All Souls College and Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 4AL, UK.
Curr Biol. 2020 Oct 19;30(20):R1246-R1250. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.08.086.
If you are not sure what 'culture' means, you are not alone. In 1952, anthropologists Kroeber and Kluckhohn identified 164 definitions of culture and there has been growth rather than rationalisation in the ensuing 70 years. In everyday English, culture is the knowledge and behaviour that characterises a particular group of people. Under this umbrella definition, culture was for many decades the exclusive province of the humanities and social sciences, where anthropologists, historians, linguists, sociologists and other scholars studied and compared the language, arts, cuisine, and social habits of particular human groups. Of course, that important work continues, but since the 1980s culture has also been a major focus of enquiry in the natural sciences.
如果你不确定“文化”是什么意思,那也很正常。1952 年,人类学家克罗伯和克拉克洪确定了 164 种文化定义,在随后的 70 年里,文化的定义不断增加,而不是合理化。在日常英语中,文化是指一个特定群体的知识和行为。在这个笼统的定义下,文化在几十年里一直是人文和社会科学的专属领域,人类学家、历史学家、语言学家、社会学家和其他学者在这些领域研究和比较特定人类群体的语言、艺术、美食和社会习惯。当然,这项重要的工作仍在继续,但自 20 世纪 80 年代以来,文化也一直是自然科学研究的主要焦点。