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Culture (Communication)
A term developed by anthropologists but widely used across academic disciplines and in vernacular speech to refer either to a group of people sharing a way of life and worldview (a culture) or to the system of meanings shared by this group (culture). In the 19th century, anthropology defined its goal as one of identifying and describing the discrete cultures of the world and understanding the different ways they lived and understood their lives. The widely used definition of culture (promoted by E. B. Tylor) that underpinned this mission was that culture was a “complex whole” that included everything a person acquired as a member of a particular society, including beliefs, customs, habits, and knowledge. Anthropologists studied the cultures of the world by living with ...