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Don’t mistake cultures for cultural artifacts or for the supra-organisms that animate them
The word “culture” in English has a number of different, but related definitions. Here are excerpts from how Wiktionary defines it, minus the senses that relate to botany (cultivation) or to microbiology (bacterial cultures):
culture (countable and uncountable, plural cultures)
1. The arts, customs, lifestyles, background, and habits that characterize a particular society or nation.
2. The beliefs, values, behaviour and material objects that constitute a people’s way of life.
3. The conventional conducts and ideologies of a community; the system comprising the accepted norms and values of a society.
4. (anthropology) Any knowledge passed from one generation to the next, not necessarily with respect to human beings.
9. (cartography) The details on a map that do not represent natural features of the area delineated, such as names and the symbols for towns, roads, meridians, and parallels.
10. (archaeology) A recurring assemblage of artifacts from a specific time and place that may constitute the material culture remains of a particular past human society.
11. (euphemistic) Ethnicity, race (and its associated…
