China Traditional Culture English Handwritten Newspaper

Understanding "culture" only as spiritual culture is too narrow, and the latter definition is too broad and abstract. Because culture is such an abstract concept, everyone seems to know what culture is and can talk about it. However, when discussing the specific meaning of culture, we will find that the original definition of culture is irrelevant, shapeless and seemingly elusive.

/kloc-After the mid-9th century, anthropology, cultural anthropology, ethnology, sociology and other human-oriented related disciplines appeared in western social sciences, from which we noticed that the concept of "culture" is a basic category of these disciplines-anthropology, ethnology and sociology.

In the eyes of western anthropologists, culture is a very specific thing. Every society, every nation, people live in a certain area, people form a real society, establish a certain social system, have a certain ideology, people follow a certain pattern of behavior, consciously or unconsciously abide by certain rules of behavior, which constitute a social and cultural system.

In other words, culture refers to concrete things in form. Culture is a regional and regional national social phenomenon. It is a structured entity and can be divided into four levels.

1, social and economic system, that is, the productive forces and relations of production that Marxism often says.

Second, it is the network of social relations formed by people in this society and the institutionalized forms adopted by these networks. For example, it links people's kinship, leadership and being led, and other legal and political relations. This is the institutionalized level of culture.

Third, it refers to a society's ideology, its spiritual products, religion, art, its cognition and interpretation of its own system, etc.

Fourth, it refers to the behavior value system of this society, people's inner constraints on self-behavior, as the ethical norms required by social morality.

The culture we understand in our daily life mainly refers to the culture as an ideology, focusing on the spiritual level of culture. For example, the books we read, our knowledge, upbringing and so on, we call it culture, but this culture is not the same as the concept of culture put forward by anthropologists since 19 century.

In addition, there is a sentence, which can be found in the common definition of culture in popular textbooks: "Culture is the sum of all material wealth and spiritual wealth created by human beings". Although there is nothing wrong with this definition, it is also different from the concept of "culture" understood by modern anthropologists and culturists.

1. From the content point of view, culture is the sum of human activities, processes and achievements in conquering nature, society and human beings themselves, while civilization mainly refers to the essence of cultural achievements.

2. In terms of time, culture has always existed in human existence, and human beings produced primitive culture before civilized society, and civilization is a certain stage of human cultural development.

3. From the form of expression, culture is a dynamic, gradual and uninterrupted development process, while civilization is a relatively stable and static leap-forward development process.