural ideas and practices within social systems, while the structures themselves are also subject to change.
Social conflict and technological development can bring about change in society by altering social dynamics, promoting new norms, and stimulating or facilitating generative actions. These social transformations may be accompanied by shifts in values and other types of cultural change. For example, the feminist movement involved new practices that brought about shifts in gender relations and altered gender and economic structures. Environmental conditions may also be a contributing factor. For instance, following the end of the last Ice Age, the return of tropical forests and the emergence of plants suitable for domestication facilitated the invention of agriCulture, which in turn led to numerous cultural innovations and shifts in social dynamics.
Culture is influenced by external factors through inter-societal contact, which may also generate or inhibit social transformation and changes in cultural practices. War or competition for resources may influence technological development or social dynamics. Furthermore, cultural concepts may transfer from one society to another through diffusion or cultural adaptation. In cultural diffusion, the form of something (though not necessarily its meaning) is transferred from one Culture to another. For example, as China opened its economy to international trade in the late 20th century, Western chain restaurants and Food brands sparked curiosity and fascination among the Chinese.
“Stimulus diffusion” (the sharing of ideas) refers to an element within one Culture that leads to its invention or transmission to another Culture. “Direct borrowing,” on the other hand, typically refers to technology or tangible cultural artifacts spreading from one Culture to another. Innovation diffusion Theory proposes a research-based model explaining why and when individuals and Cultures adopt new ideas, practices, and products.
Cultural assimilation has various meanings. However, in this context, it refers to the replacement of one cultural trait with another, as experienced by Native American tribes and many indigenous peoples. Related processes at the individual level include cultural adaptation and socialization. Transnational cultural mobility has played a significant role in blending different Cultures and sharing ideas, concepts, and beliefs.
German Romanticism
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) proposed an individualistic definition of “Enlightenment” akin to the concept of “self-improvement”: “Enlightenment is the process by which man emerges from his self-imposed immaturity.” He believed that this immaturity stemmed not from a lack of understanding, but from a lack of the courage to think independently. In response to this intellectual cowardice, Kant advocated: “Sapere Aude” (“Dare to know!”).
In response to Kant, German scholars such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) argued that human creativity inevitably takes unpredictable and highly diverse forms, and is just as important as human reason. Furthermore, Herder proposed a form of collective growth: “For Herder, growth is the sum of experiences that provide a nation with a coherent identity and a sense of shared destiny.”
In 1795, the Prussian linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) called for the establishment of an anthropology that synthesized the interests of Kant and Herder. In the 19th century, German scholars—particularly those focused on nationalist movements, such as the struggle to unite multiple principalities into “Germany” and the nationalist struggles of ethnic minorities within the Austro-Hungarian Empire—developed a more inclusive view of Culture known as the “worldview” (Weltanschauung). According to this school of thought, each nation possesses a unique worldview that is incommunicable with those of other groups. Although this view of Culture was more inclusive than earlier perspectives, it still permitted a distinction between “civilized” Cultures and “primitive” or “tribal” Cultures.
In 1860, Adolf Bastian (1826–1905) advocated for the “psychological unity of mankind.” He proposed that a scientific comparison of all human societies would reveal that different worldviews are composed of the same basic elements. According to Bastian, all human societies share a set of “elementary ideas” (Elementargedanken); different Cultures or different “folk ideas” (Völkergedanken) are local variants of these elementary ideas. This view paved the way for modern cultural understanding. Franz Boas (1858–1942) was trained in this tradition and brought it to the New World when he left Germany for the United States.
British Romanticism
In the 19th century, intellectuals such as the British poet and essayist Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) used the term “Culture” to refer to the refined ideals of the individual human being—that is, “the best things in the world thought and expressed.” This concept of Culture is also akin to the German concept of Bildung: “... Culture is the pursuit of our complete self-improvement through an understanding of the things we care about most, as well as the finest thoughts and expressions in the world.”
In practice, Culture referred to the ideals of the elite, associated with activities such as the arts, classical music, and higher education. Because these forms were linked to urban life, “Culture” came to be identified with “civilization” (derived from the Latin civitas, meaning “city”). Another aspect of the Romantic movement was an interest in folk Culture, which led to the identification of a “folk Culture” among non-elite classes. This distinction is often described as the difference between high Culture (i.e., that of the elite) and popular Culture. In other words, the concept of “Culture” that developed in Europe from the 18th to the early 19th century reflected the inequalities within European society.
