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The popular use of the word culture in many western societies, allows realizing a classification of its character according to the consumption of possessions or the exercise of activities considered as elitists: the cooking, the art, and the music for example.
In French language, the word culture indicates first of all the general knowledge of an individual. It is the only definition which gives in 1862 the national Dictionary of Bescherelle. The scientific knowledge is presented to it as leading element. It is what we call the "general knowledge" today.
Since the middle of the XXth century, the term takes a second meaning. For example, Small Larousse of 1980 looks, besides the individual conception, the collective conception: the entire social, religious orders, etc., the intellectual, artistic demonstrations, etc., which characterize a society.
The term can then take the one or the other sense, but the nearness of the domains of use of each in fact a source of ambiguity.
In German language, for instance, the definition of the individual culture or the general knowledge corresponds to the word Bildung. There is another word, Kultur, who corresponds to social, artistic, ethical belonging assets in a set of individuals having an identity.
So, this homophonous term, which corresponds rather in French to one of the meanings of a word of civilization, and by the exchanges of ideas between France and Germany, mixed little by little with the initial sense of the word Culture in French.
This second definition is supplanting the one corresponding to the individual culture.
Nevertheless, the current dictionaries quote both definitions, by placing mostly the individual culture in the first one.
There are thus at present in French two different meanings for the word culture:
- the individual culture of each, personal construction of its knowledge giving the general knowledge;
- the culture of people, the cultural identity of these people, the collective culture to which we belong.
These two meanings of a word differ first of all by their dynamic constituent:
- the individual culture contains a dimension of elaboration, construction (the term Bildung is generally translated into education), and thus by definition evolutionary and individual;
- the collective culture corresponds to a unit of identities, a consequentive mark connected with a history, an art perfectly inserted into the community; the collective culture evolves only very slowly, its value is on the contrary the stability, the reminder in the History.
It’s in this dichotomy that these two meanings can oppose:
The collective culture contains a constituent of rigidity which can oppose to the development of the individual cultures, or being able to lead to “contrecultures”, concept which is inconceivable with the individual sense, the knowledge which can not be only positive.
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