Culture and Civilization

 Culture and civilization -concepts
 

Here are ten influential definitions of culture from various sources:

 Tylor, E. B. (1871). Primitive Culture. London: John Murray.

"Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." 

Williams, R. (1983). Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. London: Fontana Press.

"Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language." 

Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

"Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun; I take culture to be those webs." 

Kroeber, A. L., & Kluckhohn, C. (1952). Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum.

"Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts." 

Boas, F. (1940). Race, Language, and Culture. New York: Macmillan.

"Culture embraces all the manifestations of social habits of a community, the reactions of the individual as affected by the habits of the group in which he lives, and the product of human activities as determined by these habits." 

Herskovits, M. J. (1948). Man and his Works: The Science of Cultural Anthropology. New York: A.A. Knopf.

"Culture is the man-made part of the environment." 

Linton, R. (1945). The Cultural Background of Personality. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

"The culture of a society is the way of life of its members; the collection of ideas and habits which they learn, share, and transmit from generation to generation." 

White, L. A. (1959). The Concept of Culture. American Anthropologist, 61(2), 227-251.

"Culture is an organization of phenomena which includes tools, implements, utensils, customs, codes, institutions, ideas, and works of art, as well as the modes of behavior characteristic of a given human society." 

Malinowski, B. (1944). A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

"Culture is the integral whole of all socially conditioned and socially generated phenomena."

 

Hofstede, G. (1997). Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. New York: McGraw-Hill.

"Culture is the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from others." 

The difference between culture and civilization is that culture refers to the shared beliefs, values, norms, customs, and practices that define a particular society. In contrast, civilization refers to a more advanced stage of human social development characterized by complex social, political, and economic systems and the growth of cities, arts, and sciences.

Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) was a British historian who proposed a history theory in his work "A Study of History." He identified 21 significant civilizations throughout history and believed civilizations pass through genesis, growth, breakdown, and disintegration

Toynbee argued that the rise and fall of civilizations could be attributed to their ability to respond creatively to challenges posed by their environment, other societies, or internal factors.

Bernard Lewis (1916-2018) was a British-American historian specializing in Oriental studies and Islamic history. His work on the relationship between Western and Islamic civilizations highlighted the historical, cultural, and religious differences that have shaped their interactions. Lewis argued that the decline of Islamic civilization was due to internal factors, such as the failure to modernize and adapt to new challenges, rather than external pressures from the West.

 

Francis Fukuyama (born 1952) is an American political scientist and economist best known for his book "The End of History and the Last Man." Fukuyama argued that the spread of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism signaled the endpoint of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. This perspective has been criticized for its Western-centric and deterministic outlook.

Samuel Huntington (1927-2008) was an American political scientist best known for his book "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order." Huntington argued that future conflicts would primarily occur between different civilizations rather than between nation-states. 

Mariano Bernardez analyzes and discusses several culture and civilization models in the following paper -from Toynbee, Huntington, and Fukuyama to Trompenaars and Hofstede. He uses these two last models to compare multiple countries, US states, and US subcultures in a more in-depth paper:

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