Raymond William‘s Perception of Culture: An Insight

Culture is a way of life. Food we eat, clothes we wear, languages we speak, Gods we worship, are all aspects of culture. In very simple term, we can say that culture is the embodiment of the way in which we think and do things. It is also what we inherit from the society. All the achievements of human beings as members of social groups can be called culture. Art, music, literature, architecture, sculpture, philosophy, religion and science can be seen as aspects of culture. However, culture also includes the customs, traditions, festivals, ways of living and one‘s outlook on various aspects of life. Culture thus refers to a human-made environment which includes all the material and non-material products of a group life that are transmitted from one generation to the next. There is a general agreement among social scientists that culture consists of explicit and implicit patterns of behaviour acquired by human beings. These may be transmitted through symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiment as artifacts. The essential core of culture thus lies in those finer ideas which are transmitted within a group, both historically derived as well as selected with their attached value. More recently, culture denotes historically transmitted patterns of meanings embodied in symbols, by means of which people communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and express their attitudes toward life.