Culture and contemporary world

Abstract

In view of contemporary relevance obtained by culture and its derivatives, by combining history of concepts with ethnography of ideas, an overview of the semantic changes in the notion of culture is drawn. However, in doing so, it is not the purpose to make an exhaustive inventory of this wide semantic framework. With the support of the categories of “constellation of meanings” and of “geological strata”, three distinct layers that ad up to the understanding of the idea of culture are differentiated and analyzed: “culto, cultivado, arte”, “culture as a whole” (nation and anthropological studies) and “mass culture”. Although bearing in mind the existing gap between the three constellations, regarding the novelty that they engender in the problem of culture, they are not taken as isolated from each other, it is chosen to observe how they intertwine and, in particular, how they become mutual references.