Culture

Culture (Culture from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate,") generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activity significance. Different definitions of "culture" reflect different theoretical bases for understanding, or criteria for evaluating, human activity. In general, the term culture denotes the whole product of an individual, group or society of intelligent beings. It includes technology, art, science, as well as moral systems and the characteristic behaviors and habits of the selected intelligent entities. In particular, it has specific more detailed meanings in different domains of human activities.

Anthropologists most commonly use the term "culture" to refer to the universal human capacity to classify, codify and communicate their experiences symbolically. This capacity has long been taken as a defining feature of the humans. However, primatologists have identified aspects of culture among humankind's closest relatives in the animal kingdom. It can be also said that culture is the way people live in accordance to beliefs, language, history, or the way they dress.

People are categorized by themselves and by others along a variety of dimensions: according to race primarily by skin colour and other physical characteristics; according to social class by the amount of money they earn and where they live and work; and according to ethnicity by their national origin or ancestry, and their own feelings of group membership.