Culture`s dimensions

Culture is a definition highly misunderstood and misused, thus the need for an explanation:

Culture refers to the following Ways of Life, including but not limited to:

• Language : the oldest human institution and the most sophisticated medium of expression.
 
• Arts & Sciences : the most advanced and refined forms of human expression.
 
• Thought : the ways in which people perceive, interpret, and understand the world around them.
 
• Spirituality : the value system transmitted through generations for the inner well-being of human beings, expressed through language and actions.
 
• Social activity : the shared pursuits within a cultural community, demonstrated in a variety of festivities and life-celebrating events.
 
• Interaction : the social aspects of human contact, including the give-and-take of socialization, negotiation, protocol, and conventions.

All of the above collectively define the meaning of Culture.

Eastern Culture

Some aspects of the Eastern Culture

The western Culture and some reasons why it is the best

History of Culture

Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate") is a term that has various meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. 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: (1) the evolved human capacity to classify and represent experiences with symbols, and to act imaginatively and creatively; and (2) the distinct ways that people living in different parts of the world classified and represented their experiences, and acted creatively. Following World War II, the term became important, albeit with different meanings, in other disciplines such as cultural studies, organizational psychology and management studies.