Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The modern term "culture" is based on a term used by the ancient Roman orator Cicero in his Tusculanae Disputationes, where he wrote of a cultivation of the soul or "cultura animi", [6] using an agricultural metaphor for the development of a philosophical soul, understood teleologically as the highest possible ideal for human development.
Ethnolinguistics (sometimes called cultural linguistics) is an area of anthropological linguistics that studies the relationship between a language or group of languages and the cultural behavior of the people who speak those languages.
As such, the term may cover both deliberate and informal enculturation. [1] The process of learning and absorbing culture need not be social, direct or conscious. Cultural transmission can occur in various forms, though the most common social methods include observing other individuals, being taught or being instructed. Less obvious mechanisms ...
[6] The term "civilization" later gave way to definitions given by V. Gordon Childe, with culture forming an umbrella term and civilization becoming a particular kind of culture. [7] According to Kay Milton, former director of anthropology research at Queens University Belfast, culture can be general or specific.
Mead contributed to the idea of cultural determinism, [10] which is the idea that culture shapes the way one thinks and behaves. Benedict contributed to the theory of cultural relativism by writing "Patterns of Culture" which elaborated on the idea that each culture is unique and can be fully understood if one studies a culture as a whole.
Ethnology (from the Ancient Greek: ἔθνος, ethnos meaning 'nation') [1] is an academic field and discipline that compares and analyzes the characteristics of different peoples and the relationships between them (compare cultural, social, or sociocultural anthropology).
In general, culture refers to human activity; different definitions of culture reflect different theories for understanding, or criteria for valuing human activity. Present-day anthropologists use the term to refer to the universal human capacity to classify experiences and to encode and communicate them symbolically. They regard this capacity ...
Sporadic use of the term for some of the subject matter occurred subsequently, such as the use by Étienne Serres in 1839 to describe the natural history, or paleontology, of man, based on comparative anatomy, and the creation of a chair in anthropology and ethnography in 1850 at the French National Museum of Natural History by Jean Louis ...