Today’s Prevailing Culture

People have used the word culture to convey various connotations and denotations and in addition to illustrate a variety of phenomena that includes many dimensions. This tendency is mainly due to the fact that there is the widespread belief that culture is the essence of socially transmitted thought, perception, tradition, practices, and, more importantly, conducts. This means that culture is part of human development as much as humanity is part of man’s cultural development. Moreover, historically, a culture is the mode of life that a particular people has developed and standardized. Structurally, it is a complexity of physical, social, and intellectual components. Practically, it is the means whereby man copes with nature. Using Goodenough’s1 notion of senses, one can construct three main senses of culture. The first forms in a most narrow field such as the arts. The second rather conveys a broader meaning of cultural concerns that we might call a whole distinctive web of meanings, values, beliefs, customs, practices and ways of doing things of a particular group. Culture in this sense is everywhere you look these days: we have deaf culture, police culture, gay culture, Microsoft culture, X culture, military culture and no doubt Wall Street culture as well. Then there’s a third definition of culture, which denotes a whole way of life, as in American culture or Western culture — a kind of anthropological use of the term. If the first meaning of culture (the arts) is too narrow, this last one is arguably too wide. Words that can mean everything mean little or nothing.