Matthew Arnold contrasted “Culture” with a state of anarchy; other Europeans, following the philosophers Hobbes and Rousseau, contrasted “Culture” with the “state of nature.” According to Hobbes and Rousseau, the indigenous peoples conquered by Europeans from the 16th century onward lived in a state of nature; this opposition was expressed through the contrast between “civilization” and “uncivilization.” Based on this way of thinking, certain nations and peoples could be classified as more civilized than others, and some individuals as more Cultured than others. This contrast gave rise to the theories of social Darwinism and cultural evolution.
Just as some critics argue that the distinction between high and low Culture reflects the conflict between European elites and non-elites, others contend that the distinction between civilized people and uncivilized peoples embodies the conflict between European colonial powers and their colonial subjects. Other 19th-century critics, following Rousseau, accepted the distinction between high and low Culture but viewed the refinement and urbanization of high Culture as a corrupt and unnatural development that obscured and distorted human nature. These critics believed that folk Culture—composed of “folk songs,” created by rural, illiterate peasants—honestly expressed a natural way of life, whereas classical music appeared superficial and decadent. Similarly, this perspective often portrayed indigenous peoples as “noble savages” living innocent and unblemished lives, untouched by the complexity and corruption of highly stratified cultural systems.
In 1870, anthropologist Edward Tylor (1832–1917) applied these ideas about higher and lower Cultures to propose a Theory of religious evolution. According to this Theory, religion evolves from polytheistic to monotheistic forms. In doing so, he redefined Culture as the diverse set of activities characteristic of all human societies. This perspective paved the way for modern understandings of religion.
Anthropology
Although anthropologists worldwide cite Taylor’s definition of Culture, during the 20th century, “Culture” became the central and unifying concept in American anthropology, most often referring to the universal human capacity for symbolic classification and coding of human experience, as well as the experience of transmitting symbolic codes within society. American anthropology is divided into four fields, each of which plays a significant role in cultural studies: biological anthropology, archaeology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology in the United States and Canada.
The term “cultural glasses,” coined by the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas, refers to the “lens” through which people view their own Culture. Martin Lindstrom argues that Kulturbrille enables people to understand their own Culture but “makes us blind to things that outsiders can immediately perceive.”
Sociology
Cultural sociology focuses on the Culture manifested within society. For the sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918), Culture refers to “the external forms that have been objectified through the historical process and serve to shape the individual.” Therefore, Culture in the field of sociology can be defined as ways of thinking, ways of behaving, and the material objects that collectively shape a people’s way of life.
Culture can be divided into two types: intangible Culture and material Culture. Intangible Culture refers to individuals’ non-material conceptions of their Culture, including values, belief systems, rules, norms, ethics, language, organizations, and institutions, while material Culture is the physical evidence of Culture found in the objects and structures it has produced or constructed. The term is typically applied only to archaeological and anthropological research, but it specifically refers to all material evidence attributable to Culture, whether past or present.
Cultural sociology first emerged in Weimar Germany (1918–1933), when sociologists such as Alfred Weber used the term “cultural sociology” (Kultursoziologie, meaning “cultural sociology”). Cultural sociology was subsequently redefined in the English-speaking world as a product of the 1960s, a shift that brought about qualitative and hermeneutic approaches to the social sciences. This type of cultural sociology can broadly be viewed as a synthesis of the methods of Weber and Simmel.
Cultural sociologists tend to reject the scientific method, turning instead to an examination of language, artifacts, and symbols. Culture has since become a key concept in multiple branches of sociology, including firmly scientific fields such as network analysis and demography. Consequently, quantitative sociologists have flocked to the field in recent years. As a result, there is now a group of cultural sociologists who, confusingly, are not cultural sociologists. These scholars reject the abstract postmodern aspects of cultural sociology, seeking instead more scientific theoretical support from fields such as social network analysis and demography.
