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Analysis Of Meanings And Concepts Of Culture Essay

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The analysis of meanings and concepts of culture

The objective of this essay is to present and analyse the main definitions of the word culture through different social and historical processes, starting from the ancient times to the most modern times.

Starting from the etymology of the word, the term culture derives from the latin word colère, that means to farm the land, and only after, this meaning was extended to the term cultus, that stands for a literate man, and there is a connection between these meanings, because, talking in a metaphorical way, a literate cultivate his spirit and his formation process as an individual, like as what Cicero writes in the “Disputationes Tusculanae” Cicero(45 a.c), which is that that the sense of the word culture is a synonymous of growth and an interior refinement. Subsequently in the middle age, during the discover of the New World, there was an increasing interest on the new shapes and the different demonstrations of culture of the indigenous population that were being taken from the notes of the travel diaries. This new interest brought to a new phenomena called cultural relativism, which is the recognition that every culture has his own validity and coherence and that every one has not to be judged by prejudices. We have the real turning point at the end of the 1800s, where there is change on the conception of the culture, from a classic humanistic, to a social anthropologic one. This period of time is really important because
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