Culture

Culture from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate," usually refers to patterns of human activity and the representative structures that give such activity significant importance. Different definitions of "culture" reflect different theoretical bases for understanding, or criteria for estimate, human activity.

Culture is manifest in music, literature, painting and statue, theater and film. Although some people differentiate culture in terms of consumption and consumer goods as in high culture, low culture, folk culture, or popular culture, anthropologists understand "culture" to refer not only to consumption goods, but to the general processes which produce such goods and give them meaning, and to the social relationships and practices in which such objects and processes become embedded. For them, cultures thus include technology, art, knowledge, as well as moral systems.