Early Researchers and the Development of Cultural Sociology: Cultural sociology originated at the intersection of sociology—shaped by early theorists such as Marx, Durkheim, and Weber—and the discipline of anthropology, where researchers pioneered ethnographic strategies for describing and analyzing diverse Cultures worldwide. The legacy of the field’s early development is reflected in part in its methods (cultural and sociological research is largely qualitative), its theories (various critical approaches within sociology form the core of the current research community), and its substantive concerns. For example, the relationship between the media, political control, and cultural production has been an early and enduring focus of the field.
Cultural Studies
In the United Kingdom, sociologists and scholars influenced by Raymond Williams, such as Richard Hoggart (1918–2014) and E.P. Thompson (1921–88), developed the field of cultural studies. Building on the legacy of nineteenth-century Romantics, they linked Culture to consumer goods and leisure activities (such as art, music, film, television, sports, and fashion). They believed that patterns of consumption and leisure were determined by class, and thus focused on class relations and the organization of production.
In the UK, cultural studies primarily focused on the study of popular Culture—that is, the social significance of mass-produced consumer and leisure goods. Richard Hoggart coined the term when he founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham in 1964. Thus, cultural studies can be viewed as a narrow focus on the complexities of consumerism, which is part of a broader Culture sometimes referred to as popular Culture.
Beginning in the 1970s, the pioneering work of Stuart Hall, together with his colleagues Williams, Hoggart, Tony Jefferson, and Vidić Bennett, gave rise to an international intellectual movement. As the field developed, it began to integrate anthropology, sociology, political science, gender studies, race studies, literature, media studies, and communication studies to examine cultural phenomena or cultural texts. Within the field, researchers typically focus on how specific phenomena relate to ideology, nationality, class, or gender.
Cultural studies examines the customs and practices of everyday life. These customs include the ways in which people do specific things within a particular Culture (such as watching television or dining out). It also studies the meanings of various objects and practices, employing ethnographic methods. Specifically, Culture involves meanings and practices that exist independently of reason. Watching television to gain a public perspective on historical events should not be considered cultural unless it involves the television itself, as the medium of television may be a cultural choice; however, students who “hang out” watching television with friends after school fully qualify, as there is no rational justification for engaging in this behavior.
In the context of cultural studies, texts include not only literary texts but also films, television programs, advertisements, or fashion: cultural studies texts encompass all meaningful cultural products. Similarly, the discipline has broadened the concept of Culture. For cultural studies scholars, Culture encompasses not only traditional high Culture (the Culture of the ruling social groups) and popular Culture, but also everyday meanings and customs. In fact, the latter two have become the primary focus of cultural studies. A more advanced and recent approach is comparative cultural studies, which draws upon both anthropology and the discipline of cultural studies.
Scholars in the United Kingdom and the United States developed different versions of cultural studies after the 1970s. The British version of cultural studies originated in the 1950s and 1960s, primarily influenced by Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and E.P. Thompson, and later by figures such as Stuart Hall at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. This included overtly political, left-wing perspectives, as well as critiques of capitalism, which it termed “cultural capitalism”; It incorporated ideas from the critique of “mass Culture.” This is evident in the works of early British cultural studies scholars and their influence: see the work of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, and Angela McRobbie.
Lindlöv and Taylor write that in the United States, “cultural studies is rooted in a pragmatic, liberal, pluralist tradition.” The American version of cultural studies initially focused more on understanding the subjective and appropriative aspects of audiences’ responses to and use of the media; for example, American cultural studies advocates have written about the emancipatory aspects of fandom.
Some researchers, particularly in the early British cultural studies field, applied Marxist models to the discipline. This approach was influenced by Louis Althusser, and specifically by the Marxism of figures such as Lucien Goldmann. The orthodox Marxist approach focuses primarily on the model of meaning, which assumes the mass production of Culture and locates ideological power in the producers.
From a Marxist perspective, production and consumption constitute the economic foundation of society, and society constantly interacts with and influences Culture, among other things. Other approaches to cultural studies, such as those in the UK and later developments in the United States, have distanced themselves from this view. They criticize Marxism’s assumption that any cultural product possesses a single, dominant meaning. Non-Marxist approaches argue that the ways in which different cultural products are consumed influence the meanings attributed to them.
