Culture

Abstract

Many disciplines reflect on the concept of ‘culture’. The term itself, in Latin initially referring to agriculture (from ‘colere’) and indicating the cultivating of crops, was used in a figurative meaning for the first documented time by Cicero, in his Tusculanae Disputationes: he makes a comparison between agriculture and philosophy and especially refers to philosophical education:10. To give a satisfying overview of the term ‘culture’ in different disciplines as it is used today, though, would be an overwhelming task: already back in 1952, for example, anthropologists Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952: 11–73) reviewed and classified 156 possible definitions of ‘culture’. Interestingly, many scholars tackling ‘culture’ are they themselves the result of more than one academic career (Geert Hofstede, for instance, is an engineer who wrote his doctoral thesis in social psychology) – fact that could speak for the inherent interdisciplinarity of the idea of culture itself. Below, some relevant references on ‘culture’ from different disciplines useful for the present study are listed in alphabetical order.