Rousseau's Defining Culture And Culture

Culture is a slippery term. Its meanings are vast and varied. While the Merriam Webster Thesaurus defines it as ‘a high level of taste and enlightenment as a result of extensive intellectual training and exposure to the arts’ and also as ‘the way (in which) people live at a particular time and place’, the Macmillan Dictionary defines it as, ‘activities involving music, literature and other arts’ and also ‘the process by which a group of bacteria or other cells is grown in a scientific experiment’. Thus while in one sense it refers to appreciation of good music or literature or art, in others it means a colony of bacteria or other microbes growing in a dish or jar or tube of nutrients in a laboratory. But to anthropologists the term culture

Richard Velkley (2002) in Velkley, Richard L (2002). "The Tension in the Beautiful: On Culture and Civilization in Rousseau and German Philosophy" contended that the term "culture," which originally meant the cultivation of the soul or mind, acquires most of its later modern meanings in the writings of the 18th-century German thinkers, who were on various levels developing Rousseau's criticism of ″modern liberalism and Enlightenment″. Thus a contrast between "culture" and "civilization" is usually implied in these authors, even when not expressed as such. Two primary meanings of culture emerge from this period: culture as the folk-spirit having a unique identity and culture as cultivation of waywardness or free individuality. The first meaning is predominant in our current use of the term "culture", although the second still plays a large role in what we think culture should achieve, namely the full "expression" of the unique or "authentic"

In large complex and diverse societies in which people from many parts of the globe stay together, these often retain much of their original culture. This leads to the existence of an identifiable subculture within the new society. Their subculture sets them apart from the rest of the society, while still being part of the larger society. Vietnamese Americans, Chinese Americans, Mexican Americans are all examples of identifiable subcultures that share common identities, food tradition and or language (amongst each subgroup) that come from common ancestral background. As the cultural differences between the people of the subculture diminish with time and eventually disappear, the subculture itself ceases to exist, except only as a group of people who had a common ancestry. Slowly but surely that has what has happened to the Irish Americans and German Americans, who now see themselves primarily as Americans and as being part of the cultural mainstream of the American