This perspective is exemplified in the book *Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman* by Paul du Gay and others, which seeks to challenge the notion that those who produce commodities control the meanings people ascribe to them. Feminist cultural analysts, queer theorists, and art historians have contributed to cultural studies from the perspectives of gender and sexual orientation. Writer Laura Mulvey, one of the influential voices of the turn of the century, contributed to cultural studies from the fields of art and French psychoanalytic feminism.
Petrakis and Kostis (2013) categorize cultural context variables into two main groups:
The first group encompasses variables representing a society’s “efficiency orientation”: performance orientation, altruism, self-confidence, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance.
The second category encompasses variables representing a society’s “social orientation,” namely the attitudes and lifestyles of its members. These variables include gender egalitarianism, institutional collectivism, in-group collectivism, and human orientation.
In 2016, Witold Jankowski proposed a new approach to Culture, defining it as the sum of resources available to humans for understanding the world. He introduced a two-tiered methodology that combines the study of texts (all concrete meanings in circulation) with cultural practices (all repeatable behaviors involving production, dissemination, or transmission), thereby enabling anthropological and sociological studies of Culture to reconnect with the tradition of textual Theory.
Psychology
Since the 1990s, psychological research on the influence of Culture has grown, challenging widely held assumptions in psychology. Cultural psychologists have begun to explore the relationship between Culture and the mind, and to address the question of whether the human mind exists independently of Culture. For example, people from collectivist Cultures, such as the Japanese, suppress positive emotions more than Americans do. Culture may influence how people experience and express emotions. On the other hand, some researchers seek to identify cross-cultural differences in personality. Since different Cultures prescribe unique rules for emotional expression, Culture is also studied to understand how people react when encountering other Cultures.
The degree of individualism varies significantly across Cultures and countries. Cognitive tools may not be accessible or may function differently across Cultures. For example, people raised in a particular Culture are trained in unique ways of reasoning. Cultural perspectives may also lead people to view the outcomes of the same event differently. Westerners are more motivated by success than by failure, whereas East Asians are more motivated by the avoidance of failure.
Culture is crucial for psychologists in understanding human psychological processes. The notion of adolescents as anxious, unstable, and rebellious has been criticized by experts, who argue, for instance, that an underdeveloped brain is not the primary cause of adolescent turbulence. Some critics challenge this understanding of adolescence, arguing that it is a relatively recent phenomenon in human history created by modern society, and they strongly criticize what they perceive as the phenomenon of young adults in American society. According to Robert Epstein and Jennifer Roberts, “American-style adolescent turmoil does not exist in over 100 Cultures worldwide, suggesting that this turmoil is not biologically inevitable. Furthermore, the brain itself changes with experience, raising the question: Are the characteristics of the adolescent brain the cause of adolescent turmoil, or are they the result of lifestyle and experience?” David Moschman has also stated that, regarding adolescence, brain research “is crucial to a comprehensive understanding, but it cannot provide the final explanation.”
There are numerous international agreements and national laws concerning the protection of Culture and cultural heritage. UNESCO and its partner organizations, such as Blue Shield International, coordinate international conservation efforts and local implementation. The Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage and the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage address cultural preservation. Article 27 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights addresses cultural heritage in two ways: on the one hand, it grants people the right to participate in cultural life, and on the other, it grants the right to protect their contributions to cultural life.
Entering the 21st century, cultural preservation has become a growing priority for organizations both domestically and internationally. The United Nations and UNESCO promote cultural preservation and cultural diversity through declarations and legally binding conventions or treaties. The goal is not to protect private property, but to safeguard humanity’s cultural heritage, particularly during times of war and armed conflict. According to the President of Blue Shield International, the destruction of cultural assets is also part of psychological warfare. The target of such attacks is the adversary’s identity, which is why symbolic cultural assets become primary targets. It also aims to impact particularly sensitive cultural memories, growing cultural diversity, and the economic foundations of states, regions, or municipalities (such as tourism).
Tourism is having an increasingly significant impact on various forms of Culture. On the one hand, this may involve physical damage to individual objects or destruction caused by increased environmental pollution; on the other hand, it involves the impact of sociocultural changes on society.
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